Foreign Occupation Quotes
Emerson was right on both points. It was the first U. S. foreign policy effort where invading and conquering a country was much easier than dealing with it afterward.
Mobutu with Amerucan CIA and French assistance deposed Lumumba, murdered him, and seized power.
When the American troops invaded Okinawa, the individual Japanese soldiers and civilians would not surrender, even when completely surrounded and out numbered. Surrender was culturally dishonorable and the Japanese had been told by their leadership that if they did surrender the Americans would kill them anyway. Almost all the Japanese died and the United States forces had an astoundingly high casualty rate—37%. Truman was fearful that there might be hundreds of thousands American casualties in the subduing of the Japanese mainland. The atomic bomb solved that problem.
This threat was shocking to coalition forces and NATO country citizens whose own soldiers were dying to keep the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan again. There were some errors made in calling in airstrikes in the Afghanistan War and collateral civilian casualties occurred. However it was often very difficult to determine if a target held civilians or insurgent Taliban. Very often Taliban sympathizers would invite Taliban into their homes to ambush coalition forces. However, Taliban would also force their way into a home and threaten to kill the family if they did not cooperate. Then they attacked from that home or several at the same time. From the point of view of the coalition forces being shot at, the view was the same. An airstrike would take out the house and no one would ever really know which of those scenarios (or others) actually produced the situation. Ironically, many more Afghanis were killed by the Afghani Taliban than by NATO forces in what was a brutal civil war. See {634912} for the American Ambassador’s reply to Karzai whose administration was totally corrupt and incompetent, making the coalition’s job almost impossible.
The government of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai was totally corrupt and preyed on the Afghan people. See {629318}. The United States had committed to the turnover at the end of 2013 the responsibility for maintaining the security of Afghanistan to the Afghan military and police forces who were being trained by the Americans.
When the British first colonized South Africa, the area they used was akmost uninhabited or very sparcely so. However, some Black tribes (including the Zulus) were moving from the north and themselves were colonizing or annexing the areas to their kingdom. The British were most interested in Trading so did not have large land asperations. The Dutch white Boer Africanners, in contrast, wanted to farm the lands and use the range for their cattle. They wanted the land. The English policy was that there would be friendly relations with the Black tribes surrounding their Cape Colony and no one should take their land. However the Boers started attacking the Black areas and seizing their farms and villages. At first, the English assumed that the Blacks would easily be able to ward off the invasion as the Afrikanners had no professional troops like the British. However, the neighboring tribes were not very warlike or good fighters. They were being overrun by the Zulus coming from the North and the Boers from the South. The British Government had a real problem in that they would have to have British soldiers fight the white Afrikanners if they wanted to stop the illegal white invasions. This was the root of the Boer War where the British would be fully at war with the Africanners.
