They have already accomplished their objectives by securing the border crossing that's being used to supply the anti assad rebels. Syria is back in control of that ground, Assad just got more time which is exactly what Russia needs to be relevant, and they were able to get it done before going to the bargaining table. Russia just got exactly what it wanted and support for Putin is growing. This was a major fuck up. I know it would be arfcom wet dream for Russia to do some crazy shit, but that isn't going to happen, not over assad.

 

Wonder what France traded to make that headline.

 
They went with multiple interceptors that are specialized for different roles as opposed to the US with a more mutli-role interceptor a la PATRIOT. The ABM capabilities are absolutely world class, and cover territory the US needs multiple systems to achieve (SM-1, THAAD, PATRIOT). I'm curious what depth they've got in their defense design. The S400 is obviously the big umbrella over the whole thing, but they probably have a soft short-range underbelly.


The SAM site isn't really a concern if war were to break out; a cruise missile salvo would wipe the BN off the map via sheer saturation. It's largely a strategic play, much the same way the US deployed PATRIOT to Gaziantep (that we're now removing...)

Russian aircraft carriers?

I do secretly envy those goat fuckers from time to time. When the wife is yapping away right as I walk in the door from work. I can't beat her. I can't sell her to a neighbor. I can't just get another one by paying some 17 year old hottie's dad a couple of camels. When we're late cause she can't find the right dress or fix her make-up I can't just throw a burka on her and drag her out the door. Every religion has it's pluses and minuses.

Gotta be something.

Their ADA tech is anything but shitty. That S-400 system is better than the PAC-3 Patriot we produce in many respects.

Man, that thing must be a cast iron bitch to reload.

Fuck Turkey
Nato needs to get their nukes back and kick them the Fuck out

A voice of sanity emerges!

 


All this chest thumping is fine but anyone who immediately dismisses the Russians as a bunch of drunks are so off the mark that it's not even funny.


While they may be in a weakened state, Russia still has sophisticated weapons and enough of a chip on their shoulders to fuck with us on a limited scale given our current political & military climate.




I have no doubts of what a "no fucks given" Russia could do before Obama found enough of his sack to do anything about it.


 

As a 14A I have to agree with the assessment. I've never ran a S400 site, but I've run a PAT site. On paper the Russian system is impressive. The weak link is probably logistics and operator experience. Still, the Radar is world class, and the interceptors are too. It's a significant capability in theater.

 

Derp.

Sure, we'll just blockade all of Russia. You understand they share a massive land border with China, right?

Regardless, trying to blockade Russia's ports is madness and a declaration of war. That would lead to nuclear war, not Russia crumbling. Please stop the derp.

China?  You realize that China wants to carve off a giant chunk of Siberia for it's own right?

Shooting at US aircraft isn't an act of war

Besides oil prices just needs to keep at their current prices for a year or so for Russia to collapse finically.

I know, Putin stronk.

[/facepalm]

Now that Russia is messing with Middle Eastern oil trade, how long until bullshit stories like Eating Babies out of Incubators, or whatever Saddam was accused of doing

Far from it but everyone is so quick to dismiss Russia from any conversation. Again, if people really understood the capabilities (much more limited than they used to be) of the Russian military, you wouldn't be so quick to throw out "Putin stronk".

 
Not a Putin fanboy or Primorski in disguise but just someone who understands what Russia and it's military/weapon systems are still capable of doing.


Plus, if we're betting between China and Russia?.......

I'll take the Russians all day. Not even close.

Looks like the Germans are getting into the mix.

It's a shitshow over there. Sooner or later us and the russians are going to start shooting at each other. There is not enough room for both of us.

Reading through, the 250mi/400km range is for strategic planes only. For fighters, the range is about 100mi, with a missile speed of anywhere from mach 6 to mach 8 depending on version.

Just curious how many planes Russian has hijacked over the last 40 years? How many suicide bombers they have sent into western cities in the past decade?  How many inocent civilians they have shot up in the name of God? In this fight the bad guys are the jihadis and we lack the balls to do what needs to be done to rid the world of them. I never said the world is black and white and i dont see how you can get that from my post. In this fight there is a clear more evil party here and they would cut your head off if given half the chance.

The shit Russians did to Ukrainian civilians is on par or worse than what Isis is doing in Syria. They blew up schools (filled with Russian Ukrainians) and  markets in false flag attacks. Shot down a civilian airliner, Raped and killed local civilians, executed POWs by knife, and burned wounded soldiers with gasoline. They gassed Chechen civilians in Grozny 1990's. Don't kid yourself Russians can be as nasty as anyone. Not to say that Turkey is all that great but atleast they don't have designs on destroying America and Europe. Their clearly is not a lot of good in this situation.

I'm sure all the good folks Merkel has been letting in will show their appreciation for Germany's efforts.

To add,

Who do you think trained all the terrorist back in the 60, 70s, and 80s?

