Why do they hate America? (Excellent essay!)

We have seen Pakistanis waving pictures of Osama Bin Laden and wearing T-shirts celebrating the death of 6,000 Americans. We have seen Palestinians dancing in the streets and firing their Kalashnikovs in glee. We have heard Harold Pinter and friends pleading with the West to stop a war we didn't start. A few of us have read a New Statesman editorial coming perilously close to suggesting that bond dealers in the World Trade Center had it coming.

Or consider what Elisabetta Burba, an Italian journalist, reported for The Wall Street Journal from Beirut. She saw suited, coiffed professionals cheering in the streets. Then she went into a fashionable cafe. "The cafe's sophisticated clientele was celebrating, laughing, cheering and making jokes, as waiters served hamburgers and Diet Pepsi. Nobody looked shocked or moved. They were excited, very excited," she writes.

"Ninety per cent of the Arab world believes that America got what it deserved," she is told. "An exaggeration?" she comments. "Rather an understatement."

It is horrifying but not entirely surprising; we have seen it before. I, certainly, have always lived in a world suffused with savage anti-Americanism. In my childhood the grown-ups were all convinced that the apparently inevitable nuclear holocaust would be the fault of the Americans. In my student years I saw the Vietnam war used as an excuse for violence and intimidation that would have made Mao Tse-tung proud - indeed, my contemporaries were waving his Little Red Book, his guide to mass murder, as they attempted to storm the American embassy. I saw many of those who now weep like crocodiles burning the Stars and Stripes.

How strange, I thought, even then. They wore Levi jeans, drank Coke, watched American television and listened to American music. Something inside them loved America, even as something outside them hated her. They were like fish that hated the very sea in which they swam - the whisky, in Samuel Beckett's words, that bore a grudge against the decanter. Like the Beirut elite, they wanted to have their hamburgers and eat them, to bite the Yankee hand that fed them.

But there is something more terrible, more gravely unjust here than 1960s student stupidity, more even than the dancing of the Palestinians and the Lebanese.

Let us ponder exactly what the Americans did in that most awful of all centuries, the 20th. They saved Europe from barbarism in two world wars. After the second world war they rebuilt the continent from the ashes. They confronted and peacefully defeated Soviet communism, the most murderous system ever devised by man, and thereby enforced the slow dismantling - we hope - of Chinese communism, the second most murderous. America, primarily, ejected Iraq from Kuwait and helped us to eject Argentina from the Falklands. America stopped the slaughter in the Balkans while the Europeans dithered.

Now let us ponder exactly what the Americans are. America is free, very democratic and hugely successful. Americans speak our language and a dozen or so Americans write it much, much better than any of us. Americans make extremely good films and the cultivation and style of their best television programmes expose the vulgarity of the best of ours. Almost all the best universities in the world are American and, as a result, American intellectual life is the most vibrant and cultivated in the world.

"People should think," David Halberstam, the writer, says from the blasted city of New York, "what the world would be like without the backdrop of American leadership with all its flaws over the past 60 years." Probably, I think, a bit like hell.

There is a lot wrong with America and terrible things have been done in her name. But when the chips are down all the most important things are right. On September 11 the chips went down.

The Yankophobes were too villanously stupid to get the message. Barely 48 hours after thousands of Americans are murdered, we see the BBC's Question Time with its hand-picked morons in the audience telling Philip Lader, the former US ambassador, that "the world despises America". The studio seethes with ignorance and loathing. Lader looks broken.

Or we have the metropolitan elite on Newsnight Review sneering at Dubya Bush. "So out of touch," Rosie Boycott, the journalist, hisses, "there was no sense of his feeling for people." Alkarim Jivani, the writer, wades in by trashing Bush's response when asked how he was feeling: "Well, I'm a loving guy; also I've got a job to do." Jivani thinks this isn't good enough, no emotion.

Hang on; I thought the bien- pensant left wanted restraint from Bush. And that "loving guy" quote was the most beautiful thing said since September 11. Poetically compressed, rooted in his native dialect, it evoked duty and stoicism. But these are not big values in Islington.

Or here's George Monbiot in The Guardian: "When billions of pounds of military spending are at stake, rogue states and terrorist warlords become assets precisely because they are liabilities." I see; so the United States, the victim of this attack, is to be condemned for somehow deviously making money out of it. I'll run it up the flagpole, George, but I suspect only the Question Time audience will salute.

