American Policing on the World StageThe American “policing” role developed because of the Cold War, but it was primarily a means for protecting and assisting economic interests for itself and its allies as illustrated by recent events as well as earlier ones. When George H. Bush called for the Gulf War in order to push Iraq out of Kuwait, he cast Hussein in the role of “villain” and Kuwait as the “victim” in his address to Congress (Bush, 1991). Colin Powell (2003) would do a similar stunt a decade later in the events leading up to the post-9/11 invasion of Iraq, which was accused of harboring WMDs and using mobile weapons labs to hide them (labs that would in fact never be found). In both cases, the pretext for war was based on phony intelligence—but the point was never about sticking up for the little guy or defending the world from evil. It was always about America being the world’s policeman as a means of protecting its own and its allies’ interests. In the Middle East, those allies are clearly Israel and Saudi Arabia, and toppling regimes (Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran) is what they desire. Since the start of the Cold War, regime change has been America’s bread and butter all over the world. From Italy to Iran to Guatemala to Laos...

Recent events in the Middle East show as much, as do earlier incidents like the Bay of Pigs and Gulf of Tonkin just to name a few of the more egregious examples (Paul, 2008).
America had become the world’s superpower in the aftermath of WWII. The U.S. had helped to turn the tide against the Axis, and its technological superiority (in terms of true WMDs) was demonstrated not once but twice over Japan. Dulles (1954) explained it sufficiently well when he (under)stated the policy of the U.S. in the face of Soviet “aggression”—a term Bush I would apply to the heinous act of Hussein in the early 1990s of daring to oppose Western machinations and annex Kuwait for himself. For Dulles (1954) the policy was simple: “The way to deter aggression is for the free community to be willing and able to respond vigorously at places and with means of its own choosing.” Those words of “of its own choosing” would be especially important—as Dulles himself would demonstrate in the Bay of Pigs incident—an attempt at regime change in Cuba that certainly qualified as America choosing its own method of dealing with upstarts who dared challenge the empire’s police…