Terrorism and the Soviet Union

They spread that shit, running class after class in places like Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, Libya, in Syria. Terrorist groups from all over the world were trained in tactics, operational planning and security, bomb making, by First Chief Directorate KGB trainers, who expected the terrorists to use those newly trained skills to weaken western civilization and any US allies. The Soviet Union didn't just train them, they funded then too.

Sins of the father...

Imagine that.

And the US government doesn't train and finance terrorists??? GTFOH!!!

Those are freedom fighters!

hate to be the prick here but i don't give two shits what Russia does in the Ukraine. It certainly leads to the idea that they cant be trusted and should not be considered an ally but i don't see them actively trying to send suicide squads to US soil.

Turkey is actively defending and cooperating with groups who literally want to cut your head off. People who cant be negotiated with, cant be bargained with, cant be reasoned with. They can be deaded.  Once those shit bags are dealt with and you want to get back to a good old cat and mouse game with the rooskies then i got your back. I think its foolish but i got ya.. At that point I don't give  a fuck if they turn off the pipe and all of europe freezes to death and all of Russia starves in return. Not my fucking problem really. I honestly don't care one way or the other. Its not my problem.

Dudes willing to strap some shit to their chest and detonate them selves on a plane or in a starbucks or pick up a rifle and shoot up a cafe full of non combatant and are more than happy to die for their cause scare the fuck out of me and they come first in my list of scary people that need to be wiped off the planet post haste before they can spread any further than they already have.

its a priorities thing. As long as the Russians are targeting those guys then  i support them. Hell, at this point the Norks could roll into Syria and i would be screaming Go Kim!!!!   I wish we and our allies had brought the pain to those Mfers but that shit didnt happen now did it. So you got to back somebody and thats somebody whos actually wants to do something even if they historically don't have our interest in mind. its a fucked up situation.

The Soviets did all that but the bulk of Islamic terrorism's tactics and techniques don't draw a heritage from soviet support if various Arab radical groups in the 70s and 80s, but from the CIA and the ISI to a certain extent and the Sunni Jihadi circuit school primarily (e.g., Algeria, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq).  Sunni  terrorist tactics have gotten more and more refined since the GIA kicked off their terror campaign in 1992.

 

Russian hardware has been over rated since Sputnik. All through the cold war we thought they were the boogie man...mig 25, typhoon, T72, ss..whatever.  all were feared until we got our hands on one, tore it down and discovred that slav shit was still slav shit.

For everyone that thinks Putin is ever...and I mean fucking EVER going to launch nukes at the west...wake up.  He knows the outcome, and every russian leader since Stalin has known the outcome. Same reason we'll never use them.  


Smoking a BN of s400 in Syria ain't gonna cause Putin to do shit. He's an asshole...but he isn't stupid.  He's far better off puffing his chest out while the apologizer in chief is around rather than starting some real drama and getting his 2nd rate military's shit pushed in on the national stage.


S400 may be formidable but it's no show stopper for anyone with the will to beat it.

And the US is a free economy LOL?. You make me laugh. Bailouts, bailouts, more bailouts, regulations, more regulations, taxes, more taxes, even more taxes, fees, more fees, mandatory minimum wage, etc...... I'm not sure what fantasy world you are living in.... But yes we do have a freer economy than alot of other countries in the world.

Not to the extent that the Soviet Union did. We didn't even really have a chance until Russia got involved in Afghanistan. And then we did our best to make it as bloody for them as possible. Payback is a medevac.

Most of the Sunni school of terrorism was learned from the Palestinian groups, which were trained by the KGB. From among these nationalisic and leftist groups came the more pious cadre who went on to train others within the Muslim Brotherhood. The techniques taught now to terrorists are not much different from those used back in the 1970s, technology changed a bit but the general tactics that the Soviets taught wholesale to every asshole in the world, managed to spread. Others picked up the methods, evolved them, and moved forward. But the Russians are waist deep in a sea of blood that they helped flow. If they had not trained and funded every militant group in the world, there wouldn't be much terrorism today.

We didn't attempt to sabotage any leftist governments in central in south america either. The CIA never collaborated with drug lords and vicious death squads or help install dictators who murdered their own people by the thousands. We kept our hands clean in the Cold War. The evil KGB though, those bastards were horrible.

It is kinda odd that those terrorists that the KGB was so close with would kidnap their diplomats and force the KGB to mail hands and heads to their leaders. I guess they did this as part of their training. Because they certainly trained every terrorist group ever.

Like I said GTFOH. You need to do a bit more reading my friend....

I was actually alive during Iran-Contra, I don't need to do any more reading.