Or here's Suzanne Moore in The Mail on Sunday: "In this darkest hour my heart goes out to America. But my head knows that I have not supported much of what has been done in its name in the past. As hard as it is, there are many who feel like this. Now is not the time to pretend otherwise." So, Suzanne, how many corpses does it take for it to be a good time to pretend otherwise? Do you laugh at the funerals of people with whom you disagreed?

Or here are two more venomous voices, both quoted in The Guardian. Patricia Tricker from Bedale: "Now they know how the Iraqis feel." And Andrew Pritchard from Amsterdam: "If the US's great peacetime defeat results in defeating America's overweening ego as the world's sole remaining superpower, it will be a highly productive achievement." Would that achievement be the dead children, Andrew, or the crushed firemen?

Anti-Americanism has long been the vicious, irrational, global ideology of our time. "It combines," says Sir Michael Howard, the historian, "the nastiest elements of the right and left." It is dangerous and stupid and, in the days after September 11, shockingly distasteful.

In the name of God, more than 6,000 noncombatants are dead, more than 6,000 families bereaved. From what dark wells of malevolence springs this dreadful reflex desire to dance on their graves?

From history, says Michael Lind, senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington: "There's an anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist and ultimately anti-modern theme that always emerges to criticise the dominant power of the day. It was directed at the cities of northern Italy, then in the 17th century at the Netherlands, then at Britain when she picked up the torch of capitalism, and now it's the US."

So at the most basic level America is loathed simply because she's on top. The world leader is always trashed simply for being the leader. The terms of the trashing are remarkably consistent. Nineteenth-century Germans, Lind points out, responded to Britain's dominance by saying, in effect, "they may be rich but we have soul". That is exactly what many Europeans and all anti-Americans are now saying: we're for God or culture or whatever against mammon. This is inaccurate - America has more soul, culture and a lot more God than any of her critics - but it is the predictably banal rhetoric of envy.

This form of "spiritual" anti-Americanism has close links with anti-semitism. "Anti-Americanism and anti-semitism are closely interwoven historically," says Tony Judt, professor of history at New York University. "Not because there are so many Jews here - there weren't always - but because both are in part about fear of openness, rootlessness, change, the modern anomic world: Jews as a placeless people, America as a history-less land."

As Jon Ronson recently demonstrated in his book, Them: Adventures with Extremists, almost every crazed cult in the world believes there is a global Jewish conspiracy run from Hollywood and Wall Street. Those bien-pensant chatterers are, I'm sure, anti-racists all, but they are swimming in deeper, darker, crazier waters than they imagine.

Judt's word "openness" is important. The fanatic - in Islington or Kabul - hates openness because he finds himself relativised and turns on the very society which permits his freedom of expression.

George Orwell noted in 1941: "In so far as it hampers the British war effort, British pacifism is on the side of the Nazis and German pacifism, if it exists, is on the side of Britain and the USSR. Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi." Elsewhere he wrote of the "unadmitted motive" of pacifism as being "hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism".

So bog-standard anti-Americanism in the developed world is a dark, irrational combination of hate-the-father/leader and infantile fantasies of rebellion and control. It is a reflex hatred of home - the place that provides succour or, in this case, Levi's. But of course there are local nuances. The French have, in contrast to the British, been consistently anti-American at governmental and diplomatic levels.

"It is a long-standing resentment born of 1940," says Judt. "A sense that France was once the universal, modern reference or model and is now just a second-class power with a declining international language to match. There is a loose analogy with British complexes about the US - us in decline, them over-mighty - but in France it is complicated by a layer of hyper-revolutionism among the intelligentsia in the years between 1947 and 1973, precisely the time when the US rise to world domination was becoming uncomfortably obvious."

In Britain we did not have the Sartres and the Derridas leading us to political and philosophical extremes. But members of the British left had something simpler: a burning hatred for America for disproving almost everything they ever believed. They so wanted rampantly capitalist America to be wrong that even Stalin hadn't quite turned them off Russia.

