When did Americans last fight a war to protect American freedom?

I got to thinking about this question because I get so tired of hearing that the troops in Iraq are over there protecting OUR freedom. So, I thought I'd ask it here:

Excluding the American Revolution and recognizing that we've fought in many, many more wars than the ones listed below, what was the last war in which American troops fought to protect the freedom of Americans (And I don't mean the freedom to ride shotgun on the world's resources)?

Dominoe theory. The Commies were going to take over the entire peninsula. Just a matter of time before they came to 'git' us too.

or as the vets say, 'Nada.

You call that fun?!

I didn't know there was any action seen there. Wasn't it over in a day? Sorry if I have offended. I didn't intend that at all.

My memory of it comes much from conversations I had with ROTC guys in college who were dismayed it didn't last long enough for them to get involved.

I was just playing.

:P

Shi*! I just spent the last ten minutes reading up on Grenada, thinking what an a** I was to say such a thoughtless thing.

:rofl:

I owe you one!

I think that was really just Reagan taking a poke at Castro. But even if accepting the idea that Ronnie invaded the island to protect the U.S. citizens who lived there, that didn't really protect American freedom in the broader sense.

Viet Nam war was lost and kept feeding kids into the meat grinder are back. And they're finishing what they were trying to do then. Build an American Empire.

both made money at that war. Nixon criminals - Cheney and Rummy - and to a large extent Poppy - have landed us in the current scenario. They are making lots of money and our children are paying the price.

©

It's tough being enlightened some days, isn't it?

x(

Vietnamese restaurant not four miles from my house. They DID come to git us! Or, at least, make some very tasty soup.

that was the justification I remember hearing re that stupid war. Commies. Coming to git us.

really. The hotheads in Congress wanted to conquer Canada-and they failed. And the war didn't solve anything-put it all back to the status quo.

Although the war began over impressment and someone mumbling about taking revenge for the 1807 attack on the USS Chesapeake. As odd as that war was(Britain really didn't care to bother until the US went into Canada) gave stories still being told today:

1. A national anthem
2. Curse of Tecumseh
3. Battle of New Orleans
4. USS Constitution

Anything else?

On a personal note, it resulted in the death of two of my great great great great great great uncles, who were captured at Ft. Niagara and held in prison in Canada.

Also we got the phrase "Don't Give Up the Ship"

Sadly, because of the Battle of New Orleans, many think we "won" the war.

The British were impressing U.S. sailors at an alarming rate, and they had not given up the land they had promised to at the end of the Revolution...

It was a dumb war to fight given American military weakness, but there was provocation

My gr-gr-gr-gr grandfather fought in the War of 1812 in upstate New York. He was discharged for refusing to invade Canada.

since we were actually attacked by a real live military force.

But Hitler and Hirohito combined never would have actually been able to conquer us if we'd played a fully defensive role. That being said of course we had to fight that war.

(if there is such a thing) that the U.S. has been involved with. I, too, question some of the tactics, but agree it had to be fought.

Even if you accept the theory that FDR knew it was coming and let it happen to provide a casus bellum, I doubt that the bombing of Pearl Harbor was a Japanese-American conspiracy. Whether or not we could have foiled the attack, I think that Japan was determined to attack the United States or our interests, somewhere in the Pacific.

funded by Henry Ford, Prescott Bush, and other Americans? That qualifies them as a manufactured enemy in my book. Ford and GM factories built the German war machines, and IBM punchcards sent the Jews to their deaths. If American money hadn't backed Hitler, there would have been no war.

http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1312540,00.html

http://www.amazon.com/Henry-Ford-Jews-Mass-Production/dp/1586481630/ref=pd_sim_b_1/102-0310704-0636931

Bill

when I was talking about being attacked. I agree that the American industry titans you speak of enabled the Nazis, but did the U.S. enable the Japanese? Serious question -- I'm not being snarky.

First off, I must admit to knowing less about the politics behind the Pacific war. I do know that the US tried to bribe Japan with raw materials, arms, and training so that in exchange Japan would agree not to attack us. Also, IIRC, the US commitment to the Pacific theater was about a third of our troop strength in Europe.

IMO the Japanese would not have attacked without a strong ally in Germany. Japan had a huge troop commitment to fight China. The US could have armed and trained China, who had enough soldiers (and will) to fight Japan for quite some time. We did, in fact, but not enough that Japan was stymied. China was invaded while they were weak in terms of government. Mao and the nationalists both rose as a result of the vacuum, and neither could face Japan without help. Ultimately Japan had ambitions to control the Pacific, and the US had territories that Japan wanted, but that is not the same as the US fighting for our freedom. The Pacific war was fought over territory and raw materials.

Bill

As usual, with international affairs, things are never as simple as they at first appear. I still feel that once we were attacked, we didn't have much choice but to fight back. It's completely different, I think, than 9/11 which was not an attack by a sovereign nation but more of a crime which should have been dealt with through international investigation and police work -- definitely not by attacking a country that had nothing to do with it. I don't see much gray area here.