1. Afghanistan

In the 1980s, the U.S. worked with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to overthrow Afghanistan's socialist government. It funded, trained and armed forces led by conservative tribal leaders whose power was threatened by their country's progress on education, women's rights and land reform. After Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew Soviet forces in 1989, these U.S.-backed warlords tore the country apart and boosted opium production to an unprecedented level of 2,000 to 3,400 tons per year.  The Taliban government cut opium production by 95% in two years between 1999 and 2001, but the U.S. invasion in 2001 restored the warlords and drug lords to power. Afghanistan now ranks 175th out of 177 countries in the world for corruption, 175th out of 186 in human development, and since 2004, it has produced an unprecedented 5,300 tons of opium per year.  President Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was well known as a CIA-backed drug lord. After a major U.S. offensive in Kandahar province in 2011, Colonel Abdul Razziq was appointed provincial police chief, boosting a heroin smuggling operation that already earned him $60 million per year in one of the poorest countries in the world.

2. Albania

Between 1949 and 1953, the U.S. and U.K. set out to overthrow the government of Albania, the smallest and most vulnerable communist country in Eastern Europe.  Exiles were recruited and trained to return to Albania to stir up dissent and plan an armed uprising. Many of the exiles involved in the plan were former collaborators with the Italian and German occupation during World War II. They included former Interior Minister Xhafer Deva, who oversaw the deportations of "Jews, Communists, partisans and suspicious persons" (as described in a Nazi document) to Auschwitz. Declassified U.S. documents have since revealed that Deva was one of 743 fascist war criminals recruited by the U.S. after the war.

3. Argentina

U.S. documents declassified in 2003 detail conversations between U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Argentinian Foreign Minister Admiral Guzzetti in October 1976, soon after the military junta seized power in Argentina. Kissinger explicitly approved the junta's "dirty war," in which it eventually killed up to 30,000, most of them young people, and stole 400 children from the families of their murdered parents. Kissinger told Guzzetti, "Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed... the quicker you succeed the better." The U.S. Ambassador in Buenos Aires reported that Guzzetti "returned in a state of jubilation, convinced that there is no real problem with the US government over that issue."  ("Daniel Gandolfo," "Presente!")

4. Brazil

In 1964, General Castelo Branco led a coup that sparked 20 years of brutal military dictatorship. U.S. military attache Vernon Walters, later Deputy CIA Director and UN Ambassador, knew Castelo Branco well from World War II in Italy.  As a clandestine CIA officer, Walters' records from Brazil have never been declassified, but the CIA provided all the support needed to ensure the success of the coup, including funding for opposition labor and student groups in street protests, as in Ukraine and Venezuela today.  A U.S. Marine amphibious force on standby to land in Sao Paolo was not needed. Like other victims of U.S.-backed coups in Latin America, the elected President Joao Goulart was a wealthy landowner, not a communist, but his efforts to remain neutral in the Cold War were as unacceptable to Washington as President Yanukovich's refusal to hand the Ukraine over to the west 50 years later.

5. Cambodia

When President Nixon ordered the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia in 1969, American pilots were ordered to falsify their logs to conceal their crimes. They killed at least half a million Cambodians, dropping more bombs than on Germany and Japan combined in World War II. As the Khmer Rouge gained strength in 1973, the CIA reported that its "propaganda has been most effective among refugees subjected to B-52 strikes." After the Khmer Rouge killed at least 2 million of its own people and was finally driven out by the Vietnamese army in 1979, the U.S. Kampuchea Emergency Group, based in the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, set out to feed and supply them as the "resistance" to the new Vietnamese-backed Cambodian government. Under U.S. pressure, the World Food Program provided $12 million to feed 20,000 to 40,000 Khmer Rouge soldiers. For at least another decade, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency provided the Khmer Rouge with satellite intelligence, while U.S. and British special forces trained them to lay millions of land mines across Western Cambodia which still kill or maim hundreds of people every year.

6. Chile


When Salvador Allende became President in 1970, President Nixon promised to"make the economy scream" in Chile. The U.S., Chile's largest trading partner, cut off trade to cause shortages and economic chaos. The CIA and State Department had conducted sophisticated propaganda operations in Chile for a decade, funding conservative politicians, parties, unions, student groups and all forms of media, while expanding ties with the military. After General Pinochet seized power, the CIA kept Chilean officials on its payroll and worked closely with Chile's DINA intelligence agency as the military government killed thousands of people and jailed and tortured tens of thousands more. Meanwhile, the "Chicago Boys," over 100 Chilean students sent by a State Department program to study under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, launched a radical program of privatization, deregulation and neoliberal policies that kept the economy screaming for most Chileans throughout Pinochet's 16-year military dictatorship.            

7. China

By the end of 1945, 100,000 U.S. troops were fighting alongside Chinese Kuomintang (and Japanese) forces in Communist-held areas of northern China. Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang may have been the most corrupt of all U.S. allies. A steady stream of U.S. advisers in China warned that U.S. aid was being stolen by Chiang and his cronies, some of it even sold to the Japanese, but the U.S. commitment to Chiang continued throughout the war, his defeat by the Communists and his rule of Taiwan. Secretary of State Dulles' brinksmanship on behalf of Chiang twice led the U.S. to the brink of nuclear war with China on his behalf in 1955 and 1958 over Matsu and Qemoy, two small islands off the coast of China.