There was, admittedly, a pause in this crude British form of anti-Americanism. When Bill Clinton was elected president, the British left suddenly constructed a fantasy America as co-pioneer of the Third Way. The new mandarins - Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie - said that America was where it was all happening. It was a fantasy because Clinton, even to himself, was window-dressing. Capitalist, religious America had merely put on this smiling mask. When Bush was elected the left felt betrayed.

Much of the present wave of anti-Americanism, and especially the awful contempt for Bush, springs from this sense of betrayal. It also springs from an inability to escape from post-cold war attitudes. "The anxiety about American behaviour now," says Hugh Brogan, research professor of history at Essex University, "is a hangover from cold war anxiety about nuclear war."

Fear of the bomb was such that it provoked in some an abiding belief that at any moment we would be fried or irradiated because of the miscalculation of some mad American in a cowboy hat - an image burnt into many brains by Stanley Kubrick's apocalyptic film Dr Strangelove.

Somehow the Soviet Union, probably because of ignorance, escaped our disapproval. It was all wrong, if just about understandable, then. Now it has become a pernicious and destructive failure to know a friend when we see one.

With the cold war confrontations gone, the anti-capitalism, anti- globalisation movements abandoned potentially rational, cultural and environmental anxieties in favour of a monstrous random bag of anti-American loathing. And, of course, the Middle East seemed to provide a clear case of the arrogant, bullying superpower persecuting the poor.

The idea of the bully fits neatly with one of the most grotesquely enduring of all anti-American beliefs: that Americans are all dumb Yanks. This is a delusion of the right as much as the left and it began with Harold Macmillan's absurd aspiration, later taken up by Harold Wilson, that somehow Britain should play Athens to America's Rome.

The idea was that America was this big, blundering lummox and we were these terribly refined deep thinkers. Precisely the same attitude inspires the raised eyebrows and condescending tut-tutting of leftish dinner party opinion. They're so naïve, say the chatterers, so innocent - and this, sadly, leads them to do such terrible things.

Well, I've spent some time among the American intelligentsia and I have been awestruck and humbled. They are, without doubt, the best educated, most cultivated and cleverest people in the world. They are also the most humane. There are 30 or more American universities where our best and brightest would be struggling to keep up. Apart from that, how could we be so dumb as to accuse the nation of Updike, Bellow, Roth, DeLillo, Ashbery, Dylan, of Terence Malick, The Simpsons, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola of stupidity, let alone innocence?

The roots of this are obvious. We want the bully to be thick for the same reason as we want the beautiful model to be thick. We can't bear the possibility of somebody having strength or beauty as well as brains.

In fairness, the stupidity charge is partly fuelled by one of the odder forms of anti-Americanism: American anti-Americanism. There has always been, within the US, cultivated East and West Coast elites who take the charge of stupidity seriously and feel they have to apologise for the embarrassment of the unsophisticated masses of the Midwest or deep South.

At its best this produces the brilliant satire of Randy Newman, at its worst the mandarin, Europhile posing of Gore Vidal. The masses bite back with their own form of anti-Americanism - a hatred of the elites. The Rev Jerry Falwell has already made common cause with the terrorists by blaming the attack on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays, and the lesbians". To Falwell modern America really is the Great Satan.

However, it is Middle Eastern anti-Americanism that is the burning issue of the moment. Again this is deeply misunderstood by the chatterers of the West. For them it is simply a matter of Israel, apparently a clear case of a surrogate bullying on America's behalf, and of oil, a clear case of American greed swamping all other human considerations.

In fact, America has always had more allies in the region than it has had enemies - although, this being the Middle East, allies become enemies and vice versa with bewildering rapidity. In the 1950s and 1960s, the US and her allies worked to subvert the secular Arab nationalist power of President Nasser of Egypt by backing Islamicist groups. Good idea, bad tactics. These groups started out pro- American and became anti. The unwelcome result was the more or less total destruction of nationalism and the creation of the powerful religious movement that now haunts Arab politics.

Israel forms a part but not the whole of this picture. Islamicism makes it a larger part because of an ancient enmity that goes back to the story of the prophet's betrayal by Jewish tribes and, more recently, to the defeat and expulsion of the Moors from Christian Europe.

In this context, Arab hardliners see Israel as a further Christian-backed offensive against the Islamic world. Even without Israel, the idea of such an offensive would still be a powerful imaginative force.

