Eric Zuesse
The U.S. Government certainly leads the world in invasions and coups.
In recent years, it has invaded and occupied — either by military assault or by coup, but in either case followed by installing (or trying to install) a new regime there — a number of countries, especially Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen.
U.S. propaganda says that its invasions and military occupations (and it denies its coups) are to benefit the people in the invaded and militarily occupied countries, or to bring them ‘democracy’, and are not done merely to benefit the people who control the U.S. Government (which itself is not a democracy, and even the neoconservative — pro-invasion or “imperialistic” — American magazine The Atlantic has finally acknowledged this fact, even though it contradicts their continuing neoconservatism).
Polling and other evidences within the invaded/occupied countries shows the opposite of the U.S. claim: America’s invasions/occupations (after World War II, and especially after 2000) destroy those countries, not help them.
The most authoritative such study that has yet been done on this matter was recently released, and its findings regarding this matter will here be presented, and then supplemented with other relevant data so as to provide a fuller picture.
The U.N./Gallup surveys of the happiness/misery of the residents in 155 countries, as reported in 2017, were physically in-person interviews in almost all countries, but there was at least one exception, as they explained: “In Libya, telephone survey methodology has been used since 2015 owing to the country’s high rate of mobile phone coverage and ongoing instability which has made it too dangerous to use face-to-face interviewers.” That’s a highly euphemistic way of saying, actually: Libya was too dangerous, and perhaps too miserable, for opinions to be sampled by the ordinary methodology, the scientifically sound methodology, which is in-person interviews. It’s a way of saying this without even mentioning the invasion and war there — as if those things don’t even count. Therefore, the finding that Gallup reported about Libya is presumably being included in Gallup’s otherwise excellent report purely for Western propaganda purposes — they know that it’s not an actual scientific finding about Libya, not a finding that can reasonably be compared to the survey-findings in the other countries. As a result, Libya, which might have been the most miserable of all countries after the U.S.-UK-France-Canada invasion, scored in the top half of all countries, #68, 5.525. But, all of the other countries that the U.S. has recently invaded (the nations that are boldfaced below) scored at or below #132, 4.096 — Ukraine’s score — as is shown here below from that U.N. report:
Following are the happiness-scores of the bottom 24 out of the 155 happiness/misery-rated countries. (Iraq, which the U.S. had destroyed in 2003, perhaps is now recovering, and it scored as #117, with a score of 4.497; but, here only the bottom 24, the most-miserable of all of the 155 countries, are shown.) Here they are:
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132 Ukraine 4.096
133 Uganda 4.081
134 Burkina Faso 4.032
135 Niger 4.028
136 Malawi 3.970
137 Chad 3.936
138 Zimbabwe 3.875
139 Lesotho 3.808
140 Angola 3.795
141 Afghanistan 3.794
142 Botswana 3.766
143 Benin 3.657
144 Madagascar 3.644
145 Haiti 3.603
146 Yemen 3.593
147 South Sudan 3.591
148 Liberia 3.533
149 Guinea 3.507
150 Togo 3.495
151 Rwanda 3.471
152 Syria 3.462
153 Tanzania 3.349
154 Burundi 2.905
155 Central African Republic 2.693
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Ukraine is (other than #117 Iraq) the least-miserable of the recently invaded countries, and perhaps the reason for this is that Ukraine was taken over by means of a coup, instead of by means of an outright and direct military invasion.
(You can see this coup happening, here. The way that U.S. President Barack Obama set it up is documented here. You can hear there his agent instructing the U.S. Ambassador in Ukraine whom to place in charge of Ukraine’s Government once the coup will have been culminated (which happened 22 days later, and that person did get the leadership-position). It’s the full conversation. And here, you will see the phone-conversation in which top EU officials were shocked to find that it had been a coup instead of what Obama pretended, a ‘revolution’.) (These evidences are some of the reasons why the head of the ‘private CIA’ firm Stratfor called it “the most blatant coup in history.”)
The U.N. happiness surveys have been taken in Ukraine not only after the coup, which occurred in February 2014, but before it, in 2013. At https://countryeconomy.com/demography/world-happiness-index/ukraine you can see the happiness/misery scores shown by Ukrainians during the years 2013, 2015, 2016, and 2017 (there was no survey in Ukraine during 2014, perhaps because of the rampant violence at that time.) In 2013, Ukraine’s happiness score was 5.057, but that steadily declined down to the 2017 score of 4.096, which placed Ukraine within the bottom 24 countries, all of which either were extremely poor, or at war, or both. You can also see there Ukraine’s resulting “World Happiness Index” rank for each one of those four years, 2013, before the coup, and then 2015-2017, after the coup. As you see there, Ukraine, which was #132 in 2017, had been #87 in 2013 before the coup. So: within just three years after the coup, it declined 45 places in the global rankings.
Some people might retort against this by saying that “happiness” is meaningless or unimportant and only physical welfare is ‘objective’,” but even on the most crudely physical measures, Ukraine has been enormously harmed by the U.S. coup. In 2013, Ukraine’s average annual household income was $2,601.40, and then it fell off a cliff and became $1,109.63 by 2015 and has stabilized at around that level since. Also, in 2013, Ukraine’s GDP was $183.31 billion, and by 2015 that had become $91.03 billion and stabilized at that level. Furthermore, some figures aren’t any longer even reported by the post-coup Ukrainian regime. For example, whereas the number of unemployed was shown in Ukrainian statistics in 2013, it disappeared in 2016 and subsequently. More information about the decline in Ukraine’s economic rankings can be seen here. The U.S. regime has been toxic to the Ukrainian people, no matter how one looks at it. But happiness/misery is the real bottom-line.
