If you're interested, "Killing Hope," also by Blum, is an excellent book on why the world hates us, without being preachy like "Rouge State." It is simply a listing of interventions (covert and overt) with the facts. It is only a partial list of the events since WWII and stops before the first US-Iraq War. It also includes a partial list (just dates and events) of America's military interventions between our founding and WWII. It's a list that would make a Prussian weep for peace.

As for the notion that Israel is only democracy in the ME, that's poppcycock. It's not even historically true, as Cyprus has been a democracy for many decades, as has Turkey, Lebanon, and Iran. Israel is a country where 3 million people are denied citizenship, much like Blacks were denied citizenship in Apartheid South Africa. The only remotely democratic state in the ME is Cyprus.

Apparently there's ANOTHER SB posting here, evidently from Canada; with a few things to say abot the 2nd Indochina war....

Maybe I'm forgetting a few things here, so if anyone wishes to correct me please do so; but as I recall the United States has a long history of involvement, or lack thereof, with Vietnam and thus plenty of culpability.

A few notable points:

After the end of WWI, at the Paris Peace Conference, a young Ho Chi Minh (then Nguyen Ai Quoc) presented an 8 point plan for Vietnamese self determination and sought help from Woodrow Wilson in obtaining his country's freedom from French rule... Wilson refused to see him. Naturally his anti-imperialist views and rejection by the imperial powers of the day led him to join the French Socialist party...

During WWII, Vietnam was occupied by and fiercly resisted Imperial Japan. Whether one looks at Vietnam as a French colony or a nation in its own right, Vietnam was clearly on the side of the allies. Yet at the end of the war the US handed Vietnam back to France, claims of US netrality in the matter notwithstanding. (France, her armies decimated, resorted in some instances to re-arming defeated Japanese troops to reestablish colonial rule)

Fast forward a few years to Dien Bien Phu - the Vietnamese have defeated France fair and square with help from China. China was not necessarily a traditional ally of Vietnam, having invadaed her a number of times over the centuries, but the US had steadfastly come down on the side of the colonial oppressors rather than the freedom fighters so the Vietnamese didn't have much choice when it came to allies. In any case, having beaten the French in spite of massive help from the US, Vietnam was promised free and fair elections in two years' time. One guess as to which superpower torpedoed those elections because it didn't like the candidate who would inevitably win. (Ho was, of course, definitely a Communist by this time)

While it is true that Americans started becoming more directly responsible for deaths in Vietnam only in the 1960's, it is disingenuous at best to deny US involvement in years of conflict in the region.

Anyway, corections welcome, this is just My Two Cents.

thanks.

It sounds like an interesting book. But, when switching over to Amazon to buy it, I find that the book is "unavailable" directly but can be purshased from used booksellers at a MINIMUM price of $110.

Just after 911 happened, the thought kept turning around in my head, there is a reason that this happened. People don't just plan for years to come over here and fly jets into buildings because "they hate our freedom." I could not accept that simplistic explanation, so I started looking into the history of our relations with that part of the world.

After learning about the imperialism endured by this region at the hand of most European nations in the Middle East since the 1800s, the prime attraction of course being the vast oil fields that exist there, along with the policies of America in the region later in that history, i.e. the fact that we armed and financed Saddam Hussein while he served to help our fight against Iran while basically giving him the green light to use chemical weapons. (Kind of ironic that we are now trying him for something we condoned back in the 80's.)

Then there is our history with Osama Bin Laden. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, thousands of Muslim radicals joined the CIA and mujahedeen, including the wealthy son of a Saudi road builder named Osama Bin Laden. He wasn't known to have taken up arms according to a professor of international policy at the Monterey Institute, but he helped build roads and an underground arms depot, training facility and medical center that were funded by the CIA.

It just goes to show that our shortsighted policy has been formed by the need or greed of the moment with not near enough thought as to how hypocritical it might make us look in the future, not to mention how dangerous it could ultimately be. If we were really as principled as we purport to be, we would not have all of these embarrasing facts to try to sweep under the rug as a nation. We would be taking real action against atrocities like the slaughter in Darfur, Sudan. We would have earned feelings of good will in the rest of the world. We must finally look at ourselves honestly, as William Blum has urged us to if we are to be successful against terrorism going forward.

We have seen the enemy, and, unfortunately, it is for the most part, us.

In the months following 9/11, I read some Blum and an apparently defunct (help, anyone?) e-mail newsletter called "The Emperor Has No Clothes."

This short interview is a start to Blum's ideas, and they are shocking, but I, for one, agree with him that US foreign policy decisions from the 20th Century to today have less to do with sentimental rhetoric of "spreading freedom" or "making the world safe for democracy" and more to do with realpolitik economic cost/benefit analyses. Reading Blum with Foucault would be worth a try--think "biopower."

Powerful governments have been bludgeoning impoverished peoples since Ancient Egypt, the US the current one in a long line. Do the reasons for mass violence really matter? That's what I learned from Blum.