Many commenters here (for example jedimaster) and elsewhere have rightly argued that, historically, particular interventions (i.e., the U.S. establishment's horrid, brutal, tyrannical, and anti-democratic intervention into Central America for the last century or so) have been heavily influenced if not led by representatives of particular economic interests, i.e., particular corporations and investors, or by representatives of particular conceptions of U.S. national economic interest.

Yet in a larger sense, they too were 'wrong'.

Had the U.S.' venal and short-sighted foreign policy establishment allowed, much less encouraged, Central and South America and the Caribbean to develop independent and indigenous governments and economies, we would all have been far, far better off, including U.S. citizens and most U.S. corporations, who would have had a much, much richer market system throughout the hemisphere and far better hemispheric infrastructure with which to conduct genuine trade, manufacturing, and investment.

Instead we had both rabid and deranged right wingers and liberal hawks justifying policies such as the overthrow of Guatemalan democracy and development and for supporting tyrants and genocidalists. And of course for Reagan's 'boogety boogety the Sandinistas are really close to Harlingen Texas' nonsense.

These people were wrong, they were immoral, and they were not defending any sane conception of my interests as a U.S. citizen nor of any actual needs of U.S. security or of the actual U.S. economy.

Latin America, thanks in no small part to Bush Jr's trapping himself in Iraq and the bold breakaway from the U.S. dominated financial system of Argentina and Venezuela, is finally beginning to launch its economic independence and development, and so far U.S. attempts to re-assert dominance have failed.

Those two nations did so in complete defiance of all of the supposedly sage Western 'economists' and the representatives of international lending and interest-charging institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, who told us all that by pursuing real and needed development that the economies of Argentina and Venezuela would surely crash. Those two nations have experienced their highest macroeconomic and quality of ordinary citizens' lives ever.

We must not cede the supposedly wise interventionists this ground, that somehow they are the rational and far-sighted purveyors of the national interest while any who disagree with them are at best woolly headed naive rose-colored fringe liberals and at worst Soviet / ChiCom dupes. It was they who failed our national interest, not we who tried to speak the truth to them.