People who suggest September 11 would never have happened if America had pulled back from her support for Israel are almost certainly wrong. Israel is not even in the foreground of Bin Laden's murderous imagination. The Palestinians have actually complained that he cares nothing for them. For Bin Laden and for many more moderate Muslims, the turning point was the Gulf war in 1990-91.

"Contrary to popular belief that was the first real build-up of American military force in the region," says Dr Clive Jones at Leeds University. "This was in Saudi Arabia, a country with the holiest sites in Islam at Mecca and Medina. This created a new form of anti-Americanism that cannot in any way be related to Israel."

To these newest and most savage anti-Americans, Israel is secondary. The primary crime is blasphemy against the holiest Islamic soil. One widely circulated picture of two women GIs in a Jeep, their shirts unbuttoned to their waists, driving across the Arabian desert, was enough to inflame the sensibilities of thousands of devout Muslims and to fling the most unstable of them into the arms of the extremists. They had a point but not one that justifies murder. Islam, at heart, is as peaceful a creed as Christianity.

The truth about the Gulf war was that the Americans saved an Arab state, Kuwait, from Saddam Hussein, the most savage oppressor in the region. They would have been as surely damned for not doing this as much as they are now damned for doing it. Now they are also damned by the chatterers for keeping the pressure on Saddam. Do the chatterers know what Saddam is still doing? I do and I'm with the Americans.

Of course America has made terrible mistakes in the Middle East. Much resentment would have been and may still be prevented by a humane settlement with the Palestinians. But America was usually trying to do the right thing, always with the collusion of large sections, if not the majority, of the Arab population. As Winston Churchill said, the Americans usually do the right thing once they have tried all the alternatives.

Yet anti-Americanism has become the savage reflex of the entire region. It is the result of cynical manipulation by, mostly, appalling Arab governments and by extremists who wish to relaunch a medieval war of civilisations between Christianity and Islam.

T his is the anti-Americanism that informs the ignorant dinner party guests of the West who, in their comfortable stupidity, pretend to have more in common with fanatical theocrats than they do with the land of The Simpsons and John Updike.

Perhaps worst of all is the deep vacuity of this reflex malevolence. In truth there is little that can be said about the attack on America. Our "thinkers" are trapped in a history they do not understand. They can grasp global conflict only as a series of confrontations between competing humanist ideologies - most obviously capitalism and communism. But this is something different. It is a confrontation between civilisation and an atavistic savagery that has no time for the delicate ways of life we have, at such terrible cost, constructed. Unable to see this, the chatterers must search for something to say.

So they blame the victim. It is a heartbreaking spectacle of delusion turned to savagery. What has America done wrong? In the days since September 11, its president and people have done nothing but demonstrate dignity and restraint. Bush will lash out, the chatterers said. But he hasn't yet. Bush is a bumbling hick, they sneered. But he isn't. Even CNN, that usually incomprehensible tumult of undigested events, has been steady and calm, devoid of all trace of prejudice, xenophobia or empty emotion.

Civilisation? It lies exactly 3,000 miles to the west of where I write and some of it is in ruins. I just wish it was closer.

I am sick of my generation's whining ingratitude, its wilful, infantile loathing of the great, tumultuous, witty and infinitely clever nation that has so often saved us from ourselves. But I am heartened by something my 19- year-old daughter said: "America has always been magic to us, we don't understand why you lot hate it so much."

Anti-Americanism has never been right and I hope it never will be. Of course there are times for criticism, lampoons, even abuse. But this is not one of them. This is a time when we are being asked a question so simple that it is almost embarrassing - a question that should silence the Question Time morons, the sneering chatterers and the cold warriors, a question so elemental, so fundamental, so pristine that, luxuriating in our salons, we had forgotten it could even be asked. So face it, answer it, stand up and be counted.

What "pressure" did the US put on the UN to rally them against Iraq? Saddam Hussein's annexing of Kuwait wasn't "a problem?"

How quickly we forget our history. Remember "Operation Desert Shield?" The United States sent its forces to the Middle East under the pretext that they were going to defend Saudi Arabia against an Iraqi invasion. After everything was in place, they decided that "Desert Shield" would become "Desert Storm," and these forces would be used to drive Iraq out of Kuwait.

