The Puppet Masters

You never see them. Only, sometimes, their hands. Maybe you can figure out who they are, but usually only long afterwards. They are the ones who made sure that Abraham Lincoln would be elected, and surrounded him with Pinkerton men when he was: in order that the Civil War might be fought; and in order that certain peculiarly swinish, irresponsible economic interests (bankers, munitions manufacurers, railroads) in the Western and North-Eastern United States might make a profit on it.
You see their hands in the infamous Mexican, Spanish-American, Korean, Vietnam, Iraq I, and Iraq II Wars (not to mention Clinton's dirty and dirtying little assault on Serbia), and, of course, in the absurd American involvement in World War I. The hands, the sense of being manipulated are not so evident in World War II. In that, the sense, so to speak, of things having gotten out of hand, is overriding, and from the attack on Pearl Harbor until the restraint suddenly put on General Patton, there is little discernible puppetry. But at Yalta, and Potsdam, and in the decision to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in the deliberate cold-blooded perpetration of a fraudulent Cold War, and War on Terror, their hands are all over everything.