100 Years – Cuba To Iraq
The Spanish American War of 1898 represented the very first time that the US intervened outside the North American Continent. As a consequence of success in Cuba and the Philippines, and the very first experience at annexation and as an occupying power, the US established a naval presence abroad, with bases in the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, Cuba etc. In 1903 US leased out Gauntanamo Bay from Cuba. Korea should have taught US the hard lesson that land wars are not winnable in Asia, yet Vietnam followed not more than a decade later. The lessons of the killing fields of South East Asia had been taken to heart, the temptation to return the favour of a proxy war because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan could hardly be ignored. No logic was applied before entering Iraq in 2003, even worse there is no exit strategy from the cauldron even in 2007.
How the Rot Started
US Secretary of State Colin Powell recently called US President George Bush, Jr. with some good news and bad news about UN inspections for Iraq’s weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), “Mr President, the good news is that Saddam Hussain has agreed to unconditional across-the-board inspections, the bad news is that he has asked for “Arthur Andersen” to carry out the inspections.” That joke sums up the backlash of the ENRON financial scandal that has afflicted a score of previously untouchable US blue-chip multi-billion dollar companies like Worldcall, Tyco etc, almost all major international accounting firms like “Arthur Andersen” are under pressure because of “creative accounting” and/or fudging financial numbers. When World Bank President Wolfensohn accused the Ms Benazir Regime in 1996 of fudging statistics, he was being discriminatory, almost all governments are guilty of this “soft” white collar crime of inflating their revenues and masking their expenditures, India regularly puts military pensions and border fortifications under innocuous “Heads” other than “Defence Expenditures”. In this new world of accounting “glasnost” it is becoming harder to mask the financial shenanigans of the kind that this country (and the world) has been witness to.