How to kill 40,000 with nary a bullet nor bomb

That’s an easy question for Uncle Sam. His one word answer? ‘Sanctions’.

The U.S. currently sanctions about 30 countries. These crippling economic measures are designed to achieve regime change for foreign leaders America wants removed. The goal is to make life for ordinary citizens so intolerable they will overthrow the despised rulers. A State Department memo from 1960 made this explicit regarding removal of the hated Castro government in Cuba. It advocated "a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of the government."

It never works because the targeted rulers deflect blame from themselves to the hated American sanctioners. Our Cuban sanctions are now in their seventh decade with no end in sight.

U.S. sanctions have been most deadly in Venezuela. Alena Douhank, UN Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures and Human Rights, just issued a devastating report blasting U.S. sanctions there which have killed over 40,000 hapless Venezuelans in the sixteen years since instituted by the Bush administration. Continued by Obama and Trump, they were greatly expanded by the latter in an effort to overthrow hated Venezuelan President Maduro in favor of U.S. educated and dedicated capitalist Juan Guaido.

The U.S. is still dropping bombs all over the Middle East and Africa to obliterate imagined bad guys. But It’s the seemingly benign economic sanctions doing the really heavy lifting ratcheting up the body count from America’s cruel and deadly foreign policy.

U.S. sanctions: adroit and inconspicuous, indeed.