>> ^chilaxe:

@<a rel="nofollow" href="http://videosift.com/member/Yogi" title="member since May 15th, 2009" class="profilelink">Yogi
People generally only care about protesters if they already agree with them.
While people are standing around protesting, hoping society will someday improve their lives for them, they're being out-competed in life by more proactive thinkers.


I guess you edited you comment because I got a message starting with this "Protesting doesn't change opinions unless you create a mass movement. Engaging the solipsistic far left or far right alone isn't enough."

I'm sorry but you are completely wrong about this...but it's not any fault of your own that you are ignorant about activism since it's simply not covered in schools outside historical discussions of the Vietnam war. For 30 years we funded the Genocide of East Timor with President Carter doubling our efforts. All told 600,000 East Timorese landless peasants and farmers murdered. Half a dozen people working in a small office lobbying the government with no funding to speak of, organized protests that were starting to get embarrassing. Clinton called off the funding...and just like that the Genocide was over and done with and International Humane services were allowed in the country.

This is one example...there are countless others where small protests at company headquarters get them to stop say privatizing water in a 3rd world nation or starving the population. They were not mass movements yet they had a huge affect for the indigenous population all because informed protesters knew who was responsible and knew that even a little protest would get them to back down before it become public. It may not seem like much here and there are no movements reported on in the media to speak of but they do have an influence on people around the globe.

Again this isn't surprising...I doubt many on this sift of people who do pay attention to the media know little about the victories won by small protests, because it isn't reported. In their eyes it really shouldn't be because as soon as you let on that the people do have power they will exercise it and there will be what liberal intellectuals termed in the 60's a "Crisis of Democracy" which happens when you have Too Much Democracy.

I only had to read 3 of the "200 lies" to see that the person who wrote it has never really read, nor understood, Chomsky... except maybe in-order to get his 'out of context' quotes.

I've been following Chomsky for over 20 years and you'd be hard pressed to come up with something on him. He has been intellectually consistent and on-topic since the 70's. He was against the slaughter of peasants in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, East Timor, Iraq, Palestine, and every other hidden murder zone in the last 50 years.

When the "200 lies" start with Chomsky's take on Lenin, the author's already proven himself to be a moron. Chomsky's only downside is that he bores people who aren't intellectual enough and infuriates people who are brainlessly patriotic.
>> ^quantumushroom:

The Top 200 Chomsky Lies.
Oh, that's right, it's FOX that has an agenda.

Sigh. liberalism is a mental disorder; I see it on the sift every time I visit. There is no arguing with peeps who don't care about facts and let emotions rule them, instead of the other way around.

I don't know who is responsible for returning these ancient sifts to the queue, in order to join the lamestream media in trying to pin the murderous actions of a lone, mentally-ill vermin on Sarah Palin, the Tea Party or the Right. In a more perfect world you would feel shame, but bolsheviks eat, sleep and breathe lies. Twenty or even ten years ago you might have gotten away with it, but not now. Team Soros has no traction with the majority any more.


WHOA! Fuck that...Obama is Jimmy Carter...that's fucking Treason right there. Jimmy Carter not only participated by facilitated one of the worst Genocides by funding one in East Timor. You dare compare the two you sniffling little weasel?! Learn your history before you start comparing Hitler to Obama next you fucking asshole!

>> ^quantumushroom:

QM can't tell the difference between a movie and a pundit on a "news" programme. Wow.
Well, can you tell the difference between one woman's thoughtless aside and an entire network?
In addition to liberals' unhealthy, irrational obsessions with race, gender and class, add Fox to the list.
PS Obama is Jimmy Carter.


WHOA! Fuck that...Obama is Jimmy Carter...that's fucking Treason right there. Jimmy Carter not only participated by facilitated one of the worst Genocides by funding one in East Timor. You dare compare the two you sniffling little weasel?! Learn your history before you start comparing Hitler to Obama next you fucking asshole!

I'm just worried that without some sort of guiding body of law about how you sort the innocent from the guilty, and what sorts of consequences are appropriate for which kind of violation, it can easily wind up being just a handy casus belli to tell people whenever you feel like conquering some new territory.
I share your concern over that, but in practice that kind of system simply does not exist at an international level. The UN is supposed to be an attempt at it, but it is completely and utterly ineffectual in that capacity. Of all the wars and atrocities committed since the UN was founded, how many has it actually opposed by placing soldiers on the ground? In the absence of a good solution(an effective UN), we are left with the alternative of unilateral action against tyrants and atrocities, with all the enormous misgivings that come with that.

