{"id":352442,"date":"2018-03-16T14:55:02","date_gmt":"2018-03-16T13:55:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=352442"},"modified":"2018-03-16T15:09:41","modified_gmt":"2018-03-16T14:09:41","slug":"352442","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/editorials\/352442\/","title":{"rendered":"What Results When U.S. Invades a Country"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at The Saker<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

(UPDATED<\/b> at bottom, as of 15 March 2018)<\/span><\/p>\n

The U.S. Government certainly leads the world in invasions and coups.<\/span><\/p>\n

In recent years, it has invaded and occupied \u2014 either by military assault or by coup, but in either case followed by installing (or trying to install) a new regime there \u2014 a number of countries, especially Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen. <\/span><\/p>\n

U.S. propaganda says that its invasions and military occupations (and it denies its coups) are to benefit the people in the invaded and militarily occupied countries, or to bring them \u2018democracy\u2019, and are not done merely to benefit the people who control the U.S. Government (which itself is not<\/i> a democracy<\/span><\/a>, and even the neoconservative \u2014 pro-invasion or \u201cimperialistic\u201d \u2014 American magazine The Atlantic<\/i> has finally acknowledged this fact<\/span><\/a>, even though it contradicts their continuing neoconservatism). <\/span><\/p>\n

Polling and other evidences within the invaded\/occupied countries shows the opposite of the U.S. claim: America\u2019s invasions\/occupations (after World War II, and especially after 2000) destroy<\/i> those countries, not<\/i> help them. <\/span><\/p>\n

The most authoritative such study that has yet been done on this matter was recently released, and its findings regarding this matter will here be presented, and then supplemented with other relevant data so as to provide a fuller picture.<\/span><\/p>\n

The U.N.\/Gallup surveys of the happiness\/misery of the residents in 155 countries, as reported in 2017<\/span><\/a><\/span>,<\/span> were physically in-person interviews in almost all countries, but there was at least one exception, as they explained: “In Libya, telephone survey methodology has been used since 2015 owing to the country\u2019s high rate of mobile phone coverage and ongoing instability which has made it too dangerous to use face-to-face interviewers.\u201d<\/span><\/a> That\u2019s a highly euphemistic way of saying, actually: Libya was too dangerous, and perhaps too miserable, for opinions to be sampled by the ordinary methodology, the scientifically sound methodology, which is in-person interviews. It\u2019s a way of saying this without even mentioning the invasion and war there \u2014 as if those things don\u2019t even count. Therefore, the finding that Gallup reported about Libya is presumably being included in Gallup\u2019s otherwise excellent report purely for Western propaganda purposes \u2014 they know that it\u2019s not an actual scientific finding about Libya, not a finding that can reasonably be compared to the survey-findings in the other countries. As a result, Libya, which might have been the most miserable of all countries after the U.S.-UK-France-Canada invasion<\/span><\/a>, scored in the top half of all countries, #68, 5.525. But, all of the other countries that the U.S. has recently invaded (the nations that are boldfaced<\/b> below) scored at or below #132, 4.096 \u2014 Ukraine<\/b>\u2019s score \u2014 as is shown here below from that U.N. report:<\/span><\/p>\n

Following are the happiness-scores of the bottom 24 out of the 155<\/span><\/a> happiness\/misery-rated countries. (Iraq, which the U.S. had destroyed in 2003, perhaps is now recovering, and it scored as #117, with a score of 4.497; but, here only the bottom 24, the most-miserable of all of the 155 countries, are shown.) Here they are:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

