Jeffrey Sachs - Blood in the Sand

 Jeffrey Sachs has similar politics to me, it seems. I saw him being ruthlessly questioned about his role in reforming the Soviet Union, where he said he tried his hardest to get it right, but people, both Russians and Americans, were working behind his back to wreck his plans. There was massive corruption, he said. 

Almost every modern US military intervention in the developing world has come to rot. It’s hard to think of an exception since the Korean War. In the 1960s and first half of the 1970s, the US fought in Indochina – Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia – eventually withdrawing in defeat after a decade of grotesque carnage. President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, and his successor, the Republican Richard Nixon, share the blame.

In roughly the same years, the US installed dictators throughout Latin America and parts of Africa, with disastrous consequences that lasted decades. Think of the Mobutu dictatorship in the Democratic Republic of Congo after the CIA-backed assassination of Patrice Lumumba in early 1961, or of General Augusto Pinochet’s murderous military junta in Chile after the US-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973.

In the 1980s, the US under Ronald Reagan ravaged Central America in proxy wars to forestall or topple leftist governments. The region still has not healed.

Project Syndicate 

Jeffrey Sachs - Blood in the Sand