Maybe if there had been some sort of Holocaust-level sort of abuses going on I'd have been able to agree with it, but then if there had been, the UN probably would have gone along with it too, and it would've been the whole world working to stop it.
But when Saddam was committing Holocaust-level abuses, the UN did nothing(in part thanks to American vetos if I recall). When a million were killed in Rwanda not only did the UN do nothing, they actively withdrew all but 400 of the troops they already had in the country. Korea, Vietnam, East Timor, Cambodia, the whole of Africa and South America, all victims of horrific wars and atrocities that the UN could not or would not prevent or stop.

After the first gulf war, the sole thing that stopped Saddam from repeating his campaign against the Kurds was the unilateral, illegal act of war that was the American enforced no-fly zone over northern Iraq. Saddam's first campaign against the Kurds saw him execute an estimated 2-300 thousand people and destroy 90% of all Kurdish villages. Every single Kurd he could capture was placed in a concentration camp. The women, children and elderly were regularly beaten and malnourished to the point that virtually every last child under the age of 3 died. The men were, without exception, hauled off to pre-dug mass graves to be executed and buried by bulldozer. The concentration camps also had rape rooms, not for the amusement of the guards or humiliation of the prisoners, but with the goal of impregnating the Kurdish women with half arab children in order to breed the Kurdish people out of existence.

Saddam committed holocaust level atrocities and 'illegal' unilateral American intervention prevented him from repeating those acts a second time. In spite of the misgivings I have about unilateral wars, I support the Iraq war on the largest level, in spite of the many lies, mistakes and tragedies that came with it the alternatives were worse.



In reply to this comment by NetRunner:

What I am disputing is religion as the driving force behind all the madness out that way.


And I think at least on that I am with you in disagreeing with Hitchens. I'm not sure just how much of the mess out there Hitchens attributes to religion, but I do believe I estimate it much lower than he does as well. The questioner in this video though made the different point of claiming the driving force behind all the madness out that way is America foreign policy, which I disagree with as strongly as Hitchens and am glad he set it straight so well.


What interventions are you talking about?


The most stark comparison is the one Hitchens references in the video. When America intervened by supporting those committing genocide against the people of East Timor, Al-Qaida cared not. It was when America ceased to support that genocide and sided instead with the victims in East Timor, that WAS listed as Al-Qaida's third greatest reason to hate America. Any support whatsoever for the state of Israel, meaning anyone not helping to entirely eliminate the state of Israel, is number one. It would not be enough to stop supporting Israel, nothing short of helping to completely erase it is enough. Similarly we must also repress our own people as well and restrict religious freedoms least any satirist draw inappropriate pictures of the prophet and bring death on us all.

The worst of the things America has done, like say Cambodia, Africa or South America doesn't make the list for Al-Qaida's reasons at all.

Without the rhetoric, the whole argument goes like this:
-The question to Hitchens: Isn't the jihad fueled by the Western powers' action in Islamic land over the whole history of colonization (i.e. 1000+ years if we count the crusades)?
-Response by Hitchens: No, it is fueled by the religious content of these actions, i.e. the things jihadists are most upset about are not related to colonization per se but to the perceived desecration/irrespect of their religion's rightful place as the OTR (Only True Religion). Jihadists don't care about the atrocities committed in the name of Islam, only of those that are committed against Islam (and their definition of "atrocity" is very broad). That's why the establishment of an independent country in East Timor with a christian majority is to them worse than the genocide that islamists committed with the help of their former western allies.

Let's remember that Al-Qaeda was formed just as the Cold War stopped and the U.S. started to take action against their former Islamic allies. What the U.S. did to Iran doesn't count since they are Shi'ites, not Sunni like Al-Qaeda. Also, Al-Qaeda doesn't care about the Turkish government massacring Kurds, they care that it is a secular government in a Islamic land. Same with Pakistan, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Iraqi insurgency is another matter. An insurgency is inevitable in any invaded country. This one is used by Al-Qaeda as a testing ground and as a continuation of their war against the U.S.A. They don't care about the freedom of the Iraqis since they also are Shia Muslims in majority. They only care that the Sunni minority be free to be as Islamic as they want. They also want to destroy the U.S.A. and a war of attrition is always a good way when you're overwhelmed in terms of raw power. So in brief: the Iraqi insurgency is fueled by Al-Qaeda, not by the occupation (though the invasion/occupation was the spark, so to speak).

Funny how BreakstheEarth calls the other guy, whoever he is, a fundamentalist apologist when his vid is of Hitchens standing there excusing western abuses of power.