Two researchers, Tom Coupe and Maxym Obrizan, published together two separate studies, both in leading economics journals, one article titled “The impact of war on happiness: The case of Ukraine”, and the other titled “Violence and political outcomes in Ukraine — Evidence from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk”. They reported, in “The Impact of war on happiness”:
The average level of happiness declined substantially in zones that experience war directly. …
This decline is comparable to the loss of happiness a relatively well-off person would experience if he/she were to become a poor person. …
Regions that are not directly affected by the war are basically as happy as they were before the war.
In other words: all of the increase in misery occurred only in the regions that have been “directly affected by the war.” The Ukrainians who reside outside those regions are “as happy as they were before the war.” They’re not happier than before the war; they haven’t been helped by the war; but, the misery — so intense for them that it has already lowered the happiness-ranking of the entire nation, from 87 down to 132 — just hasn’t bothered them, at all.
In “Violence and political outcomes in Ukraine” they reported:
We also find that property damage is associated with greater support for pro-Western parties, lower support for keeping Donbas in Ukraine and lower support for compromise as a way to stop the conflict.
In other words: Ukrainians who live close to the Ukraine-Donbass border; that is, who live inside Ukraine but close to Donbass and so are in the Ukrainian portion of the conflict-zone (not in Donbass, where the vast majority of the “property damage” is actually occurring), have “greater support for pro-Western parties” (i.e., for the Obama-installed regime), but “lower support for keeping Donbas in Ukraine.” Although they endorse the overthrow that had been done of the pre-coup government (because they receive ‘news’media only from the post-coup regime, in the Ukrainian language), they want to get on with their lives without the war that’s since been causing them “property damage.” (U.S. propaganda notes that “the separatist-controlled parts of Lugansk and Donetsk oblasts ([the two Donbass] provinces) only have access to Russian TV channels” but avoids noting that the Ukrainian regime’s blocking of Russian-language media on the other side of that border — inside Ukraine — exists and is even more severe.) Apparently, Ukrainians near the border just want the war to end — no “compromise” — no negotiations, no Minsk process; they want their Government to simply quit trying to conquer Donbass, no negotiations about it, at all. And they’re ignored.
Right now in Ukraine, the central political controversy is between the U.S.-puppet President of Ukraine, who promises to conquer both of the two breakaway provinces, Donbass and also Crimea — but who hasn’t yet been able to do it — versus Ukraine’s political parties, in western and northern Ukraine, that derived from the organizations which had supported Hitler against Stalin in World War II and who still crave to kill Russian-speakers. Those passionately racist-fascist, anti-Russian, ideologically nazi, political organizations, are determined to actually carry out those additional invasions, no matter what the cost. However, according to this finding by Coupe and Obrizon, the Ukrainians who are suffering the “property damage” and whose personal scores on happiness have thus become so abysmally low as to have dragged the whole Ukrainian nation down to a 132nd ranking, are opposed to that nazi position, and they just want the war to end. And they’re ignored.
Where, then, is the support for the war to be found (except amongst the U.S. Congress and President and the U.S. arms-makers whose products have been selling so well to Ukraine’s government and which are now being used against the residents of Donbass)? That support is to be found as far away from the conflict-zone as possible: in Lviv and the rest of far-western and northern Ukraine, the areas that were cheering Hitler’s forces in WW II, and where the ‘news’ media today are owned by U.S.-supported oligarchs and their NGOs.
Ukraine was a severely divided nation even before the coup. In the last Ukrainian election in which the residents within the Ukraine that then included both Donbass and Crimea voted, which was the election in 2010, the candidate who won Ukraine’s Presidency and whom Obama ousted, had won 90% of the vote in Donbass, and 75% of the vote in Crimea. However, in far-western Ukraine, his opponent — whom Obama had been hoping that Ukrainians would elect as Ukraine’s President in 2014 after the coup — won 90% of the vote. That’s the candidate whose party (though not herself) now dominates (in conjunction with the two outright nazi parties) the Ukrainian Government. The man whom the residents in the rump Ukraine chose, was the more moderate candidate, and he is increasingly being challenged by the nazis. (Ukraine is the world’s only nation that has two nazi political parties. Both of them have been clients of the U.S. Government ever since the end of World War II, but only with Obama did they win control of the country — that is, of its non-breakaway regions.) For example, on 18 January 2018, the AP headlined “Ukraine passes bill to get occupied regions back from Russia” and reported that, “Ukraine’s parliament on Thursday passed a bill that aims to reintegrate the eastern territories currently controlled by Russia-backed separatists, and goes as far as to declare support for taking them back by military force if necessary.” Though that position is a minority position amongst the Ukrainian public, it authentically represents the position that Obama wanted. In fact, he even overrode his own Secretary of State, John Kerry, to push for it. That’s the position of Ukraine’s two nazi parties, which are trying to replace the existing President. (Trump hasn’t yet made clear whether he backs them, but he is expected to.)
So: that’s Ukraine — the happiest of the nations that the U.S. has recently invaded.
——
UPDATE: On March 15th, the “World Happiness Report 2018” was issued, and here are the bottom-scoring countries:
- Ukraine (4.103)
- Togo (3.999)
- Guinea (3.964)
- Lesotho (3.808)
- Angola (3.795)
- Madagascar (3.774)
- Zimbabwe (3.692)
- Afghanistan (3.632)
- Botswana (3.590)
- Malawi (3.587)
- Haiti (3.582)
- Liberia (3.495)
- Syria (3.462)
- Rwanda (3.408)
- Yemen (3.355)
- Tanzania (3.303)
- South Sudan (3.254)
- Central African Republic (3.083)
- Burundi (2.905)
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