8. Colombia

When U.S. special forces and the Drug Enforcement Administration aided Colombian forces to track down and kill drug lord Pablo Escobar, they worked with a vigilante group called Los Pepes. In 1997, Diego Murillo-Bejarano and other Los Pepes' leaders co-founded the AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) which was responsible for 75% of violent civilian deaths in Colombia over the next 10 years.

9. Cuba

The United States supported the Batista dictatorship as it created the repressive conditions that led to the Cuban Revolution, killing up to 20,000 of its own people. Former U.S. Ambassador Earl Smith testified to Congress that, "the U.S. was so overwhelmingly influential in Cuba that the American Ambassador was the second most important man, sometimes even more important than the Cuban president." After the revolution, the CIA launched a long campaign of terrorism against Cuba, training Cuban exiles in Florida, Central America and the Dominican Republic to commit assassinations and sabotage in Cuba.  CIA-backed operations against Cuba included the attempted invasion at the Bay of Pigs, in which 100 Cuban exiles and four Americans were killed; several attempted assassinations of Fidel Castro and successful assassinations of other officials; several bombing raids in 1960 (three Americans killed and two captured) and terrorist bombings targeting tourists as recently as 1997; the apparent bombing of a French ship in Havana harbor (at least 75 killed); a biological swine flu attack that killed half a million pigs; and the terrorist bombing of a Cuban airliner (78 killed) planned by Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, who remain free in America despite the U.S. pretense of waging a war against terrorism. Bosch was granted a presidential pardon by the first President Bush.

10. El Salvador

The civil war that swept El Salvador in the 1980s was a popular uprising against a government that ruled with the utmost brutality.  At least 70,000 people were killed and thousands more were disappeared. The UN Truth Commission set up after the war found that 95% of the dead were killed by government forces and death squads, and only 5% by FLMN guerrillas. The government forces responsible for this one-sided slaughter were almost entirely established, trained, armed and supervised by the CIA, U.S. special forces and the U.S. School of the Americas. The UN Truth Commission found that the units guilty of the worst atrocities, like the Atlacatl Battalion which conducted the infamous El Mozote massacre, were precisely the ones most closely supervised by American advisers. The American role in this campaign of state terrorism is now hailed by senior U.S. military officers as a model for "counter-insurgency" in Colombia and elsewhere as the U.S. war on terror spreads its violence and chaos across the world.

11. France


In France, Italy, Greece, Indochina, Indonesia, Korea and the Philippines at the end of World War II, advancing allied forces found that communist resistance forces had gained effective control of large areas or even entire countries as German and Japanese forces withdrew or surrendered.  In Marseille, the CGT communist trade union controlled the docks that were critical to trade with the U.S. and the Marshall plan. The OSS had worked with the U.S.-Sicilian mafia and Corsican gangsters during the war. So after the OSS merged into the new CIA after the war, it used its contacts to restore Corsican gangsters to power in Marseille, to break dock strikes and CGT control of the docks. It protected the Corsicans as they set up heroin labs and began shipping heroin to New York, where the American-Sicilian mafia also flourished under CIA protection. Ironically, supply disruptions due to the war and the Chinese Revolution had reduced the number of heroin addicts in the U.S. to 20,000 by 1945 and heroin addiction could have been virtually eliminated, but the CIA's infamous French Connection instead brought a new wave of heroin addiction, organized crime and drug-related violence to New York and other American cities.

12. Ghana

There seem to be no inspiring national leaders in Africa these days. But that may be America's fault. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a rising star in Ghana: Kwame Nkrumah. He was Prime Minister under British rule from 1952 to 1960, when Ghana became independent and he became president. He was a socialist, a pan-African and an anti-imperialist, and, in 1965, he wrote a book called Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah was overthrown in a CIA coup in 1966. The CIA denied involvement at the time, but the British press later reported that 40 CIA officers operated out of the U.S. Embassy "distributing largesse among President Nkrumah's secret adversaries," and that their work "was fully rewarded." Former CIA officer John Stockwell revealed more about the CIA's decisive role in the coup in his book In Search of Enemies.