"The U.N. has mandated an armed response to get get Hussein out of Kuwait," they said at the time, "so we must do it." The fact that the U.N. has been "mandating" Israel's withdrawal from the occupied territories for years (with the U.S. and Israel often being the only opposing votes) never seemed to inspire even the mildest U.S. interest, but by gosh, this U.N. mandate must be followed!

That whole incident in the Persian Gulf was nothing more than manipulation of public opinion from the beginning. In retrospect, there are some facts related to the Gulf War that make the whole thing ridiculous from a U.S. perspective.

1. The U.S. ended up engaging in military action against one of the only Middle Eastern nations that had any degree of religious tolerance and where non-Islamic religions (with the exception of Judaism, of course) flourished. Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz, for example, is not a Moslem but is a Chaldean or Maronite Christian.

2. During this conflict, the U.S. sided with an array of Islamic nations that on any other day would be considered "intolerant." After hearing the stories about the Pentagon asking U.S. servicemen stationed in Saudi Arabia to refrain from openly showing religious medallions or other symbols (in case they offend the very people that the U.S. was supposed to be "protecting"), I didn't know whether to laugh or vomit. It was this incident in particular that made me decide that I wouldn't be so disappointed to see President Bush defeated in 1992.

3. Iraq and Kuwait had been engaged in a border dispute for years, primarily centered around the issue of directional drilling and the ownership of oil fields that straddled the border between the two nations. This became a particularly contentious issue in the late 1980s because Iraq was relying on its oil revenue to help it recover financially from its ten-year war with Iran. If anything, most Arab countries probably would have supported Iraq, since Kuwait has always been seen by these nations as nothing more than a huge pain in the ass.

I haven't "forgotten" that "history," because it was never written that way -- not accurately, anyway. I don't know what Canadian history books are like, but they don't seem to be much different than America's, unfortunately.

Let's get a take from one of the true insiders: Here's Wafic al Samarrai, Saddam's Head of Iraqi Military Intelligence at the time, from a BBC interview shown on PBS' Frontline (bold mine):

Q: Iraq's situation following the Iran/Iraq War.....
Samarrai: Iraq left the war with Iran heavy under debts. Iraq had ambitions ...Iraq looked to build a major military power and sturdy economy. Towards the end of the Iraq/Iran war the Iraqi army stood at one million and 300,000 soldiers and had more than 4500 tanks and more than 600 combat aircrafts and many pieces of artillery. In addition, this includes the popular army. When Saddam Hussein spoke he thought that Kuwait was the salvation from the poor economic state that resulted from the war with Iran . The economic status was good if not very good, but the financial state of the power..was not providing enough sources to re-vamp the army. Iraq was also heavily in debt and this put a restraint to his research in biological and other sorts of weapon. This is what is meant by the very poor economic state. But as for individuals, they were being able to manage quite alright.
Saddam Hussein always talk about great Iraq. Great Iraq meant that Iraq should become the strongest country in terms of the army, the economy and the politics and he always looked to expand...
</font color>

Q: His Arab Neighbors....
Samarrai: Generally speaking, he was not comfortable to dealings with all Iraq's neighbours. For instance, he looks at Syria and the leadership in Syria with very deep concern. He thought that intellectual threat came from Syria. He was neither comfortable with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, economically speaking. He thought and he felt that he fought for them and he did favours for them and they should pay him back. He had also a very antagonistic view towards Iran. So you can see he is not comfortable with any of his neighbours and he was quite evil. He often miscalculated situations and that's why we always suffered from this point during our war with Iran. He never thought or visualised that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will take a tough stand towards him.</font color> Even towards the very few hours before the invasion, he never thought that the allies will strike against him though we tried very hard to convince him of this.
We had reports, intelligence reports, that the Gulf States had very poor relations at the time with Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, we learned that there were very clear sensitivities in their relations. We also learned, and knew, that the relations between the Gulf States and Jordan were not at their best terms. He built his calculations on these factors and he did not expect that reactions will be severe.
Saddam, before invading Kuwait, improved his relations with Yemen, with Jordan and Egypt and he formed the Arab Cooperation Council. One of the main objectives of this was to prepare the ground for invading Kuwait or any other similar action.. and to guarantee that these three parties would not know the truth.
The relation between Iraq and Jordan was very strong but, in fact, Saddam was really watchful and quite cautious towards King Hussein.</font color>

Q: Saddam's ambition...
Samarrai: I believe that Saddam did not, and would not have been satisfied with only Kuwait. Had his invasion of Kuwait been without reprisals, he would have continued to take the Eastern part of Saudi Arabia.
In his further plans, we had planned this in detail, i.e. to take the oil wells in Saudi Arabia, had we engaged in fighting and had we been able to carry on our plans.</font color>

Now...what was that you were saying about "pretext?"