132 Ukraine<\/b> 4.096<\/span><\/p>\n

133 Uganda 4.081<\/span><\/p>\n

134 Burkina Faso 4.032<\/span><\/p>\n

135 Niger 4.028<\/span><\/p>\n

136 Malawi 3.970<\/span><\/p>\n

137 Chad 3.936<\/span><\/p>\n

138 Zimbabwe 3.875<\/span><\/p>\n

139 Lesotho 3.808<\/span><\/p>\n

140 Angola 3.795<\/span><\/p>\n

141 Afghanistan<\/b> 3.794<\/span><\/p>\n

142 Botswana 3.766<\/span><\/p>\n

143 Benin 3.657<\/span><\/p>\n

144 Madagascar 3.644<\/span><\/p>\n

145 Haiti 3.603<\/span><\/p>\n

146 Yemen<\/b> 3.593<\/span><\/p>\n

147 South Sudan 3.591<\/span><\/p>\n

148 Liberia 3.533<\/span><\/p>\n

149 Guinea 3.507<\/span><\/p>\n

150 Togo 3.495<\/span><\/p>\n

151 Rwanda 3.471<\/span><\/p>\n

152 Syria<\/b> 3.462<\/span><\/p>\n

153 Tanzania 3.349<\/span><\/p>\n

154 Burundi 2.905<\/span><\/p>\n

155 Central African Republic 2.693<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Ukraine is (other than #117 Iraq) the least-miserable of the recently invaded countries, and perhaps the reason for this is that Ukraine was taken over by means of a coup, instead of by means of an outright and direct military invasion. <\/span><\/p>\n

(You can see this coup happening, here<\/span><\/a>. The way that U.S. President Barack Obama set it up is documented here<\/span><\/a>. You can hear there his agent instructing the U.S. Ambassador in Ukraine whom to place in charge of Ukraine\u2019s Government once the coup will have been culminated (which happened 22 days later, and that person did get the leadership-position). It\u2019s the full conversation. And here<\/span><\/a>, you will see the phone-conversation in which top EU officials were shocked to find that it had been a coup instead of what Obama pretended, a \u2018revolution\u2019.) (These evidences are some of the reasons why the head of the \u2018private CIA\u2019 firm Stratfor called it \u201cthe most blatant coup in history.\u201d<\/span><\/a>)<\/span><\/p>\n

The U.N. happiness surveys have been taken in Ukraine not only after the coup, which occurred in February 2014, but before it, in 2013. At https:\/\/countryeconomy.com\/demography\/world-happiness-index\/ukraine<\/span><\/a> you can see the happiness\/misery scores shown by Ukrainians during the years 2013, 2015, 2016, and 2017 (there was no survey in Ukraine during 2014, perhaps because of the rampant violence<\/span><\/a> at that time.) In 2013, Ukraine\u2019s happiness score was 5.057, but that steadily declined down to the 2017 score of 4.096, which placed Ukraine within the bottom 24 countries, all of which either were extremely poor, or at war, or both. You can also see there Ukraine\u2019s resulting \u201cWorld Happiness Index\u201d rank for each one of those four years, 2013, before the coup, and then 2015-2017, after the coup. As you see there, Ukraine, which was #132\u00a0 <\/span>in 2017, had been #87 in 2013 before the coup. So: within just three years after the coup, it declined 45 places in the global rankings.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some people might retort against this by saying that \u201chappiness\u201d is meaningless or unimportant and only physical welfare is \u2018objective\u2019,\u201d but even on the most crudely physical measures, Ukraine has been enormously harmed by the U.S. coup. In 2013, Ukraine\u2019s average annual household income was $2,601.40, and then it fell off a cliff and became $1,109.63 by 2015 and has stabilized at around that level since.<\/span><\/a> Also, in 2013, Ukraine\u2019s GDP was $183.31 billion, and by 2015 that had become $91.03 billion and stabilized at that level.<\/span><\/a> Furthermore, some figures aren\u2019t any longer even reported by the post-coup Ukrainian regime. For example, whereas the number of unemployed was shown in Ukrainian statistics in 2013<\/span><\/a>, it disappeared in 2016<\/span><\/a> and subsequently<\/span><\/a>. More information about the decline in Ukraine\u2019s economic rankings can be seen here<\/span><\/a>. The U.S. regime has been toxic to the Ukrainian people, no matter how one looks at it. But happiness\/misery is the real bottom-line.<\/span><\/p>\n

