Die Monroe Doctrine, Die!

[Sandpiper]

About 200 years ago, James Monroe essentially proclaimed the U.S. to be the governor of the Western Hemisphere.

Since then, we've been exploiting, running roughshod, and imposing good old economic and political "imperialismo yanqui" on the citizens of South and Central America.

It looks like the tide might finally be starting to turn. Leaks are starting to spring in the dike and we don't have the fingers to plug them. The U.S. has its hands so full with occupying two countries in the Eastern Hemisphere, it's losing its grip on the Western Hemisphere.

Venezuela defeated a U.S. backed coup of Hugo Chavez, Ecuador forced out U.S. toady Lucio Gutierez, and a people's uprising in Bolivia has essentially shut down the pro-U.S., pro-Corporate oligarchy in that country as well.

The time may at last be right for the death knell to be sounded for Mr. Monroe's pernicious Doctrine. And when it is, what a happy day that will be for our neighbors to the south.

Hasta la Victoria!

[flordehinojos]

1. the bush boy and his nanny condoleeza rice came to ft. lauderdale to

entice the ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN STATES to sign up on to a program of "monitoring democracies in the region".

[Toots]

12. Like they "monitored" the Democracy of Haiti

They are vile creatures who start wars for profit.

[bennywhale]

2. Every US "Doctrine" has had nasty

consequences and motivations. The 'Truman Doctrine' making it the "duty of the US to 'help' 'free peoples' resisting armed subjugation." Replace Communist with Islamist, and interpret as destroy any non-American system.

The "Domino Effect" Again replace Communist with Islamist and interpret as pre-emptively invade any country in surrounding area that may or may not, at sometime possibly blah blah ....

The "Realist Approach". Replace any ideology within the US administration with a cold calculation of interests, and go lookin' for oil.

Mix together with a dose of theocracy, free market dogma, and a trigger happy army and leave to simmer for a couple of decades.

[DivinBreuvage]

4. Yes, other pernicious ones include the Declaration of Independence

the Bill of Rights, the separation of Church and State, the Emancipation Proclamation, the New Deal, Desegregation, and so forth.

This is not to deny or downplay the historic and contemporary wrongs that you point out. But like every other human endeavor the US has produced both good and bad, and in fact the US has produced a great deal of both. Seeing only the dark is as foolish and benighted as seeing only the light.

[bennywhale]

9. We're talking about foreign policy here, not the bill of

rights or any domestic positives. The US foreign policy is a seperate sphere and has been destructive, vicious, and ruthless throughout history, barring W Wilson. Name one righteous action by the US since 45' abroad (we could debate the righteous motives of WW2, but it will descend)

[DivinBreuvage]

11. The Marshall Plan was a HUGE one

like any political good deed it was not without its selfish motives (although Mark Twain in his bitter old age would argue that even the most altruistic actions are at bottom selfish), but this does not change the fact that it did a very great deal of good. If you subscribe to the New Testament, feeding the hungry and lifting up your fellow man is about as righteous as it's possible to get (although I concede you should do so from the goodness of your heart rather than from fear of the big red bear).

I believe that US support for the independent state of Israel was a good deed. Again, it was undertaken from a combination of selfishness and altruism, but still, in my opinion, the righteous thing to do. I feel somewhat differently about the current relationship between the two states.

Some other examples: The Peace Corps; President Kennedy's approach to Africa; The Camp David Peace Accords; President Clinton's intervention in the former Jugoslavia. Other people could do a better job on this question; my historical focus fades greatly after WWII. But I hazard a guess that if you study the administrations of Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton you will find at least a little more to feel positive about than you do now.

I don't disagree with your assessment of US foreign policy overall; I simply don't agree that it's been universally bad.

[bennywhale]

15. Clinton's intervention in Yugoslavia consisted of

murdering tens of thousands of innocent Serbs in Belgrade and elsewhere because he wouldn't risk the precious lives of a few dozen American soldiers to do a proper job of ridding Kosovo of the Serbs. I believ that to be a war crime, as one nations people were put at higher importance than anothers and thousands were killed.

Kennedy hmmmm.

Carter, i think i'll grant you Carter. A decent man, but only one man in the great American machine that dicates murder across the globe.

[DivinBreuvage]

17. "Murdering tens of thousands"? Provide evidence of this astounding claim.

I'm fascinated by your habit of concocting fictions in your imagination and attempting to pass them off as historical fact. I'm still uncertain, though, whether this behavior indicates pathology or simply the antics of an agent provocateur. Anyway, for the sake of anyone else who may bother to read these posts, I continue:

"Kennedy hmmmm". Not exactly an effective counterargument, though kudos to you for employing a device that gives you the air of knowing more about the subject than you let on. Unfortunately this trick doesn't really work too well after you've already shown that you aren't very well informed.

Hey, thanks for granting me Carter. That's quite a feather in my cap coming from a person of your historical literacy.

[bennywhale]

18. I retract "tens of thousands" as i didn't mean

to write that i was rushing off the post as i was concentrating on a more important thread. Replace tens of thousands with thousands in my post stands. (phew, glad it wasn't tens of thousands, now that would have been a REAL WAR crime rather than the piddly thousands.)

Furthermore, the mutilation continues today. There are swathes of land in the Balkans that are out of bounds due to cluster bombs and amputees are still being carted out of hospitals. Righteous humane internationalist was Clinton. But hey at least no American soldiers broke a nail.

[DivinBreuvage]

3. Your statement about the Monroe Doctrine is grotesquely inaccurate

and I'd be interested to know how you arrived at this remarkable conclusion. Did you post this identical thread before?