How ignorant are you? Hitchens never excused western abuses, he pointed back to the fact he wrote a, if not THE, book on it with 'The Trial of Henry Kissinger'. He never excused the west, but once again renewed his condemnation and calls for war crimes prosecution of those responsible. What video where you watching exactly????


Yeah, we gave the Indonesians weapons knowing full well what they were intended for but thats ok because thirty years later we stopped the killing. THIRTY FUCKING YEARS!!?


I must repeat, what video were you watching? Hitchens never even vaguely suggested that the western turn around thirty years later justified anything. What he stated was that Al-Qaida's stated reasons for hating the west included not the East Timor genocide, but the act of ENDING their support for it.


He admits that history yet still feels like the west has some sort of moral superiority over a human surplus of young, poor, uneducated, jobless fundamentalists.

And yet again, which video did you watch? Hitchens condemned villians of both the west AND the fundamentalists. Unbelievable...

Here's a list of the military actions the US has been involved in since 1960.

I think he may have a point...

1959-60 -- The Caribbean.
1962 -- Thailand.
1962 -- Cuba.
1962-75 -- Laos.
1964 -- Congo (Zaire).
1959-75 -- Vietnam War.
1965 -- Invasion of Dominican Republic
1967 --Israel.
1967 -- Congo (Zaire).
1968 -- Laos & Cambodia.
1970 -- Cambodia Campaign.
1974 -- Evacuation from Cyprus.
1975 -- Evacuation from Vietnam.
1975 -- Evacuation from Cambodia.
1975 -- South Vietnam.
1975 -- Cambodia.
1976 -- Lebanon.
1976 -- Korea.
1978 -- Zaire (Congo).
1980 -- Iran.
1981 -- El Salvador.
1981 --Libya. in the Gulf of Sidra, claimed by Libya as territorial waters but considered international waters by the United States.[RL30172]
1982 -- Sinai.
1982 -- Lebanon.
1982-1983 -- Lebanon.
1983 -- Grenada.
1983-89 -- Honduras.
1983 -- Chad.
1984 -- Persian Gulf.
1986 -- Libya.
1986 -- Libya.
1986 -- Bolivia
1987-88 -- Persian Gulf.
1988 -- Honduras
1988 -- Panama.
1989 -- Libya.
1989 -- Panama.
1989 -- Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru.
1989 -- Philippines.
1989-90 -- Panama.
1990 -- Liberia.
1990 -- Saudi Arabia.
1991 -- Iraq.
1991 -- Zaire
1992 -- Sierra Leone.
1992 -- Kuwait.
1992-2003 -- Iraq. Iraqi No-Fly Zones
1993-Bosnia-Herzegovina.
1993 -- Macedonia.
1994-95 -- Haiti.
1994 -- Macedonia.
1995 -- Bosnia.
1996 -- Liberia.
1996 -- Central African Republic.
1997 -- Albania.
1997 -- Congo and Gabon.
1997 -- Sierra Leone.
1997 -- Cambodia.
1998 -- Iraq.
1998 -- Guinea-Bissau.
1998 - 1999 Kenya and Tanzania.
1998 -- Afghanistan and Sudan.
1998 -- Liberia.
1999 - 2001 East Timor.
1999 -- NATO's bombing of Serbia
2000 -- Sierra Leone.
2000 -- Yemen.
2000 -- East Timor.
2001 -- Afghanistan.
2002 -- Yemen.
2002 -- Philippines.
2002 -- Côte d'Ivoire.
2003 -- 2003 invasion of Iraq
2003 -- Liberia.
2003 -- Georgia and Djibouti
2004 -- Haïti
2004 -- Georgia, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen, and Eritrea.[7]
2006 -- Pakistan.
2006 -- Lebanon.
2007 -- Somalia.

Legacy100's raving immediately became irrelevant when an entire continent of 53 unique countries was compared to 3 cherry picked countries in Asia. Do I need to remind you that some of these gems of economic development also fall under the Asian designation . . . Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, East Timor, The Maldives, Nepal, Yemen, Bhutan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, etc.

There are deep and complex structural problems in Africa. Every country is unique but the exploitation of natural resources and labour is pretty universal.

Why not try reading "Bitter Chocolate" by Carol Off. It chronicles the exploitation of cocoa by large western corporations in the Ivory Coast, just 1 unique story in a bouquet of 53.

Westerners should stop pointing fingers at Africa while they stuff their mouths full of chocolate tempered on the back of bitter exploitative conditions on a continent they know NOTHING about.

I say Saddam is not a terrorist because that was the narrative created for you by the Bush Administration, until that time no one referred to sovereign government heads as terrorists, it was all about framing the issue to justify a war. Saddam gas and suppressed his own people before the Iraq invasion of 2003, before even the Gulf War. Power politics justified his oppression of civilians, the US supported that there was no action, the Iran-Iraq war falls under the same definition, again many western nations profited from arms sales to both.

Furthermore as Reagen said "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" or rather "The only difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist is your point of view."

The US defines what and who is a terrorist pretty freely, your example of Saddam killing civilians flies in the face of the fact that most of the arms for that endeavor was supplied by the US government. The US also supported and enabled coups in Iran (Shah), Chile (Pinochet), East Timor and countless other states that went on to falling in the same definition of terrorism that you apply. However they weren't labeled as such.

The Isreal/Palestine issue is the biggest example where the excuse of terrorism, has been applied to justify encroachments on Palestinian lands, criticism of which makes you somehow antisemitic. Who is the terrorist in this case? The Palestinians who are forced to use guerrilla tactics or the modernize Israel army with its tanks, jets and rifles?

This is realpolitik of the world.

Terrorism -- use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate, and subjugate, esp. such use as a political weapon or policy

Power politics -- international political relations in which each nation attempts to increase its own power or interests by using military or economic coercion

Realpolitik -- practical politics; a euphemism for power politics

Frequently, realpolitik = power politics = terrorism

http://www.twf.org/Library/Terrorism.html

Thanks for posting this. I've read a few of his books and think he has done some great reporting particularly on Burma and East Timor. If you ever get the chance to read "Heroes" do so. It deals with people in all different kinds of situations around the world and really offers some insight into injustice.

Re Chomsky: on Pol Pot, etc:

http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/5/6.html

" The Pol Pot Affair

Collaborators once more, Chomsky and Edward Herman published The Political Economy of Human Rights in 1979. In the second volume of this two-volume work, After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, they compared two sites of atrocity ­ Cambodia and Timor ­ and evaluated the diverse media responses to each. It embroiled Chomsky in an entirely new controversy.

In a 7 November 1980 Times Higher Education Supplementarticle called "Chomsky's Betrayal of Truths," Steven Lukes accused Chomsky of intellectual irresponsibility. He was contributing to the "deceit and distortion surrounding Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia," Lukes charged, because, "obsessed by his opposition to the United States' role in Indochina," he had "lost all sense of perspective" (31). Lukes concluded that there was "only one possible thing to think" : Chomsky had betrayed his own anarchist-libertarian principles. "It is sad to see Chomsky writing these things. It is ironic, given the United States' government's present pursuit of its global role in supporting the seating of Pol Pot at the [United Nations]. And it is bizarre, given Chomsky's previous stand for anarchist-libertarian principles. In writing as he does about the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, Chomsky betrays not only the responsibilities of intellectuals, but himself" (31).


The Obscure History of East Timor

Lukes makes no mention here of the subject of the book, which is clearly stated in the introduction to volume 1, which is entitled "Cambodia: Why the Media Find It More Newsworthy than Indonesia and East Timor." It is an explicit comparison between Cambodia and Timor ­ the latter being the scene of the worst slaughter, relative to population size, since the Holocaust. Now if the atrocities perpetrated in Timor were comparable to those perpetrated by Pol Pot in Cambodia (and Chomsky claims that they were), then a comparison of Pol Pot's actions to those committed in Timor could not possibly constitute an apology for Pol Pot. Yet somehow Lukes suggested that it did. If such comparisons cannot be made without the intellectual community rising up in protest, then the entire issue of state-instigated murder can become lost inside the polemics of determining which team of slaughterers represents a lesser evil.

That Lukes could ignore the fact that Chomsky and Herman were comparing Pol Pot to East Timor "says a lot about him," in Chomsky's opinion:

By making no mention of the clear, unambiguous, and explicit comparison [of Pol Pot and East Timor], he is demonstrating himself to be an apologist for the crimes in Timor. That is elementary logic: if a comparison of Pol Pot to Timor is apologetics for Pol Pot, as Lukes claims (by omission of the relevant context, which he could not fail to know), then it must be that the crimes in Timor were insignificant. Lukes, then, is an apologist for the worst slaughter relative to population since the Holocaust. Worse, that is a crime for which he, Lukes, bears responsibility; uk support has been crucial. And it is a crime that he, Lukes, could have always helped to terminate, if he did not support huge atrocities; in contrast, neither he nor anyone else had a suggestion as to what to do about Pol Pot. (13 Feb. 1996)