13. Greece

When British forces landed in Greece in October 1944, they found the country under the effective control of ELAS-EAM, the leftist partisan group formed by the Greek Communist Party in 1941 after the Italian and German invasion. ELAS-EAM welcomed the British forces, but the British refused any accommodation with them and installed a government that included royalists and Nazi collaborators. When ELAS-EAM held a huge demonstration in Athens, police opened fire and killed 28 people. The British recruited members of the Nazi-trained Security Battalions to hunt down and arrest ELAS members, who once again took up arms as a resistance movement.  In 1947, with a civil war raging, the bankrupt British asked the U.S. to take over their role in occupied Greece. The U.S. role in supporting an incompetent fascist government in Greece was enshrined in the "Truman Doctrine," seen by many historians as the beginning of the Cold War. ELAS-EAM fighters laid down their arms in 1949 after Yugoslavia withdrew its support, and 100,000 were either executed, exiled or jailed. The liberal Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup in 1967, leading to seven more years of military rule. His son Andreas was elected as Greece's first "socialist" president in 1981, but many ELAS-EAM members jailed in the 1940s were never freed and died in prison.

14. Guatemala

After its first operation to overthrow a foreign government in Iran in 1953, the CIA launched a more elaborate operation to remove the elected liberal government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. The CIA recruited and trained a small army of mercenaries under Guatemalan exile Castillo Armas to invade Guatemala, with 30 unmarked U.S. planes providing air support. U.S. Ambassador Peurifoy prepared a list of Guatemalans to be executed, and Armas was installed as president. The reign of terror that followed led to 40 years of civil war, in which at least 200,000 were killed, most of them indigenous people. The climax of the war was the campaign of genocide in Ixil by President Rios Montt, for which he was sentenced to life in prison in 2013, until Guatemala's Supreme Court rescued him on a technicality. A new trial is scheduled for 2015. Declassified CIA documents reveal that the Reagan administration was well aware of the indiscriminate and genocidal nature of Guatemalan military operations when it approved new military aid in 1981, including military vehicles, spare parts for helicopters and U.S. military advisers. The CIA documents detail the massacre and destruction of entire villages, and conclude, "The well documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor) has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike."

15. Haiti

Almost 200 years after the slave rebellion that created the nation of Haiti and defeated Napoleon's armies, the long-suffering people of Haiti finally elected a truly democratic government led by Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991. But President Aristide was overthrown in a U.S.-backed military coup after eight months in office, and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recruited a paramilitary force called FRAPH to target and destroy Aristide's Lavalas movement in Haiti. The CIA put FRAPH's leader Emmanuel "Toto" Constant on its payroll and shipped in weapons from Florida. When President Clinton sent a U.S. occupation force to restore Aristide to office in 1994, FRAPH members detained by U.S. forces were freed on orders from Washington, and the CIA maintained FRAPH as a criminal gang to undermine Aristide and Lavalas. After Aristide was elected president a second time in 2000, a force of 200 U.S. special forces trained 600 former FRAPH members and others in the Dominican Republic to prepare for a second coup. In 2004, they launched a campaign of violence to destabilize Haiti, which provided the pretext for U.S. forces to land in Haiti and remove Aristide from office.

16. Honduras


The 2009 coup in Honduras has led to severe repression and death squad murders of political opponents, union organizers and journalists. At the time of the coup, U.S. officials denied any role in the coup and used semantics to avoid cutting off U.S. military aid as required under U.S. law. But two Wikileaks cables revealed that the U.S. Embassy was the main power broker in managing the aftermath of the coup and forming a government that is now repressing and murdering its people.

17. Indonesia

In 1965, General Suharto seized effective power from President Sukarno on the pretext of combatting a failed coup and unleashed an orgy of mass murderthat killed at least half a million people. U.S. diplomats later admitted providing lists of 5,000 Communist Party members to be killed. Political officer Robert Martens said, "It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment."

18. Iran

Iran may be the most instructive case of a CIA coup that caused endless long-term problems for the United States. In 1953, the CIA and the U.K.'s MI6 overthrew the popular, elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh. Iran had nationalized its oil industry by a unanimous vote of parliament, ending a BP monopoly that only paid Iran a 16% royalty on its oil. For two years, Iran resisted a British naval blockade and international economic sanctions. After President Eisenhower took office in 1953, the CIA agreed to a British request to intervene. After the initial coup failed and the Shah and his family fled to Italy, the CIA payed millions of dollars to bribe military officers and pay gangsters to unleash violence in the streets of Tehran. Mossadegh was finally removed and the Shah returned to rule as a brutal Western puppet until the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

19. Israel

Just as the U.S. uses its economic and military power, its sophisticated propaganda system and its position as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council to violate international law with impunity, it also uses the same tools to shield its ally Israel from accountability for international crimes.  Since 1966, the U.S. has used its Security Council veto 83 times, more than the other four Permanent Members combined, and 42 of those vetoes have been on resolutions related to Israel and/or Palestine. Just last week, Amnesty International published a report that, "Israeli forces have displayed a callous disregard for human life by killing dozens of Palestinian civilians, including children, in the occupied West Bank over the past three years with near total impunity." Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories condemned the 2008 assault on Gaza as a "massive violation of international law," adding that nations like the U.S. "that have supplied weapons and supported the siege are complicit in the crimes." The Leahy Lawrequires the U.S. to cut off military aid to forces that violate human rights, but it has never been enforced against Israel. Israel continues to build settlements in occupied territory in violation of the 4th Geneva Convention, making it harder to comply with Security Council resolutions that require it to withdraw from occupied territory. But Israel remains beyond the rule of law, shielded from accountability by its powerful patron, the United States.    