The Monroe Doctrine -- which was actually the brainchild of Monroe's Secretary of State John Quincy Adams -- was expressed in Monroe's 1823 message to Congress. I'm not sure how familiar you are with early US history, but at that time the imperialist powers resided not in Washington DC (which was the cow-town capital of a political anomaly) but in London, Paris, and Madrid.

The Monroe Doctrine was formulated because Latin American revolutionaries were throwing off the colonial dominion of Spain. Spain wanted to crush those revolutions and was working to persuade Great Britain, France, and Russia to back her up. In other words, the Monroe Doctrine was issued in support of revolutionary movements against imperialist interference. Not for purely altruistic reasons, of course, but at the same time the US itself still had something of a revolutionary government (it had been less than ten years since the last colonial war with Great Britain) and revolutionary governments are supportive of the efforts of other revolutionaries to liberate their own nations.

I don't disagree that the US has been responsible for a great deal of miserable work in Latin America since then. But blaming it on James Monroe and the Monroe Doctrine is silly and wrong.

[atre]

5. It's not an uncommon mistake

The imperialistic Roosevelt Corrollary of TR was marketed as an amendment to the Monroe Doctrine, even though the ideological underpinnings were not quite aligned. The MD opposed European imperialism in the western hemisphere, ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, but more realistically to protect America's power among its neighbors; the RC opposed European imperialism in the western hemisphere, and supported imperialistic activities of America for the protection of America's commercial interest.

The only similarity really was opposition of European imperialism in the western hemisphere. Because of the mismarketing of the Corrollary, however, I think it's a fairly common mistake for people to attribute the RC to the MD.

[Spectral]

6. Thanks for the lesson

I had never heard of the Roosevelt Corrollary.

[bennywhale]

8. You are also twisting the essence of the Monroe Doctrine

It established intially the Sphere of influence of North America as outside the "jurisdiction" of the European powers. it was NOT about supporting revolutions in Latin America, is was about securing land in North America, free from European interference, as was America's "Manifest Destiny"

[DivinBreuvage]

10. It was NOT about securing land. You are confusing the Monroe Doctrine

with the way it was misused by later Presidents such as Tyler and Polk. The Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny are two different things.

Admittedly the Doctrine was not issued for purely altruistic reasons, as I alluded in my first post. Its "ulterior motive" was to ensure that the markets of fledgling Republics like Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico -- all of which had been officially recognized by the United States the year before -- remained open to US trade rather than being locked back down by Spanish colonialism.

So the United States had a vested financial interest not only in preserving the independence of the Latin American Republics but in seeing other colonies in the Western Hemisphere break their chains as well (though of course the Doctrine itself carefully denies this). At the same time, there was a great deal of genuine sympathy in the United States for the Latin American revolutionaries and this cannot and should not be ignored.

The point remains that the Monroe Doctrine, for a number of motives, was issued in support of revolutionary movements against imperialist interference (although admittedly that was not its primary intent). It did NOT "declare the US the governor of the Western Hemisphere" as the thread initiator claims, nor was it a legal pretext for grabbing land as you allege.

[bennywhale]

16. I know that the Monroe Doctrine and Minifest destiny are different things

The point in my post was that the Monroe Doctrine was used simply to fulfill America's Manifest destiny. It was not constructed to support revolutiions in S America or elswhere, as you suggets.

[rman]

7. Doctrine confirmed by govt papers available under FOIA

Excerps from a debate between Noam Chomsky and Richard Perle;

At The Ohio State University in 1988 Noam Chomsky debated Richard Perle. This famous debate was mentioned by Ed Herman in a Z Mag article last year. Later the video tape was sent to him and the audio was pulled from the video.
http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=8409

"Official doctrine is quite inconsistent with the historical and documentary record. It conforms to the pattern of evolving events and is entirely inconsistent with widely proclaimed doctrine."
...

From declassified state department planners documents on US policy:
"The 3rd world was to fulfil its function as a source of raw material and markets for the industrialist capitalist powers, and was to be exploited for their reconstruction"
...
Latin America:
"Prime concern is the protection of our raw materials. We have 50% of the worlds wealth but only 6% of its population, we must maintain this disparity to the extent possible, by force if necessary, putting aside vague and idealistic slogans such as human rights, raising of living standards, democratization, preferring police states if needed over democracies that might be to liberal and to indulgent to communists, the latter has lost any substantial meaning in US political rhetoric, referring simply to anyone who stands in our way."
These are all quotes...
"The primary threat to the US in Latin America is the trend towards nationalistic regimes that respond to popular demand for improvement in low living standards and production for domestic needs. That's not acceptable because the US is committed to encouraging a climate inductive to private investment, in particular guaranties for opportunity to earn and in the case of foreign capital to repatriate a reasonable return."
"We must therefore oppose what is regularly called ultra nationalism in secret documents, that means efforts to pursue domestic needs. We must foster exports or (..?) production in the interests of US investors. It is recognized such programs have very little appeal to the Latin American public. So the conclusion is that we must therefore gain control over the military which can in turn control domestic opposition and overthrow civilian governments if necessary. We must also act to overcome excessive liberalism in Latin American countries."
...

[davepc]

13. wow

I didnt know that the United States State Department was refering to Latin America as the "3rd world" in 1823, or that in the early 1800's the United States had 50% of the worlds wealth.

That settles it, Monroe was an imperalist who wanted to use the vast wealth and resources of 1820's U.S.A to dominate and control South and Central America.

[Don1]

14. And

Brazil is one step away from a leftist revolution as well. Don't forget about Spain, too...and the left is stronger now in Italy as well.

George Bush and his neoconservative imperialism have done more for socialism worldwide than any Democratic Party President ever did.

Cheney 2008!