But we're talking about actual indigenous Americans, not the European imperialists colonizers. So the last large scale wars fought by Americans (although not "troops" in the accepted sense) were those fought by desperate indigenous peoples to repel the European invaders. There were an estimated 12 to 15 million people living in North America around the time Columbus "discovered" Hispaniola and, to the detriment of millions of lives, decided to take a right and sail north. By the time "the west was won," most of the original inhabitants had been slaughtered by "guns, germs and steel," as Jared Diamond's brilliant analysis of westward expansion makes clear.

Other than that, it's just an endless bunch of interchangeable, greedy rich white guys convincing or conscripting naive young kids to do their dirty work for them -- whether it's invading and occupying a country for its cheap raw materials, taking advantage of its cheap (read "slave") labor, projection of military power into a critical region, maybe implementing the one piece of a strategy that couldn't be achieved through negotiation (like the Caspian Basin pipeline through Afghanistan that required the temporary removal of the Taliban).

It's all wrapped in the flag, given religious justification from the pulpits of America, features dehumanizing of the enemy du jour, and sells exceptionally well with a certain demographic.

So, despite that incontrovertible truth that the actual enemy is war itself, and that modern warfare invariably is war against civilian populations (as the so-called "smart" bombs become increasingly stupid and wipe out whole apartment buildings in residential neighborhoods), and as the stories of kids with various limbs blown off proliferate -- despite all this horror and needless misery, the war machine must be fed, and its diet consists exclusively of pallets of crisp high-denomination bills ripped off from the taxpayers and transferred upward to the investor classes, and finally to the insanely rich people who run companies like Lockheed-Martin (which made $36.4 billion last year devising more efficient ways to commit mass murder), Boeing, General Dynamics and so forth.

All of which makes me mightily regret that right turn Columbus took. Anthropologists have thoroughly studied the tribes and nations who used to be the American people and have reached several near-unanimous conclusions. One of which, and the one most painful when contemplating what was and what is, is that all indications suggest indigenous Americans had no concept of profit, land ownership, mass resource exploitation, zero-sum exploitative relationships, a acute sense of reverence for and kinship with their local ecosystems, as well as their broader natural environment. And their god (or pantheon) was based on animism rather than that old testament sociopath who slew everybody he could get his hands on.

Not that these people were saints. Cutting out the heart of an enemy and eating his liver is pretty grim. But they look like saints compared with how we live our lives. We refined the perpetual power struggle into a national pastime; we obsess about property rights, to the point that many people die each year who are mistaken for thieves or trespassers; our delight in resource exploitation is both shameless and shameful; and our dominant god these days is a killer on the magnitude of Stalin and apparently requires idiots or the marginally demented as adherents.

Yeah, that was a fateful right turn around 1500 AD. But I suppose if it hadn't been the Spanish, it would have been one of the other vicious colonial powers who spent the next several centuries murdering, raping, pillaging and conquering.

And now it's us. How very precious.


wp

And it could be said that, for many indigenous Americans, the war has never ended.

Even Native Americans used the land bridge to move from Asia to North America.

...But I fail to see how that de-legitimizes their claim as indigenous Americans. They were here for several millennia, had established tribal territories, had carved out post-ice age lives for themselves that involved both hunter-gather and agrarian societies, and from what paleoanthropologists can discern, lived in relative peace and harmony -- with other tribes and larger societal organizations, and with their ecosystems. They hunted for food, not trophies. Their personal relationships involved extended families, with parents, cousins, nephews and nieces, children and wives all important parts of the family and all except very young kids considered valuable contributors when big decisions had to be made. Some societies were apparently even matrilineal, which would be one of a European conquistador's worst nightmares.

There were approximately 15 million of these people living in the giant area drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries. There were several million more in what's now Arizona, New Mexico, California and up to Washington on the west coast. Same with the area from Florida to New England.

Now that's a hell of a lot of people for a couple thousand Spaniards to not only subdue, but commit full-scale genocide against. But smallpox was their friend; in the late 19th century, soldiers gave captive "Indians" blankets that had formerly covered smallpox victims, just to help the disease spread a little faster and give it every opportunity to lock its death-grip around another disposable brown (red?) person.

But I ramble... Point is, they were here a hell of a lot longer than the European imperialists and, possession being nine-tenths as they say, North America was theirs. Unfortunately, sitting on a pile of natural resources that the white invaders covet is never a prescription for a long and undisturbed life. So they died by the tens of thousands, by the millions, all to fill the coffers of Spain, The Netherlands, Portugal, Great Britain, France (mostly in Canada), and seemingly anybody else with navigation skills and the con man's gift for amassing other peoples' money to finance an expedition.

Final point being: look what this place could have been, and look at it now. Peace and harmony lost and gold-lust won. And it continues to this very day, as tens of millions climb into their tin cans and head off to immerse themselves in intolerable commuter traffic, then spend the day as a middle-management android in constant fear of out-sourcing and off-shoring, then back into the tin can for another soul-shattering ride home, then a bit of TV time and a taste of whatever little wifey's come up with to keep starvation away, and finally off to bed for a troubled, interrupted and unsatisfying sleep -- repeat until you're dead or retired, if anyone can tell the difference anymore.


wp

eom

Because every war, right or wrong, reaffirms the willingness of our civilian-soldiers to stand up when called to arms.