20. Iraq

In 1958, after the British-backed monarchy was overthrown by General Abdul Qasim, the CIA hired a 22-year-old Iraqi named Saddam Hussein to assassinate the new president. Hussein and his gang botched the job and he fled to Lebanon, wounded in the leg by one of his companions. The CIA rented him an apartment in Beirut and then moved him to Cairo, where he was paid as an agent of Egyptian intelligence and was a frequent visitor at the U.S. Embassy. Qasim was killed in a CIA-backed Baathist coup in 1963, and as in Guatemala and Indonesia, the CIA gave the new government a list of at least 4,000 communists to be killed. But, once in power, the Baathist revolutionary government was no Western puppet, and it nationalized Iraq's oil industry, adopted an Arab nationalist foreign policy and built the best education and health systems in the Arab world. In 1979, Saddam Hussein became president, conducted purges of political opponents and launched a disastrous war against Iran. The U.S. DIA provided satellite intelligence to target chemical weapons that the West helped him to produce, and Donald Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials welcomed him as an ally against Iran. Only after Iraq invaded Kuwait and Hussein became more useful as an enemy did U.S. propaganda brand him as "a new Hitler." After the U.S. invaded Iraq on false pretenses in 2003, the CIA recruited 27 brigades of "Special Police," merging the most brutal of Saddam Hussein's security forces with the Iranian-trained Badr militia to form death squads that murdered tens of thousands of mostly Sunni Arab men and boys in Baghdad and elsewhere in a reign of terror that continues to this day.

21. Korea

When U.S. forces arrived in Korea in 1945, they were greeted by officials of the Korean People's Republic (KPR), formed by resistance groups which had disarmed surrendering Japanese forces and begun to establish law and order throughout Korea. General Hodge had them thrown out of his office and placed the southern half of Korea under U.S. military occupation. By contrast, Russian forces in the North recognized the KPR, leading to the long-term division of Korea. The U.S. flew in Syngman Rhee,a conservative Korean exile, and installed him as President of South Korea in 1948. Rhee became a dictator on an anti-communist crusade, arresting and torturing suspected communists, brutally putting down rebellions, killing 100,000 people and vowing to take over North Korea. He was at least partly responsible for the outbreak of the Korean War and for the allied decision to invade North Korea once South Korea had been recaptured. He was finally forced to resign by mass student protests in 1960.

22. Laos

The CIA began providing air support to French forces in Laos in 1950, and remained involved there for 25 years. The CIA engineered at least three coups between 1958 and 1960 to keep the growing leftist Pathet Lao out of government. It worked with right-wing Laotian drug lords like General Phoumi Nosavan, transporting opium between Burma, Laos and Vietnam and protecting his monopoly on the opium trade in Laos. In 1962, the CIA recruited a clandestine mercenary army of 30,000 veterans of previous guerrilla wars from Thailand, Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines to fight the Pathet Lao. As large numbers of American GIs in Vietnam got hooked on heroin, the CIA's Air America transported opium from Hmong territory in the Plain of Jars to General Vang Pao's heroin labs in Long Tieng and Vientiane for shipment to Vietnam. When the CIA failed to defeat the Pathet Lao, the U.S. bombed Laos almost as heavily as Cambodia, with 2 million tons of bombs.

23. Libya

NATO's war on Libya epitomized President Obama's "disguised, quiet, media-free" approach to war. NATO's bombing campaign was fraudulently justified to the UN Security Council as an effort to protect civilians, and the instrumental role of Western and other foreign special forces on the ground was well-disguised, even when Qatari special forces (including ex-ISI Pakistani mercenaries) led the final assault on the Bab Al-Aziziya HQ in Tripoli. NATO conducted 7,700 air strikes, 30,000 -100,000 people were killed, loyalist towns were bombed to rubble and ethnically cleansed, and the country is in chaos as Western-trained and -armed Islamist militias seize territory and oil facilities and vie for power. The Misrata militia, trained and armed by Western special forces, is one of the most violent and powerful. As I write this, protesters have just stormed the Congress building in Tripoli for the fourth or fifth time in recent months, and two elected Representatives have been shot and wounded as they fled.        