Two researchers, Tom Coupe and Maxym Obrizan, published together two separate studies, both in leading economics journals, one article titled “The impact of war on happiness: The case of Ukraine\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and the other titled “Violence and political outcomes in Ukraine \u2014 Evidence from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk\u201d<\/span><\/a>. They reported, in \u201cThe Impact of war on happiness”:<\/span><\/p>\n

The average level of happiness declined substantially in zones that experience war directly. \u2026<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

This decline is comparable to the loss of happiness a relatively well-off person would experience if he\/she were to become a poor person. \u2026<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Regions that are not directly affected by the war are basically as happy as they were before the war.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

In other words: all of the increase in misery occurred only<\/i> in the regions that have been \u201cdirectly affected by the war.\u201d The Ukrainians who reside outside<\/i> those regions are \u201cas happy as they were before the war.\u201d They\u2019re not happier than before the war; they haven\u2019t been helped by the war; but, the misery \u2014 so intense for them that it has already lowered the happiness-ranking of the entire nation, from 87 down to 132 \u2014 just hasn\u2019t bothered them, at all.<\/span><\/p>\n

In \u201cViolence and political outcomes in Ukraine\u201d they reported:<\/span><\/p>\n

We also find that property damage is associated with greater support for pro-Western parties, lower support for keeping Donbas in Ukraine and lower support for compromise as a way to stop the conflict.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

In other words: Ukrainians who live close to the Ukraine-Donbass border; that is, who live inside Ukraine but close to Donbass and so are in the Ukrainian portion of the conflict-zone (not in Donbass, where the vast majority of the \u201cproperty damage\u201d is actually occurring)<\/i>, have \u201cgreater support for pro-Western parties\u201d (i.e., for the Obama-installed regime), but \u201clower support for keeping Donbas in Ukraine.\u201d Although they endorse the overthrow that had been done of the pre-coup government (because they receive \u2018news\u2019media only from the post-coup regime, in the Ukrainian language), they want to get on with their lives without the war that\u2019s since been causing them \u201cproperty damage.\u201d (U.S. propaganda<\/span><\/a> notes that \u201cthe separatist-controlled parts of Lugansk and Donetsk oblasts ([the two Donbass] provinces) only have access to Russian TV channels\u201d but avoids noting that the Ukrainian regime\u2019s blocking of Russian-language media on the other side of that border \u2014 inside Ukraine \u2014 exists and is even more severe.) Apparently, Ukrainians near the border just want the war to end \u2014 no \u201ccompromise\u201d \u2014 no negotiations, no Minsk process; they want their Government to simply quit trying to conquer Donbass, no negotiations about it, at all. And they\u2019re ignored.<\/span><\/p>\n

Right now in Ukraine, the central political controversy is between the U.S.-puppet President of Ukraine, who promises to conquer both of the two breakaway provinces, Donbass and also Crimea \u2014 but who hasn\u2019t yet been able to do it \u2014 versus Ukraine\u2019s political parties, in western and northern Ukraine, that derived from the organizations which had supported Hitler against Stalin in World War II<\/span><\/a> and who still crave to kill Russian-speakers. Those passionately racist-fascist, anti-Russian, ideologically nazi, political organizations, are determined to actually carry out those additional invasions, no matter what the cost. However, according to this finding by Coupe and Obrizon, the Ukrainians who are suffering the \u201cproperty damage\u201d and whose personal scores on happiness have thus become so abysmally low as to have dragged the whole Ukrainian nation down to a 132nd ranking, are opposed to that nazi position, and they just want the war to end. And they\u2019re ignored.<\/span><\/p>\n