The vigor of Chomsky's remarks reflects the contempt that he feels for this kind of by-now-familiar tactic. Decorum must not take precedence over decrying slaughter and falsity, and Chomsky is compelled to demonstrate this: "Let us say that someone in the us or uk . . . did deny Pol Pot atrocities. That person would be a positive saint as compared to Lukes, who denies comparable atrocities for which he himself shares responsibility and knows how to bring to an end, if he chose. That's elementary. Try to find some intellectual who can understand it. That tells us a lot . . . about the intellectual culture" (13 Feb. 1996). The point of course goes beyond Lukes, and extends into a general discussion concerning the intellectual community, which itself, in Chomsky's opinion, "cannot comprehend this kind of trivial, simple, reasoning and what it implies. That really is interesting. It reveals a level of indoctrination vastly beyond what one finds in totalitarian states, which rarely were able to indoctrinate intellectuals so profoundly that they are unable to understand real trivialities" (14 Aug. 1995).

Within weeks, two long and lucid replies to Lukes's piece were sent in to the Times Higher Education Supplement, accusing him of selective reading, of missing the entire point of both volumes of Political Economy, of ignoring the first volume, of trivializing the moral potency of Chomsky's thesis, of cold-bloodedly manipulating the truth, of misrepresenting Chomsky and Herman's work, and of disrespect. Neither reply came from Chomsky; one was from Laura J. Summers, the other from Robin Woodsworth Carlsen.

Though bolstered by the support of those sympathetic to his position and his larger aims, Chomsky knew that a smear campaign could be much more effective and have a much wider dissemination than rational argumentation. In Herman's opinion,

the Cambodia and Faurisson disputes imposed a serious personal cost on Chomsky. He put up a diligent defence against the attacks and charges against him, answering virtually every letter and written criticism that came to his attention. He wrote many hundreds of letters to correspondents and editors on these topics, along with numerous articles, and answered many phone enquiries and queries in interviews. The intellectual and moral drain was severe. It is an astonishing fact, however, that he was able to weather these storms with his energies, morale, sense of humour and vigour and integrity of his political writings virtually intact. ( "Pol Pot" 609)


Cambodia today: continuing carnage

As ever, Chomsky is quick to point out that being the subject of such treatment did not make him unique. But the ferocity of the attack on him does reveal something about the power of popular media, the lengths to which endangered elites will go to eliminate dissent, and the nature of what passes for appropriate professional behavior. In a letter he wrote to the Times Literary Supplement in January of 1982 ­ a reply to an article by Paul Johnson in that same publication in which he, like Lukes, accused Chomsky and Herman of sympathizing with the Khmer Rouge ­ Chomsky examined one of the tactics used against him: "[A] standard device by which the conformist intellectuals of East or West deal with irritating dissident opinion is to try to overwhelm it with a flood of lies. Paul Johnson illustrates the technique with his reference to my `prodigies of apologetics . . . for the Khmer Rouge' (December 25). I have stated the facts before in this journal, and will do so again, not under any illusion that they will be relevant to the guardians of the faith." Chomsky asserted that the smear campaign was a side issue; the larger concern was, of course, the intellectual apologists' ability to forgo reasonable analysis when their own government was at fault:

The context was extensive documentation of how the mainstream intelligentsia suppressed or justified the crimes of their own states during the same period. This naturally outraged those who feel that they should be free to lie at will concerning the crimes of an official enemy while concealing or justifying those of their own states ­ a phenomenon that is, incidentally, far more significant and widespread than the delusions about so-called "socialist" states that Johnson discusses, and correspondingly quite generally evaded. Hence the resort to the familiar technique that Johnson, and others, adopts. ("Political Pilgrims")

Otero even goes so far as to describe (in a note he added to Language and Politics) the reaction to Chomsky's positions on Faurisson and Pol Pot as a coordinated attempt to undermine his credibility and thereby sabotage his powerful critique of policies on Indochina:

The major international campaign orchestrated against Chomsky on completely false pretexts was only part ­ though perhaps a crucial part ­ of the ambitious campaign launched in the late 70s with the hope of reconstructing the ideology of power and domination which had been partially exposed during the Indochina war. The magnitude of the insane attack against Chomsky, which aimed at silencing him and robbing him of his moral stature and his prestige and influence, is of course one more tribute to the impact of his writings and his actions ­ not for nothing he was the only one singled out. (310)

Such commentary assigns to the ruling elite a uniformity that is based on the values shared by its members. Evidence for this may be found in the heavy media coverage given to the Lukes camp and the general reluctance to allow Chomsky space for rebuttal (particularly in France)."

