Miguel Syjuco Quotes

In general, Americans are not very good at nation-building and not very good colonialists.

The U.S. has intervened more often in more countries farther from its own shores than has any power in modern history.

All the sparrows on the rooftops are crying about the fact that the most imperialist nation that is supporting the colonial regime in the colonies is the United States of America.

And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals.

American failures in Vietnam and Iraq suggest that it's not really possible to create and sustain a proxy government in a country far from our own borders.

The mission of the United States [to the Philippine Islands] is one of benevolent assimilation, submitting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.

A U.S. invasion of Iraq could turn the whole region into a cauldron, and thus destroy the war on terrorism. A military campaign very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation.

The American people are sick of our failed regime change wars.

I profoundly do not believe that the United States could make things better in Syria by being there. And we have an evidentiary record of what happens when we're there - nearly a decade in Iraq.

I'd be willing to bet that any incursion throughout history in which the invading country has proclaimed it is bringing benefits to the conquered is based on a lie.

But, if you believe we should go around the world overturning regimes to make little United States, I don't agree with that, because I don't think we're capable of doing that.

Reviewing the record of American intervention in Indochina in the Pentagon Papers, one cannot fail to be struck by the continuity of basic assumptions from one administration to the next. Never has there been the slightest deviation from the principle that a noncommunist regime must be imposed and defended, regardless of popular sentiment.

'Honor in the Dust' is less about the freedom of the Philippines than the soul of the United States.

The United States is not for democracy in Iraq, it's for setting up a puppet government.

Most governments in the United States in a hundred years have not respected the peoples of Latin America. They have sponsored coup d'etats, assassinations.

American imperialism is often traced to the takeover of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii in 1898.

Vietnam was a lie but at least there was a political agenda. It was the domino theory. Iraq is about nothing but George Bush's ego laced with imperialist ambitions. And it was helped by your government.

It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.

People are constantly applying double standards. Take the United States, for example. Washington wants the whole world to admire the country for its democracy. Then the government sends out its army, in the name of this democracy, and leaves behind the kind of chaos we see in Iraq.

And the fact that Haiti was occupied for 19 years by the United States, from 1915 to 1934.

People make mistakes. And one of the mistakes that the United States consistently made was that it could intervene and somehow adjust people's governments, especially in the Middle East.

You can’t undo a thousand years of history by sending military troops into a country.

My husband and brother—in—law had been treacherously killed with either the official or unofficial blessing of the American government… No one can seriously believe in the disclaimer that the Americans have nothing to do with the present situation in Vietnam.

We don't have the temperament to be an occupying power.

We should not act as if we were an imperialist power, willy-nilly moving into capitals in that part of the world, taking down governments.