As no world-changing event has occurred on February 29th, let’s instead take this opportunity to reflect on one country’s determination to dominate the world in the last one hundred years by jackbooting its self-anointed authority across the globe in a succession of largely secret and always self-serving military and CIA interventions.

Since emerging as the economic victor of WWI, a succession of American governments have deployed despotic foreign policies including bullying, lying, cheating, exploitation, extortion and terror to “protect” U.S. interests – supposedly on behalf of its citizens, most of whom have no idea of the atrocities perpetrated in their name and couldn’t even point out on a map the majority of the countries listed below.

These imperialist interventions – ranging from overt wars to covert destablisation campaigns, CIA-backed coups, illegal arms deals, and state-sanctioned terrorism in the form of specially trained dictators, assassins and “death squads” at the notorious School of the Americas in Georgia – have been undertaken in the name of “security’, “peace-keeping”, “democracy” and “freedom”. But the truth is that an alarming number of these operations have resulted in absolute bloodbaths. If we were to calculate the death toll, it would exceed Hitler’s and rival Stalin’s.

This chronological roll of shame includes more than 60* separate, (supposedly) sovereign countries – the poorest and most helpless of which were victims of multiple assailments (otherwise known as America’s Third World War). It omits, of course, the pre-20th century Native American genocide as well as the countless acts of terror and murder perpetrated on home soil against U.S. citizens.

I urge you to click the links to find out more. “Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of world peace.” – Dalai Lama XIV

A Century of American Interventions 1912-2012

China (continuous occupations and intrusions pre-1912>1972)

Philippines (continuous occupations and intrusions pre-1912, 1948-54, 1989, 2002-?)

Cuba (1912, 1917-1933, 1961, 1962)

Honduras (1912, 1919, 1924-25, 1983-89)

Nicaragua (1912-33, 1981-90)

Mexico (1913, 1914-18, 1923)

Dominican Republic (1914, 1916-24, 1965-66)

Haiti (1914-34, 1994, 2004-05)

Panama (1916, 1919-1920, 1925, 1958, 1964, 1989-?)

World War I (1917-18)

Russia (1918-22, five secret missions to fight Bolsheviks)

Yugoslavia (1919, 1946)

Guatemala (1920, 1954, 1966-67)

Turkey (1922, 1947, between 1950-91 America provided billions of dollars of “military assistance” in exchange for US military bases resulting in several Cold War crises)

El Salvador (1932, 1981-92 decade-long secret war)

World War II (1941-45)

Iran (1946, 1953, 1980, 1984, 1987-88)

Uruguay (1947, 1964-70 – CIA torturer Dan Mitrione introduces “death squads”)

Greece (1947-49, 1965, 1967-74)

Puerto Rico (1950)

Korea (1951-53)

Vietnam (1954, 1960-75)

Egypt (1956)

Syria (1956-57, 2008)

Lebanon (1958, 1982-84)

Iraq (1958-? meddling off and ON for over five decades)

Peru (1960-65, 1968)

Congo (1961, 1996-97)

Laos (1962, 1971-73)

Ecuador (1963)

Bolivia (1964-67, 1986)

Brazil (1964)

Chagos Islands (1964-?)

Indonesia (1965 CIA-assisted army coup, one million killed)

Ghana (1966)

Cambodia (1969-75 please watch this)

Oman (1970)

Chile (1973 CIA-assisted coup ousted democratically elected socialist president in favour of a homicidal maniac)

Australia (1975)

Angola (1976-92 Cold War command operation lasting nearly two decades)

East Timor (1975)

Nigeria (1976, 2011-?)

Afghanistan (1979-92, 2001-?)

Libya (1981-89, 2011)

Grenada (1983-84)

Liberia (1990, 1997, 2003)

Saudi Arabia (1990-91)

Kuwait (1991)

Somalia (1992-94, 2006-?)

Bosnia (1992-1993)

Albania (1991)

Sudan (1998)

Serbia (1999)

Yemen (2002, 2009-?)

Colombia (2003)

Venezuela (2002-04)

Georgia (2003-?)

Djibouti (2003-?)

Kenya (2004-?)

Ethiopia (2004)

Pakistan (2005-?)

Uganda (2011-?)

* Know of any others? Let me know and I’ll add ’em to the list.