President Johnson sabotaged the war? Am sorry but you need to re-do your American history course. The CIA backed the extermination of thousands of people in East Timor. The Gulf Of Tonkin incident was a gross lie, the administration operated on the assumption of the domino theory whereas in reality Vietnam and China hate each other for thousands of years.

The Paris peace plan was nearly signed by both sides with Nixon exiting office, Kissinger sabotaged it and peace was eluded because someone was playing a 19th century diplomacy game using American lives. Then they proceeded to have the largest bombing operation ever to prove to the South Vietnamese that they fucking meant to stay.

Kissinger then tried to lie to the American people and expanded the war into Cambodia facilitating the rise of Khmer Rouge regime due to destabilization in the country side. B-52s would take off and have target corrections going into the Cambodian border, when they landed the logs of course showed operations within Vietnam.

The Vietnam war ended not because of hippies, or war vets or anything like that. It ended because the American people did not want it, nor did they support it.

Your comments make the people who got shot by the National Guard at universities across the country seem insignificant and trivial, this was the time of the draft and people didn't want to go killing another race of people half across the world for dubious reasons.

The US administration does not want to get involved in what potentially could be a 2nd Vietnam war, even though it is abundantly clear from the time span of the actual war that the Iraqi military was completely overwhelmed. Kurdish rebels in the North and Shiites in the South start military operations against Saddam's goverment. The American goverment at the time felt that this would lead to civil war and thus let the situation resolve itself, however it makes a mistake in negotiations for a cease fire with Saddam. While a no fly zone was imposed, Saddam was given premission to use attack helicopters. Attack helicopters crush both rebel movements. (Remember those famous pictures of Kurds driven to the mountains?). The American administration does no intervene any further because an unstable presence in the Middle East means that military bases will be allowed remain in Kuwait, Saudia Arabia and Qatar, securing the oil supply should anything ever happen. The American goverment could have overthrown Saddam then and there, the initative was there, the world was behind them but they stopped, because it served their objectives at the time. What follows is 10 years of misery via the UN Oil-for-food programme, under which thousands suffer. The iraqi people feel betrayed because the liberators had left before the job was finished, pro american supports silently dissappeared off the streets as Saddam tightened control, seeing no alternative a cult of personality arises around Saddam who starts to provide food and supplies to the people, in 10 years he becomes more beloved and feared ruler. Something that US forces are dealing with every day, day in day out. The rest is history.

During the same time period (70s to 90s), the USSR intervenes in Afghanistan, the CIA sponsors the mujahedin and Osama Bin Laden with roughly a billion dollars in order to destabilize the Soviet Union. Significantly they provided the mujahedin shoulder launched heat seekers that destroyed the air support of the russian helicopter fleet (responsible for supply, transportation and tactical attacks) which was vital to any successful campaign. Clearly the CIA was not doing it's job properly because at the time it was clear the Soviet Union was just disintergrating under the inefficiency of the soviet communist system. Osama Bin Laden joined the Taleban because they envisioned a muslim nation, and that was attacked by a secular power (USSR). With US forces staying put in Saudia Arabia indefinately after the Gulf War, Osama Bin Laden declares a jihad against occupying forces in the Islamic Holyland. The rest is thus history.

In conclusion. The policies the American goverment has undertaken have backfired, the consequences of which we see in 9/11, the Afghan war, the Iraq war, the uneasy situation with Iran. The CIA have a code word for this called "blow back". Intervention in Iranian affairs has created regime whose coming to power was mostly based on a hatred of America for doing what it did. This is the same regime that could be acquiring nuclear weapons, supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestine, supporting indirectly anti-american action in Iraq. The same people who would have greeted America as liberators in 1991, when it mattered, are not the same people America invades in 2003.

The same thing I mentioned about Nicaragua applies to East Timor. in 1975, the Indonesian Military Regime intervenes in the former colony of East Timor. What follows is a genocidal event. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the US ambassdor to the UN blocks any international reaction to the event. And I quote now "The United States wished things to turn out as they did and worked to bring this about. The department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success."
In 1991, A News Service study reveals that the US goverment supplied the Indonesian military with a list of names of promeint communist party leaders, mass organizations, labour federations and youth groups. The CIA station chief reffered to this as "a shooting list".

I could go on and on...