Imperialism (Strong nations Striving to Conquer Weaker Nations)

I'll start by saying that my opponent is absolutely right " imperialism doesn't require the payment of heavy tribute on the part of the conquered, nor does it require genocide. However, the act of imperialism often leads to these or similar ends, which I intend to prove will occur even if the purpose is "a humane and beneficial occupation of somebody else's land. " What Pro is discussing here is the concept of benign imperialism, the mentality being that we should engage in imperialism solely when pursuing a recognized benefit to the people of the country being conquered. This is nothing but a wolf in sheep's clothing, meant to provide justification for a practice that is inherently both harmful to the country being occupied and aimed mainly to benefit the imperialist country itself. With that, let's get into Pro's examples. Pro discusses the examples of the U. S. Invading and occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. Let's start with deaths, because I think that Pro is pretty flippant about these. How many people died in Iraq? Most of the available statistics are pretty inaccurate, mainly based on reported deaths. This study, however, aimed to determine those numbers by going to Iraq and polling the heads of households and siblings across Iraq. It found that there were approximately 405,000 deaths attributable to the war, with at least another 56,000 that likely resulted from households forced to flee. [1] Now, Pro would like to attribute these results to insurgent groups. This assertion is wrong. Again, in that study, more than 60% of these deaths were the direct result of shootings, bombings, airstrikes, or other violence, with the rest coming from stress-related heart attacks or ruined sanitation and hospitals, many of which were destroyed by us. The bombings that occurred upon our invasion alone were estimated to have killed 3,200-7,500 civilians, along with 30,000 enemy combatants and the losses of 172 U. S. and U. K. troops. [2] However, it hardly matters. Even if he's accurate, none of these deaths would have occurred if the insurgency wasn't fighting back against the U. S. Pro provides no reason whatsoever to believe that these deaths would have occurred in the absence of an invasion. Whether we directly caused those deaths makes absolutely no difference if they resulted from our invasion. Pro provides two justifications for this. He says that the U. S. is creating stability and rebuilding infrastructure, and our provision of freedom. Pro even admits that this only lasts so long as we are in the country. In this, he's partially right " the insurgency caused a large number of deaths and destruction even while we had troops there. Problem is that we're not there anymore. Pro doesn't actually discuss this at all " we left. Why did we leave? Because the cost was tremendous, the number of troops we were still losing was too high, the Iraqi people wanted us gone, and the benefits we received were too few. These are also the reasons we're on the verge of leaving Afghanistan, though I'll get to that shortly. And how have they been doing since we left? Are they still free? Well, their democratic candidates for elections are being killed off, so that's unlikely. [3] Acts of terrorism remain consistently high (and they're still losing vital infrastructure in the process), their military is still relatively weak, and their own government is having a hard time working together for the common good. [4] Afghanistan doesn't look any better. Coalition military fatalities are above 3000[5] and almost 20,000 civilians have lost their lives. [6] Pro spends no time justifying this, and given the challenges they face in getting a stable government up and running that's not affected by Taliban influence and their still relatively weak military, that's not surprising. [7] The insurgency is less problematic here than in Iraq, but their relative stability and the transition to democracy have been slow to come about, and that's in our presence. We will eventually have to leave. And this is the problem. Pro would have voters believe that these invasions could turn into imperialist power grabs and keep us there forever. But he's provided no reason to support the U. S. , or any other country, taking that step. I've given a number of reasons why not, but I'll add to them that the international community stands opposed to such imperialist actions, and therefore we will harm our relations with many of our allies and enemies. That's not to mention that forcing imperialism would do more harm than good to both countries. Pro then provides a list of African countries that have functioned poorly in the absence of imperialism. He's wrong on two fronts here. First, they are all examples of imperialism gone wrong. Somalia went through 5 stages of imperialism, ruled first by a Arabic Sultanate, then it was Dervish, then Italian, then British, then a Trust Territory under the UN. Rwanda was ruled by Germany and then Belgium. Angola was Dutch, then Portugese. Ethiopia was subjected to Italian rule over much of their history. Many of these problems are the direct result of their experience with imperialism, which dramatically reduced their stability and made it impossible to establish any sort of long term government. They weren't helped by the fact that, being subjugated by these countries, they had many of their most important resources stripped and were forced into jobs that would benefit the more powerful European nations. Second, Pro has provided absolutely no analysis for why imperialism would have solved for any of this. If anything, the reality that imperialism existed in their backgrounds shows that more of it wouldn't have benefited their countries. So long as he doesn't give any reason to believe that these nations would be bettered by the experience, the realities of the destabilization of war and occupation are always going to be more likely to cause harm than imperialism is to lead to benefit. So, let's talk about benign imperialism. The reality is that a country will never engage in this practice if it doesn't see any benefits for itself " the financial, human, and political costs are simply too large to ignore solely for the benefit of another nation. That's why benign imperialism isn't really benign " it's simply a justification for transgressions. We can look to any number of countries invaded and occupied by the U. S. , particularly during the famed Banana Wars. I'll discuss these more in my next post, but for the time being, let's look at some significant examples. We could look at Panama, where our interventions led directly to the Watermelon War, the Thousand Days' War, innumerable deaths among the workers forced to build the Panama Canal, and indirectly led to a series of military coups in the 50's and 60's. We were trying to help free them from tyranny under the Republic of Colombia, or so we said. [10] Haiti's a great example. We occupied it for almost 20 years, building tremendous amounts of infrastructure, mainly railroads. The U. S. even refused to engage in economic exploitation. Sadly, that didn't lead to good results. They resisted the construction, but they didn't have much choice after we arrived and took over. We forced them to engage in corv"e, or statute labor, which was imposed upon the poorer people in Haiti. It was unpaid, so it was essentially forced labor for short periods of time. In fact, they hated this so much that they would later engage in guerrilla warfare for two years. But hey, at least it resulted in 210 bridges and 1,00 miles of all-weather roads, right? "Unskilled Haitians inherited the infrastructures built by Americans and neglected to maintain them properly. Within two decades, most roads and bridges were a potholed mess impassible during the rainy season and accessible only with all-wheel drive vehicles the rest of the year. "[11] The so-called "benefits" of imperialism are nothing of the sort. With that, I hand the debate back to my opponent to continue his case and rebut mine. 1. . http://www.plosmedicine.org... 2. . http://en.wikipedia.org... 3. . http://www.csmonitor.com... 4. . http://www.huffingtonpost.com... 5. . http://icasualties.org... 6. . http://costsofwar.org... 7. . http://www.usip.org... 8. . http://www.touregypt.net... 9. . http://www.napoleon-series.org... 10. . http://en.wikipedia.org... 11. www. occidentaldissent. com/2014/01/31/caribbean-project-benign-imperialism-us-occupation-of-haiti-1915-1934/