Where, then, is the support for the war to be found (except amongst the U.S. Congress and President and the U.S. arms-makers whose products have been selling so well to Ukraine\u2019s government and which are now being used against the residents of Donbass<\/span><\/a>)? That support is to be found as far away from the conflict-zone as possible: in Lviv and the rest of far-western and northern Ukraine, the areas that were cheering Hitler\u2019s forces in WW II, and where the \u2018news\u2019 media today are owned by U.S.-supported oligarchs and their NGOs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ukraine was a severely divided nation even before the coup. In the last Ukrainian election in which the residents within the Ukraine that then included both Donbass and Crimea voted, which was the election in 2010, the candidate who won Ukraine’s Presidency and whom Obama ousted, had won 90% of the vote in Donbass, and 75% of the vote in Crimea. However, in far-western Ukraine, his opponent \u2014 whom Obama had been hoping that Ukrainians would elect as Ukraine\u2019s President in 2014 after the coup \u2014 won 90% of the vote.<\/span><\/a> That\u2019s the candidate whose party (though not herself) now dominates (in conjunction with the two outright nazi parties) the Ukrainian Government. The man whom the residents in the rump Ukraine chose, was the more moderate candidate, and he is increasingly being challenged by the nazis. (Ukraine is the world\u2019s only nation that has two nazi political parties. Both of them have been clients of the U.S. Government ever since the end of World War II, but only with Obama did they win control of the country \u2014 that is, of its non-breakaway regions.) For example, on 18 January 2018, the AP headlined \u201cUkraine passes bill to get occupied regions back from Russia\u201d<\/span><\/a> and reported that, \u201cUkraine’s parliament on Thursday passed a bill that aims to reintegrate the eastern territories currently controlled by Russia-backed separatists, and goes as far as to declare support for taking them back by military force if necessary.\u201d Though that position is a minority position amongst the Ukrainian public, it authentically represents the position that Obama wanted. In fact, he even overrode his own Secretary of State, John Kerry, to push for it<\/span><\/a>. That\u2019s the position of Ukraine\u2019s two nazi parties, which are trying to replace the existing President. (Trump hasn\u2019t yet made clear whether he backs them, but he is expected to.)<\/span><\/p>\n

So: that\u2019s Ukraine \u2014 the happiest of the nations that the U.S. has recently invaded.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

UPDATE:<\/b> On March 15th, the \u201cWorld Happiness Report 2018\u201d<\/span><\/a> was issued, and here are the bottom-scoring countries:<\/span><\/p>\n

138. Ukraine<\/b> (4.103)<\/span><\/p>\n

139. Togo (3.999)<\/span><\/p>\n

140. Guinea (3.964)<\/span><\/p>\n

141. Lesotho (3.808)<\/span><\/p>\n

142. Angola (3.795)<\/span><\/p>\n

143. Madagascar (3.774)<\/span><\/p>\n

144. Zimbabwe (3.692)<\/span><\/p>\n

145. Afghanistan<\/b> (3.632)<\/span><\/p>\n

146. Botswana (3.590)<\/span><\/p>\n

147. Malawi (3.587)<\/span><\/p>\n

148. Haiti (3.582)<\/span><\/p>\n

149. Liberia (3.495)<\/span><\/p>\n

150. Syria<\/b> (3.462)<\/span><\/p>\n

151. Rwanda (3.408)<\/span><\/p>\n

152. Yemen<\/b> (3.355)<\/span><\/p>\n

153. Tanzania (3.303)<\/span><\/p>\n

154. South Sudan (3.254)<\/span><\/p>\n

155. Central African Republic (3.083)<\/span><\/p>\n

156. Burundi (2.905)<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at The Saker (UPDATED at bottom, as of 15 March 2018) The U.S. Government certainly leads the world in invasions and coups. In recent years, it has invaded and occupied \u2014 either by military assault or by coup, but in either case followed by installing (or trying to install) a new […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":352443,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461,519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-352442","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}