AmeriKKKa as Mr. Magoo

Just for a bit of context for those who are not acquainted with or don’t remember Mr. Magoo:



From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mr. Quincy Magoo is a cartoon character created by John Hubley in 1949, for UPA. Hubley based the character on his former professor Francis Peabody Magoun, who bore some physical resemblance to the character. Voiced by Jim Backus (also famed in popular culture for his role as Thurston Howell III in the 1960s sitcom "Gilligan's Island"), Quincy Magoo is a wealthy, short-statured retiree who gets into a series of sticky situations as a result of his nearsightedness, compounded by his stubborn refusal to admit the problem, in which the affected people (or animals) think that he is a lunatic, rather than just being near-sighted.

Additionally, though not noted in the Wikipedia reference, at the end of each miraculous episode where, through sheer dumb luck or fortuitous happenstance Magoo emerges unscathed (though often causing immense havoc in his wake) he would wryly comment to himself, “Magoo! You’ve done it again!”

I recently saw a Mr. Magoo cartoon again when, at the end of the cartoon Magoo is congratulating himself, that it struck me: AmeriKKKa IS Mr. Magoo!

At the very least since the post WWII period, as AmerKKKa has bestrode the world stage as one of the pre-eminent world powers (and, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, as THE single world hyper power), she has been evincing the same near totally blind, blundering mien of Mr. Magoo, less his much more benign character. What do I mean? Let us count merely a few of the ways.

1. Iran - 1953 Because Mohammad Mossadegh, the legally and legitimately elected Prime Minister of Iran was determined to claim a more reasonable percentage of the oil revenues for Iran (and because he had enforced the Parliament’s nationalization decree against the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later to become British Petroleum, BP) the British determined that Mossadegh must go and a more pliant ruler (who in this case was Shah Reza Pahlavi) must be installed. So Operation Ajax was born. Through a variety of clandestine operations and maneuvers (led by Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson), a coup was fomented and the Shah was installed. And, it worked. For 26 years. At which time the Shah was forced to flee Iran and was replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeni. At which time the American Embassy was attacked by a mob of enraged (due to US involvement in overthrow of Mossadegh and our unquestioning support of the Shah) Iranian students and the embassy staff was taken hostage and kept so for 444 days. In 1953 like Magoo we wryly commented to ourselves, “Magoo! You’ve done it! (This being the first CIA overthrow) So, just like Mr. Magoo, we blithered and blundered into the internal affairs of Iran and so created a monstrous situation that has plagued us ever since.
   
   2. Guatemala - 1954 Following our glowing ‘success’ in Iran in 1953, the CIA, at the behest of United Fruit, went back to its bag of tricks seeking to overthrow the legal President, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. This they managed to do and, again in the words of Wikipedia, “…was ousted in a coup d'état organized by the US Central Intelligence Agency, known as Operation PBSUCCESS, and was replaced by a military junta, headed by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, plunging the country into chaos and long-lasting political turbulence. [emphasis added]
   
   Time skip; numerous other ill advised interventions yielding, at best, temporary benefits but long term damage. Now that I’ve whet your appetites, I commend you to do a little solo research, don’t want you to think I’m picking and choosing here.
   
   3. Iraq - 1990 The manufactured crisis that became ‘Desert Storm’ (the Gulf War) and began the murderous chain of events that has led to the incomparable disaster that is Iraq today.
   
   Prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein (who had been a long term CIA asset and who had been heavily aided by the U.S. during the 8 year long bloodletting that was the Iran-Iraq War) had consulted with U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie to clarify the U.S. position on Iraq’s ‘occupation’ of Kuwait. Kuwait had been slant-drilling into Iraq’s oil reservoirs and was being extremely unwilling to even negotiate with Iraq on these matters and certainly weren’t about to stop stealing Iraq’s oil (primarily because they had been encouraged by G.H.W. Bush to stand firm; America would ‘protect’ them). Ambassador Glaspie was instructed to state that: "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America."(Wikipedia)
   
   Upon receiving the above apparent ‘blessing’ of the United States, Saddam ‘invaded’ Kuwait to terminate their slant drilling practices (and to extract some payback for the oil that had been stolen in the period prior. It was this invasion of Kuwait that provided G.H.W. Bush his causus belli for the initiation of ‘Desert Storm’.
   
   4. Yugoslavia - 1991-1999 Even though Yugoslavia’s internal affairs had been meddled with at least since the Reagan Administration, part of the Reagan Administration’s worldwide war with the ‘Evil Empire’, the real disaster began during the G.H.W. Bush Administration. The Bush I administration cut off all aid for Yugoslavia unless each republic essentially voted to renounce their federation which formed the country of Yugoslavia. This was brought to a head in December 1991 when the newly reunited Germany firmly and insistently backed the secession and recognition of its Nazi era allies, Slovenia and Croatia. Blackmailing the Europeans by holding hostage the negotiations in Maastricht to form the European Union and pressuring the Bush I administration, the European Community jointly and severally violated international law in the form of the Helsinki Final Act which guaranteed the “inviolability of national borders and respect for territorial integrity”. (Wikipedia) All of the members of the EC (future EU), Yugoslavia and the United States were all signatories of the Helsinki Final Act and were bound by this treaty.
   
   This pattern was continued with the 1992 recognition of Bosnia as a sovereign nation, again in violation of the Helsinki Final Act.
   
   A detailed description of the continued and repeated violations of international laws would require a paper in and of itself. Suffice it to say that the period 1991-1999 in Yugoslavia was a study in blunder, bombast, and simple unadulterated lunacy on the part of Albright, Blair, Clinton and the West. Without any understanding of the recent history, language, culture of the peoples that made up Yugoslavia, the West and particularly the U.S. were blinded by domestic political concerns as well as a heretofore unseen campaign of biased propaganda and PR.
   
   In the final analysis, due to the continual blundering intervention of the West (i.e., U.S.), 2 Muslim dominated states were established in the heart of Europe (Bosnia and Kosovo) and provided a haven and a training area for several of the 9/11 hijackers. Blowback is a bitch.
   
   5. Iraq - 2003 We have come almost full circle. Again, as was the case in Bosnia and Kosovo (see above) on the basis of manufactured casus belli, manufactured ‘intelligence’ and just plain lies, G.W. Bush (Bush II) invaded Iraq. Though combat operations were concluded by May, 2003, Mr. Magoo’s AmeriKKKA has deluded itself into believing that a war is still being fought (true, 650,000 Iraqis have expired as well as 3,000 Americans) but, this is and has been an occupation, not a war.
   
   So, just in the extremely short exposition above (note, I have not even touched on such matters as the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, the endless and constant ‘interventions’ by whatever name in Central America) that we have a rather prolific record of blundering, murderous interventions that, even granting the best of all possible intentions, simply do not yield the ‘golden fruit’ the American people are constantly told they will. We are like a blinded bull in a china shop, very adept at wrecking the place and of little or no utility in cleaning up the mess and putting the pieces back together.
   
   Worse yet, because of this record of truly disastrous intervention, we have lost virtually all the ‘good will’ and kind feelings of people around the world that we had had as late as 1945 (even excepting such ‘minor’ matters as nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki). As each day comes upon us, we are being more and more generally perceived not unlike Nazi Germany in 1939. Not unlike Imperial Japan in 1937 when they committed the Rape of Nanking.
   
   And, unlike the likable Mr. Magoo, we can no longer say ‘Ah Magoo! You’ve done it again!’ 9/11 has shown us and the world just how much venom we have created worldwide with our hubristic attitude and actions. Care to guess what awaits us?