Excuses in US Foreign Policy

Elio Delgado Legon

HAVANA TIMES — Nobody should be surprised about the fact that today, the current US president is using an excuse so as to take US-Cuba relations back to what they were during the Cold War. There is no longer any doubt that all of the fuss created around the alleged sonic attacks on US diplomats, was part of a CIA plan, which the Cuban-American mafia had requested in order to reverse the advances made during the last stages of Barack Obama’s government.

They have created the perfect situation so that the current president of the Empire, who is completely oblivious to Cuban reality and to what a president of a country that wants to be a world leader should be, can take ridiculous measures, which have most likely been asked for by people in Miami, to reduce US-Cuba relations to the bare minimum.

Accusing Cuba of carrying out this attack, or of not having stopped those who did, doesn’t make any sense. Who would benefit from this situation? To be precise, those who have tried to stop relations improving between both countries at all costs, because they have made a great business out of the Cuba-US dispute and the counter-revolution.

If the aforementioned sonic attacks were true and not a CIA invention, both Cuban and US investigators would have been able to interview those affected and the doctors who diagnosed them. If the investigation hasn’t been allowed to move forward, it’s because of the US fear that the lies about these events will be discovered.

The latest news to surface is that agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully have taken charge of investigating this case. When they arrived at Jose Marti airport in Havana, both stated the same thing, one in English and the other in Spanish: “The truth is out there.” Therefore, we can agree that this is where they should be investigating and uncovering the truth.

The US holds every record in the art of excuse-making. In the 19th century, while Cubans were fighting for their independence from Spain, governments in the north did everything they could to stop Cuban revolutionaries from preparing expeditions to go and free their country. They tried to buy Cuba on more than one occasion from Spain, without success; but when the Cuban people had almost won the war, they fell back on the excuse of the explosion of the Maine battleship in Havana’s port to declare war on Spain, which was already exhausted and beaten. And they took over Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Phillipines in this way. A sound business deal, Trump would say today.

In the art of winning wars after others have put in the bloodshed, the Second World War came, where they intervened after the Soviet Union had put German armies in retreat, costing them 20 million fatalities. But the truth is, they didn’t intervene to overthrow Germany, which had already been defeated, but rather to stop the Soviet Union from gaining more ground and taking Berlin, which led to the city and country being divided.

In the art of pretexts, let’s remember the Golf of Tonkin incident, which was also fabricated, in order to kick off the cruel and bloody Vietnam War, where they had to leave defeated. More recently, we can mention the excuse, which had also been invented, to invade Iraq, and the Twin Towers attack, which could have been prevented and they didn’t so it would justify their invasion of Afghanistan.

More recently yet, with the aim to change the regime in Syria because it didn’t please them or Israel, they armed and supported terrorism in this country, even supplying chemical weapons, and they have tried to blame the Syrian government of these chemical attacks against their own people, a completely absurd idea, so as to have another excuse which would allow them to attack the Syrian army and also towns, where hundreds of civilians have perished.

I could have given many more examples, but I think that these are enough to illustrate that excuses throughout history have been a means for US foreign policy.