24. Mexico

The death toll in Mexico's drug wars recently passed 100,000. The most violent of the drug cartels is Los Zetas.  U.S. officials call the Zetas "the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and dangerous drug cartel operating in Mexico." The Zetas cartel was formed by Mexican security forces trained by U.S. special forces at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, and at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

25. Myanmar

After the Chinese Revolution, Kuomintang generals moved into northern Burma and became powerful drug lords, with Thai military protection, financing from Taiwan and air transport and logistical support from the CIA. Burma's opium production grew from 18 tons in 1958 to 600 tons in 1970. The CIA maintained these forces as a bulwark against communist China but they transformed the "golden triangle" into the world's largest opium producer. Most of the opium was shipped by mule trains into Thailand where other CIA allies shipped it to heroin labs in Hong Kong and Malaysia. The trade shifted around 1970 as CIA partner General Vang Pao set up new labs in Laos to provide heroin to GIs in Vietnam.  

26. Nicaragua

Anastasio Somosa ruled Nicaragua as his personal fiefdom for 43 years with unconditional U.S. support, as his National Guard committed every crime imaginable from massacres and torture to extortion and rape with complete impunity. After he was finally overthrown by the Sandinista Revolution in 1979, the CIA recruited, trained and supported "contra" mercenaries to invade Nicaragua and conduct terrorism to destabilize the country. In 1986, the International Court of Justice found the United States guilty of aggression against Nicaragua for deploying the contras and mining Nicaraguan ports. The court ordered the U.S. to cease its aggression and pay war reparations to Nicaragua, but they have never been paid. The U.S. response was to declare that it would no longer recognize the binding jurisdiction of the ICJ, effectively setting itself beyond the rule of international law.

27.Pakistan; 28.Saudi Arabia; 29. Turkey

After reading my last AlterNet piece on the failed war on terror, former CIA and State Department terrorism expert Larry Johnson told me, "The main problem with respect to assessing the terrorist threat is to accurately define the state sponsorship. The biggest culprits today, in contrast to 20 years ago, are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Iran, despite the right-wing/neocon ravings, is not that active in encouraging and/or facilitating terrorism." In the past 12 years, U.S. military aid to Pakistan has totaled $18.6 billion. The U.S. has just negotiated the largest arms deal in history with Saudi Arabia. And Turkey is a long-standing member of NATO. All three major state sponsors of terrorism in the world today are U.S. allies.        

30. Panama

U.S. drug enforcement officials wanted to arrest Manuel Noriega in 1971, when he was the chief of military intelligence in Panama. They had enough evidence to convict him of drug trafficking, but he was also a long-time agent and informer for the CIA, so like other drug-dealing CIA agents from Marseille to Macao, he was untouchable. He was temporarily cut loose during the Carter administration but otherwise kept collecting at least $100,000 per year from the U.S. Treasury. As he rose to be the de facto ruler of Panama, he became even more valuable to the CIA, reporting on meetings with Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and supporting U.S. covert wars in Central America. Noriega probably quit drug trafficking in about 1985, well before the U.S. indicted him for it in 1988. The indictment was a pretext for the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, whose main purpose was to give the U.S. greater control over Panama, at the expense of at least 2,000 lives.

31. The Philippines

Since the U.S. launched its so-called war on terror in 2001, a task force of 500 US JSOC forces has conducted covert operations in the southern Philippines. Now, under Obama's "pivot to Asia," U.S. military aid to the Philippines is increasing, from $12 million in 2011 to $50 million this year. But Filippino human rights activists report that the increased aid coincides with increased military death squad operations against civilians. The past three years have seen at least 158 people killed by death squads.

32. Syria

When President Obama approved flying weapons and militiamen from Libya to the "Free Syrian Army" base in Turkey in unmarked NATO planes in late 2011, he was calculating that the U.S. and its allies could replicate the "successful" overthrow of the Libyan government. Everyone involved understood that Syria would be a longer and bloodier conflict, but they gambled that the end result would be the same, even though 55% of Syrians told pollsters they still supported Assad. A few months later, Western leaders undermined Kofi Annan's peace plan with their "Plan B," "Friends of Syria." This was not an alternative peace plan, but a commitment to escalation, offering guaranteed support, money and weapons to the jihadis in Syria to make sure they ignored the Annan peace plan and kept fighting. That move sealed the fate of millions of Syrians. Over the past two years Qatar has spent $3 billion and flown in planeloads of weapons, Saudi Arabia has shipped weapons from Croatia, and Western and Arab royalist special forces have trained thousands of increasingly radicalized fundamentalist jihadis, now allied with al-Qaeda. The Geneva II talks were a half-hearted effort to revive the 2012 Annan peace plan, but Western insistence that a "political transition" means the immediate resignation of Assad reveals that Western leaders still value regime change more than peace. To paraphrase Phyllis Bennis, the U.S. and its allies are still willing to fight to the last Syrian.

33. Uruguay

The foreign officials the U.S. has worked with include many who have benefited from their cooperation in American crimes around the world. But in Uruguay in 1970, when Police Chief Alejandro Otero objected to Americans training his officers in the art of torture, he was demoted. The U.S. official he complained to was Dan Mitrione, who worked for the U.S. Office of Public Safety, a division of the US Agency for International Development. Mitrione's training sessions reportedly included torturing homeless people to death with electric shocks to teach his students how far they could go.

