Yeah..maybe you can explain why getting rid of popular Sukarno and replacing him with someone like Suharto who invaded East timor was in our best national interests.
Funny how Obama’s mother was around during that time
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2211432/posts?page=9
Interesting that Erik Prince (Devos brother) is up for reinstating a program that was used while Anne’s husband was in Hawaii . It’s called the Phoenix program.
Our foreign policy involves so many layers that Bush is probably right when he made that comment about what the American people would do if they really knew the truth.
It was his own military, headed by Suharto, that decided he had to go. It was in our interest, and we certainly supported the change if not instigated it (such was the CIA's modus operandi at the time) because of Sukarno's increasing alignment with the Soviet Union and China. It was certainly not in our national interest for an oil rich nation sitting astride the Malacca Strait and due south of where a half million American troops were committed to a fight to become a close ally of our two greatest enemies.
I doubt anyone here at that time had ever heard or factored in the fate of Christian enclaves like East Timor and Aceh, or knew anything about the Hindu island of Bali besides the fact that their bare breasted girls occasionally showed up in the more heavily thumbed issues of National Geographic magazine in the high school library.
Sukarno was a prototypical independence fighter turned dictator, a'la Mugabe, Ho Chi Minh, and Kim Il Sung and his overthrow was hardly a bad thing for American national interests in SE Asia and the Western Pacific.