Bernin' down the house...

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The world is rarely so simple. Foreign Policy decisions are difficult to evaluate because we don't have the counter-factual of what would have happened if a different decision was made.

Going back in history a bit, the korean war was an intervention to stop the spread of communism. It was arguably immoral supporting a brutal (non-communist) dictatorship. Still I don't see how anyone can see the relative prosperity of North and South Korea today and say that the Korean War was a mistake.

The Vietnam War was essentially the same as the Korean War just in a different field of battle and 20 years later. If the Korean War was such a success surely the Vietnam War would be as well? We all know how that story went.

Brutal dictators are bad so removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq must be a good thing? Wrong. Occupying Iraq was a grave mistake so leaving must be the right move? Wrong again.

Foreign policy is complicated as hell. Trying to apply simple universal principles to radically different world regions is naive at best. Sometimes regime change is a good idea, sometimes it isn't. Saying intervention is universally good or bad, is just plain wrong.

Just to inform people. Snopes 'fact-check' was saying that trump did say, refering to white supremacists, that he was insisting that there were 'fine people' among the white supremacists. A couple of posts ago I proved this to be false which means that snopes fact-check needs to be fact-checked. Ironic huh. He 100% said he is not talking about white supremacists being good people and specifically said that white supremacists were bad, horrible people. Snopes fact-check straight up lied.

You can watch the clip yourself, it's not too long and it's not cut up and shows him saying that there were fine people on both sides, he was speaking about the 'protesters and the antifa side', not the white supremacists that marched the night before. You will here a journalists say, " you are saying that there were fine people among the supremacists, then he replies, no, the white supremacists are bad, horrible people. Once again, there were 3 groups, white supremacists marched the night before. Then the next day there where Trump supporters who were just protesting, then there was antifa and normal people among them. The Trump supporters and the white supremacists from the night before were not connected in any way at all. And it is suspected that the white supremacists march was a 'hoax', more than likely carried out by Antifa.

We have the before and after. Every US intervention has led to far worse. Peace options were not tried let alone exhausted.

No the Korean was wasn't to stop communism, that was just the phony pretext. Cuba was a threat because of the Soviet Union and why the US had to strangle the country, the Soviet Union imploded and US continued to strangle the country. The US is The global gangster and won't let anyone get out of line. I don't think the 1.5 million dead in Korea would see it your way. The US dropped so many bombs on the North that they ran out of military targets so started bombing agricultural targets. Massive war crimes.

For one you're making the mistake of thinking that the US has good intentions when destroying a country. They are just doing what is best for the arms industry, continuous war. And the point you miss most is, what right does the US have to go in and bomb a country back to the stone age? What right do they have to tell another country which kind of economic policy they can carry out?

I'm from the US, and god do I hate the war machine that it is. They never tell us the truth of everything and we have no way to confirm most of the crap they tell us. I'm sure most of what they do benefits particular people, not the country they invade. The US is known for sticking their noises in everybody's business and completely screwing things up. My uncle served in Vietnam and told me to never trust news broadcasts about wars, they are generally incorrect. I've watched a documentary about some country that we are 'helping' by giving them good cheap food, yet from the point of view from that country we are destroying their economy and putting local farmers out of business, therefor leaving the country to 'depend' on foreign aid. Just one example out of thousands I'm sure people could find. I'm sure most of what they do is not to help, that's the story sold to us. What they want is power and control(IMO).

An Unforgiven quote "deserves got nothing to do with it." Intentions do not matter in the very high stakes of world policy outcomes do. "Might makes right" may not be a morally palatable saying but it is the truth, as the mightiest are able to enforce their interests. Mid 20th century US considered communism an existential threat to its existence and consistently acted to quash it wherever it could. You can debate whether this was wise or moral policy, but to say it was just to fuel a war industry comes off as conspiracy theorist and ignorant of numerous policy decisions made in the mid-20th century.

But lest you forget and claim the US acted solely out of aggression, the North invaded the South and the South Korean government asked for help. The US and many other NATO countries (including the UK et. al) provided military support nearly conquering the entire North before a fearful China contributed their own military power to the North forcing a stalemate at the original 48th parallel. Same thing happened in Vietnam. Now this is not to say the South was the "right" side as it was a brutal dictatorship in its own right, but the North made the first aggressive move in each case. Also this was not the Korean people deciding what economic system they wanted. This was a brutal civil war carried out by two dictators who subscribed to different economic systems.

Had the US not intervened the North would have conquered South a la Vietnam, and it's impossible to say how things would have developed at that point. What we do know is what happened in this world where that didn't happen. North Korea is a poor country with limited development and a brutal dictator who pours his countries limited economic resources into the military. South Korea is an advanced economy with some of the best quality of life on the planet.

1.5 million Koreans died in the Korean War? How many South Koreans would have died under Kim Il Sung, and Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jung Un's brutal rule? We can't know but some other communist dictator regimes killed millions of their own people. 3 to 9 million Soviets died under Stalin's regime. 2.5-5.5 million Chinese died under Mao's Great Leap Forward.

If you want to warp facts to support your narrative that intervention is always war machine driven and always bad that's your prerogative I can't stop you. However, I invite you to consider that perhaps factors are more complex than you're making them out to be. There are plenty of examples were US intervention has gone poorly. Most recently in Iraq, where we've taken things from bad to really bad to extremely bad, and now just back to really bad again.

Yeah, the Nazis had the same idea. Same kind of excuses for invading too. The US basically carried on with a mixture of Nazi Germany's and the British Empire's foreign policies. Someone believing there's a threat or using it as a phony pretext doesn't make it pluasable.
So President Eisenhower was a conspiracy theorist when he warned of the Military Industrial Complex as he left office? Or ex CIA man Ray McGovern is a conspiracy theorist when he talks about It? The real conspiracy theories are the outrageous lies spewed out before a war. "Babies out of incubators", "weapons of mass destruction". Staged gas attacks in Syria.

Yeah speaking of ignorance. After Korea had been liberated from Japan it wanted to reunify, the US rejected. Here's Chomsky explaining the reality of the situation
https://youtu.be/X8_kg75N3_k
There had been talk of reunification after the liberation from Japan, but you forget to mention the dictator in the South that put a stop to those talks was installed by the US.

Yeah, same thing happened in Vietnam as in the US supported brutal dictators long before the war and were bombing South Vietnam a few years before the war really kicked off in 1964 via the bombing of a US ship that um, didn't actually happen!! Gulf Of Tonkin. If the US had stayed the hell away we can make a Damn good guess that millions of people wouldn't have lost their lives and there wouldn't be babies being born 4 generations later with severe deformities.