34. Yugoslavia

The NATO aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999 was a flagrant crime of aggression in violation of Article 2.4 of the UN Charter. When British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Secretary of State Albright that the U.K. was having "difficulties with its lawyers" over the planned attack, she told him the U.K. should "get new lawyers," according to her deputy James Rubin. NATO's proxy ground force in its aggression against Yugoslavia was the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), led by Hashim Thaci. A 2010 report by the Council of Europe and a book by Carla Del Ponte, the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, support long-standing allegations that at the time of the NATO invasion, Thaci ran a criminal organization called the Drenica group which sent more than 400 captured Serbs to Albania to be killed so that their organs could be extracted and sold for transplant. Hashim Thaci is now the Prime Minister of the NATO protectorate of Kosovo.

35. Zaire

Patrice Lumumba, the president of the pan-Africanist Mouvement National Congolais, took part in the Congo's struggle for independence and became the Congo's first elected Prime Minister in 1960. He was deposed in a CIA-backed coup led by Joseph-Desire Mobutu, his Army Chief of Staff. Mobutu handed Lumumba over to the Belgian-backed separatists and Belgian mercenaries he had been fighting in Katanga province, and he was shot by a firing squad led by a Belgian mercenary. Mobutu abolished elections and appointed himself president in 1965, and ruled as a dictator for 30 years. He killed political opponents in public hangings, had others tortured to death, and eventually embezzled at least $5 billion while Zaire, as he renamed it, remained one of the poorest countries in the world. But U.S. support for Mobutu continued. Even as President Carter publicly distanced himself, Zaire continued to receive 50% of all U.S. military aid to sub-Saharan Africa. When Congress voted to cut off military aid, Carter and U.S. business interests worked to restore it. Only in the 1990s did U.S. support start to waver, until Mobutu was deposed by Laurent Kabila in 1997 and died soon afterward.

LOL

And if they do?

Russian Mi-24's providing CAS for Syrian Army against Isis.

Missile cruiser Moskva arrived to the shore zone of Latakia for air defence of the region.

 

Well that post was a real buzzkill.  What's it got to do with anti aircraft rockets in Syria again?


Eta: the really long bullet list of how bad of people we are...


 

Yet at the same time, it can very effectievly be argued that more good has come to the world while America has been the dominate force than during any other period ever before. Robert Kagan presents a very good--and honest, meaning it's not just a chest pounding "look how great we are"--narrative on this in his book The World America Made. It's a fairly short read, and well worth it.

It's a fucked up world, and to be a global leader, we deal in fucked up situations with fucked up people. But by and large, it's created prosperity, peace, and individual liberty.

All along Turkey has wanted to make Syria a West vs. Russia thing instead of West vs. Jihadist Goatfucker Terrorists thing. After reading this thread, it seems like it worked.
I don't know about you guys, but I don't worry about Russians shooting up kids at the mall, or running airplanes into skyscrapers, or kidnapping and beheading me. Some of you people are so stuck in the 80's its pathetic, meanwhile Durka Durka is drawing up plans to murder your family.
 

FBHO needs to impeached if this is true. Major fuckup and more evidence "we" don't want ISIS defeated.

Hell, impeach him even if it isn't.

Not "we". Our government.

 
To the rest of the world there's no difference

"We" are our government.

Holy plagiarism Batman. Too bad you didn't provide the link to that masterpiece of unbiased info.

Written by this guy

"Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of "Blood On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq." Davies also wrote the chapter on "Obama At War" for the book, "Grading the 44th President: A Report Card on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader." subscribe to Nicolas J.S. Davies's feed

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Why the Showdown with Islamic Extremists Is the War the Pentagon Was Hoping For
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Since 9-11 America's Insane Foreign Policy -- Continued Under Obama -- Has Killed a Million and Created ISIS
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Syria: Where the Obama Doctrine of Covert War Spectacularly Backfired
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How the West Fueled the Ever-Growing Carnage in Syria
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10 Years After the Invasion: America Destroyed Iraq But Our War Crimes Remain Unacknowledged and Unpunished
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Bomber in Chief: 20,000 Airstrikes in the President's First Term Cause Death and Destruction From Iraq to Somalia
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The Inevitable Consequences of Sending Special Forces on Missions in 120 Different Countries-- Endless Conflict Around the World and Blowback on U.S. Soil
Posted on: Sep 13, 2012, Source: AlterNet"

In your case i'd say read less.

GTFOH!!! Just because I copied and pasted it makes it less true? Do some research outside of that site about those topics and you will come up with the same info bud.

There's something awesome about seeing Hinds out there still kicking ass. They're just...evil. In a good way.

Also like how the Russian cram 50 of every weapon imaginable on each ship they produce. Nothing is ever really specialized. Just make it bigger and put more and more stuff on it.