Military Invasion Quotes
Ford gave the confidential interview under the condition that it would not be made public until after he passed away. It was published by the Washington Post on December 26, 2006 just after Ford died. Ex-President’s are very reluctant to criticize a current President---especially on a foreign policy issue.
The note was found in an abandoned Japanese camp on Bataan. There are some who believe that this note was a forgery. However, most think it genuine as it reflected one of the Japanese
“aces in the hole” to defend against an allied invasion of the Japanese mainland. It was one of the reasons that some American planners advocated use of the Atomic Bomb. Of course that was a real risk of using the bomb. The Japanese might be so angry and feel morally abused and kill the many allied prisoners they had. Many thought it was a lesser risk because it did not have the symbolic animus that foreigners occupying the Japanese homeland had. The quotation illustrates the amazing complexity that the American and allied leadership faced trying to end WWII in the Pacific.
When he made this statement he was Chief of Staff to the President of Iran. What is facinating is that a man of this seniorority can utter the last sentence. When israeil first was created by the United Nations over 10 Arab Armies attacked and invaded Israel and were beaten back. Thereafter of all the wars against Israel, the Israelis started only one-- a preemtive attack after Arab Armies started their attack plans but had not yet invaded. In each successive war Israel repulsed the attacks and then controlled more territory than before the war. Yet the man said that no one has attacked Israel.
This threat was shocking to coalition forces and NATO country citizens whose own soldiers were dying to keep the Taliban from taking over Afghanistan again. There were some errors made in calling in airstrikes in the Afghanistan War and collateral civilian casualties occurred. However it was often very difficult to determine if a target held civilians or insurgent Taliban. Very often Taliban sympathizers would invite Taliban into their homes to ambush coalition forces. However, Taliban would also force their way into a home and threaten to kill the family if they did not cooperate. Then they attacked from that home or several at the same time. From the point of view of the coalition forces being shot at, the view was the same. An airstrike would take out the house and no one would ever really know which of those scenarios (or others) actually produced the situation. Ironically, many more Afghanis were killed by the Afghani Taliban than by NATO forces in what was a brutal civil war. See {634912} for the American Ambassador’s reply to Karzai whose administration was totally corrupt and incompetent, making the coalition’s job almost impossible.
That is exactly what happened to the nations of Eastern Europe.
In April of 1962, President Kennedy convened a meeting of top advisors at the State Department to discuss the proposed CIA plan for the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The senator was the lone dissenter from the plan:
