Justification of U.S. military intervention in other countries

Thesis Statement: The military intervention of the U.S. in other countries is justified in light of the fact that the intervention is essentially an act of self-defense.

Introducion

It is only logical that a country should seek out opportunities to take a proactive stance towards possible threats towards its sovereignty. The US has always sought to ensure that no internal or external powers are allowed to achieve a position from where they can cause harm to US interests and to the United States as a nation. As a result, the US has often chosen to take the offensive against potential threats and eliminate them before they can acquire the footing that they need to draw first blood. In the pursuit of this philosophy, the US has often engaged in military interventions around the world.

This is a strategy that has been frequently criticized and is a subject of intense debate. This is because of the fact that some schools of thought consider it incorrect for the US to interfere in the balance of other countries. This paper will attempt to present a discussion on the military interventions that the US has engaged in during the course of history. In addition, the discussion will seek to analyze each military intervention to determine whether the military intervention was justified or not. The discussion will seek to critically evaluate the nature of the US military intervention in the perspective of the rationale behind the military intervention. In this regard, the discussion will provide a post-Second World War perspective so that a more up to-date picture can be drawn.

Discussion

Since the September 11 attacks on the United States, most people in the world agree that the perpetrators need to be brought to justice, without killing many thousands of civilians in the process. But unfortunately, the U.S. military has always accepted massive civilian deaths as part of the cost of war. The military is now poised to kill thousands of foreign civilians, in order to prove that killing U.S. civilians is wrong.

The media has told us repeatedly that some Middle Easterners hate the U.S. only because of our freedom and prosperity. Missing from this explanation is the historical context of the U.S. role in the Middle East, and for that matter in the rest of the world (Khlaifat & Bashayreh). This basic primer is an attempt to brief readers who have not closely followed the history of U.S. foreign or military affairs, and are perhaps unaware of the background of U.S. military interventions abroad, but are concerned about the direction of our country toward a new war in the name of freedom and protecting civilians.

The United States military has been intervening in other countries for a long time. In 1898, it seized the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico from Spain and in 1917-18 became embroiled in World War I in Europe. In the first half of the 20th century it repeatedly sent Marines to protectorates such as Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, Haiti, and ...