Michele Bachmann in last night’s presidential debate:
Cutting back on foreign aid is one thing. Being reimbursed by nations that we have liberated is another. We should look to Iraq and Libya to reimburse us for part of what we have done to liberate these nations.
Bachmann isn’t the first to suggest that invading, destroying, and occupying a country for the benefit of defense corporations and Washington’s national security planners is grounds for reparations to be paid back to the United States government. I’ve written before about such idiotic proposals. This is such extreme ignorance it’s hard to stomach. Iraq is a country that was invaded in a war of aggression – without the justification of self-defense – and in which, by the most conservative estimates, well over 100,000 civilians were killed, horrifying war crimes were committed by US troops, and an economy was destroyed. The leader of the puppet government we’ve set up there, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has circumvented Parliament, consolidated illegitimate power in a long trend of quasi-dictatorial behavior, harshly cracked down on peaceful activism, harassed and even attacked journalists that were critical of his regime, and has been accused of torturing prisoners in secret Iraqi jails. In a diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, US envoy Ryan Crocker noted in 2009 that Maliki’s turn towards more centralized rule is “in US interest.” To Bachmann and other vile dimwits, this is liberation.
That talk like this is even allowed in these debates without immediate and unalterable ostracism from politics or any position of any responsibility is indicative of how sickly the society is when it comes to American foreign policy.
She should be forced to directly ask these children and their families to pay up for all the hard work her and her henchman in the war party did to liberate them:
How long until impoverished Afghans have to hear about reparations for America’s benevolence?