To believe otherwise is to believe that our soldiers do wrong when they have gone to war, and I will not accept that.

Our brave soldiers fight because they believe what they've been told by their superiors and the corporate media. The fact that, like many Americans, they have been deceived makes them no less brave and loyal and no less deserving of our boundless admiration for what they are willing to do for us. That's why, in fact, I believe that the most important way to honor the troops is to never, never send them into harm's way for anything less than the protection of our freedom.

In the past, the United States didn't have any pretenses, damned near everybody knew the Maine explosion was an accident, yet we wanted Empire, so we fought Spain and conquered territory. Same for Manifest Destiny before that, or the farce that was the Hawaii coup and invasion, etc.

If the message is that the civilian population will go to war at any time for any reason then it means that a President can turn this country into an aggressive empire that denies freedom to those in other nations. That's what at least half of our wars have done.

All the rest were manufactured and had not so much to do with protecting American freedom. Oh yeah, except for the war we are currently fighting over here against the Bush Junta. That is definitely a war for our freedom.

for most of its existence. Not against any single enemy, but against several. Most of these wars are wars of aggression for conquest, yet they are rarely mentioned. Yet, in all that time, only one, maybe two wars, actually threatened U.S. sovereignty, i.e. our freedom, the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. Plus, since then, we have only fought two additional defensive wars of any type, WWI and WWII. All of our other wars were defensive or instigated by us.

Generally, the more power a nation has, the more atrocities it commits worldwide. I won't whitewash British, French, or Spanish history just to placate the people who live there, why should I make exceptions for Americans?

Even in the 1920's most people thought it served no purpose other than to enrich war profiteers.

BTW: I did mean offensive in my last sentence, not defensive. Past the editing period, which sucks.

I found this awhile when I was looking for something unrelated. I find a lot of it hard to swallow, but it's an interesting read at the very least.
http://www.patriceayme.com/ltr_010_carrol.html

What do you find factually incorrect?

Bill

other than business.

Although, I don't really like the phrase "fighting for freedom", it just seems too simplistic.

Interesting. I'm sure a World where Europe was governed by Nazis and Asia by Imperial Japan would have been no threat to us.

And that if we let the two powers just fight each other, Nazi rule over Europe would have ultimately collapsed. The counter-argument to this is that the Germans may have developed an atomic bomb.

IMO, Hitler was a genuine threat and needed to be stopped.

I wonder if it would have affect the soviet war effort if they did not receive such aid... Or worse, had the Germans received it instead.

Which, given what the Eastern Front cost every single month from 1942 onwards, was reason enough to speed its end, IMHO.

You really BELIEVE we fought WWII to protect US?

Have you a clue about grand-daddy BUSH????

DON'T YOU GET THE GAME?

The game of power,...do you get that?

When was the last time we fought for our DEFENSE? OUR DEFENSE? When has our sovereignty EVER BEEN THREATENED?

Are you logical or IN THE GAME OF POWER?

If Hitler ever threatened OUR SECURITY,...it was because OUR MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL-COMPLEX ARMED HIM TO DO SO,...just like the same MIC does so to this day except even worse: to create a cycle of destruction FOR PROFIT.

Fool yourself into believing an ideal that the profiteers have CREATED (and pride themselves, even openly, about fucking with your mind),...but, don't pretend that your defensiveness has ANYTHING TO DO with reality rather than denial and do not fucking assert your denial on the rest of us.

'kay?

I hate war, but what would you have had the U.S. do when Pearl Harbor was attacked? Just say, okay, we had it coming?

Not just the American ones, either...

:eyes:

that killed innocent Americans and attempted to cripple our navy was not a threat to our defense and sovereignty?

to protect our freedoms right now.
This is just the cold war stage.

i really can not believe anyone would say that..oh well, to each his/her own.

I don't think anyone with any real sense of history denies that the US has been involved in imperialistic wars, Vietnam and Iraq being some of the latest and most egregious examples. But the idiotic "America is always warmongering/imperialist" crap I'm reading on this thread is just knee-jerk fellow traveler bullshit. Trying to equate the Unites States with Nazi Germany is just blind ignorance disguised as some kind of maligned leftist "truth," the virtue of believing which makes its believers somehow more "intelligent" or "perceptive" than the rest of us who believe the history of WWII that "they" want us to know - "they," of course, being the archetypal corporate/fascist/right-wing standard issue boogeyman of dubious identity. I think that tinfoil hat is cutting off circulation to your brain. :eyes:

Yes, Henry Ford and IBM did business with Nazi Germany and Ford is a fairly well known right-wing fascist. No one disputes this. But I missed the part where Ford was elected president and conducted foreign policy decisions on behalf of America.

That a handful of American businessmen were sympathetic to the Nazis is not surprising, nor does it make the entire goddamn country a co-conspirator of the Third Reich, any more than German expatriates to America such as Einstein made Germany somehow a secret member of the Allied war effort.

You know, sometimes - I know it's hard for some of you "troo revolutionaries" to accept - America was actually on the right side of a global conflict. My only complaint with WWII is that we waited too damn long to get involved.