Here's what I say about "pretext":

1. I am a U.S. citizen, and I was living in the States during the Persian Gulf War, so my views have not been colored by "Canadian history books."

2. There is a larger oil presence in Alberta than anywhere else in the world except Texas, and when you speak to people in the industry you get a very different picture of how things work in international politics.

3. People of even moderate intelligence must ask themselves what exactly motivated the U.S. government when they pursued their course of action in the Middle East back in 1991. The United States was selling military hardware to Iraq up until the day of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and the research I did at the time on those last-minute meetings between the Iraqi government and U.S. ambassador April Glaspie indicated that the United States had given Hussein veiled approval to invade Kuwait. When you consider that Hussein has been permitted to remain in power long enough to outlast George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton (and will be in power long after George W. Bush leaves office unless he dies a natural death -- mark my words on this one), something doesn't seem quite right.

In one respect, Osama bin Laden was justified in his outrage at the Saudi government in response to their dealings with the United States in 1991. I have always believed that the real motive for the U.S. involvement in the Gulf War had nothing to do with Saddam Hussein and was nothing more than a back-door strategy to establish a permanent military presence in an oil-rich part of the world. Every day that passes lends more credence to this theory, and this is something that people should think about as events unfold in Afghanistan over the coming months.

If this sounds like a bizarre conspiracy theory to you, consider that the U.S. military campaign in the Middle East has now lasted longer than the Civil War and both World Wars -- combined.

I don't pretend to have any idea what was the deal with April Glaspie. It didn't then and doesn't now make sense that she would give some form of official word that it didn't make no nevermind if Iraq wanted to annex Kuwait, only for her superiors to contradict her. If this was some kind of brilliant master plan, the GHW Bush admin was really clever in making it look like Keystone Global Kops.

Regarding your charge that Saddam Hussein has been "permitted" to remain in power (as if the West has some use for him rather than being fearful of the bloody quagmire extracting him would cause), that suggests that world affairs are so well in hand that something like the Glaspie situation wouldn't have even happened.

Besides, the point of my last post wasn't to argue what was in the mind of the US and its UN allies as much as I was showing that the idea that Saddam was a threat to the Saudis wasn't a fantasy spun as cover for restoring Kuwait to it's ruling family.

It's a fact, Jack (or Jackie): Saddam Hussein DID have eyes on Saudi Arabia, and Desert Shield thwarted him. No less an authority than his military intelligence chief backs that charge up.

As a "Yankee" who grew up in small-town New England in the '50's, I have long been greatful for the "Heritage" of the English Peoples.

I wish the "Times" would let me thank the author directly for his honest attempt to assess our culture.

We ARE "The GOOD GUYS" in this terrible conflict.

The tragedy is, we will now be forced to CRUSH a conflicting culture in order to survive.

Once before, we were faced with "Kamikazes,"--& were forced to crush a competing culture whose only purpose was our annihilation. We NOW face a similar enemy; we are NOW forced to decide--once again--; if OUR culture should survive, if THEIR culture must expire to allow us to continue!--a choice NO civilized culture should be forced to make!

At the end of WWII, the psychotic element of Japanese culture FORCED this horrible decision upon us; now we face the SAME decision, forced upon us by the psychotic followers of a perverted form of Islam.

I sadly think that our answer MUST be the same--WE are STILL the "GOOD GUYS!!"

We must NOT ONLY be admired (however begrudgingly,) but FEARED.

The CRETINOUS Psychopaths who attacked us & MURDERED our innocents (women & children) MUST learn to be TERRIFIED of us.

They must lose one or more cities to HORRIFYING nuclear destruction; they & their offspring must be taught to fear us for GENERATIONS.

The ONLY deterrent to suicidal psychopaths is TOTAL, MIND-NUMBING FEAR.

So be it.

Doc

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