Posted on 09/13/2001 6:33:57 AM PDT by getoffmylawn
Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.
Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.
But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences. US political leaders are doing their people no favours by reinforcing popular ignorance with self-referential rhetoric. And the echoing chorus of Tony Blair, whose determination to bind Britain ever closer to US foreign policy ratchets up the threat to our own cities, will only fuel anti-western sentiment. So will calls for the defence of "civilisation", with its overtones of Samuel Huntington's poisonous theories of post-cold war confrontation between the west and Islam, heightening perceptions of racism and hypocrisy.
As Mahatma Gandhi famously remarked when asked his opinion of western civilisation, it would be a good idea. Since George Bush's father inaugurated his new world order a decade ago, the US, supported by its British ally, bestrides the world like a colossus. Unconstrained by any superpower rival or system of global governance, the US giant has rewritten the global financial and trading system in its own interest; ripped up a string of treaties it finds inconvenient; sent troops to every corner of the globe; bombed Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Iraq without troubling the United Nations; maintained a string of murderous embargos against recalcitrant regimes; and recklessly thrown its weight behind Israel's 34-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the Palestinian intifada rages.
If, as yesterday's Wall Street Journal insisted, the east coast carnage was the fruit of the Clinton administration's Munich-like appeasement of the Palestinians, the mind boggles as to what US Republicans imagine to be a Churchillian response.
It is this record of unabashed national egotism and arrogance that drives anti-Americanism among swaths of the world's population, for whom there is little democracy in the current distribution of global wealth and power. If it turns out that Tuesday's attacks were the work of Osama bin Laden's supporters, the sense that the Americans are once again reaping a dragons' teeth harvest they themselves sowed will be overwhelming.
It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth.
But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world.
All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday.
Already, the Bush administration is assembling an international coalition for an Israeli-style war against terrorism, as if such counter-productive acts of outrage had an existence separate from the social conditions out of which they arise. But for every "terror network" that is rooted out, another will emerge - until the injustices and inequalities that produce them are addressed.
Yes the Guardian is left wing; it does have a romantic view of the Arab world and has an underlying anti-Semitism. I however have the opposite views in those respects. Nevertheless, having read more posts than I care to count I feel there is a need for a little bitch slapping of the hysterical nonsense that has been posted.
Most but not all of what the Guardian says is perfectly correct. All the wars you have been waging are against those not able to defend themselves, for it has become quite plain that any country that can kill half a dozen American will have nothing to fear from Uncle Sam.
Many Iraqi wife has received a telephone call from the authorities notifying her that her husband who left for work this morning will not becoming home because he has become collateral damage to American bombs and missiles that have destroyed his place of work. Is Iraq at war with America, did the UN sanction these over flights by the Americans and their British lackeys? It has been decided by your country to violate the air space of another and randomly visit death and destruction upon the inhabitants because you are frustrated that you have been unable to starve them. I won’t elaborate upon shooting down Iranian civilian aircraft killing everyone on board. And I will only mention in passing the complicity, no let us say the driving force behind shooting down civilian aircraft in Peru and other parts of Latin America. These things were not done by Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Idi Amin or the whole Parthenon of bogey men you have brought up abhor. No Veronica, Americans did these horrendous acts.
Yesterday your Command and Control centers were attacked, fortunately the White House escaped due to events beyond the control of the your enemy. There was collateral damage – ask CNN there is always collateral damage. It is hard for you to accept that perhaps the death of 10,000 Americans could be described so callously. It was also hard for the Serbs, Iraqis, Iranians, and Sudanese etc. to hear that their fellow countrymen and loved ones were dismissed as collateral damage after a military operation.
So stand up straight, stop you wailing about being victims, start thinking and stare reality in the face. What happened a couple of days ago have more far reaching implications than any of you realize at this moment – you have suffered a great defeat, accept that fact. Your enemy gained a stature that they have not had since Suliman the Magnificent. The Islamic world is rejoicing. If the response were to bomb Afghanistan that would be a joke – two minutes after you had bombed it, no one would notice the difference unless they had a photograph of the rubble, before and after. In fact the whole of Islam would love such a ludicrous and ineffectual response, as another example of the evilness of the great Satan. I don’t know what, make my day, in Arabic is I can’t believe that sentiment or something similar is not in every Arab’s mind.
What would really worry them is that Americans would really start to think. Then they could have big problems, If I were their minister of disinformation the White House would be flooded with Faxes and E-mails demanding the carpet bombing of Afghanistan, with a couple of nukes thrown it. To really infuriate a dozen other countries – that’s not going to happen but there no harm in trying.
This is enough for now to put half this thread in orbit…
On the matter of sanctions, however much I wish they worked, they usually do far more harm than good. Having lived in two countries under long-term broad economic sanctions (Cambodia and former Yugoslavia), I must say the results up close are far different than one might expect from a distance. These sanctions only serve to entrench a mafia-style regime within the country and encourage mafia-style factions in bordering countries. (There is ALWAYS a black market!) A recent case in point being Macedonia: economically devastated by the broad sanctions against her largest trading partner Yugoslavia, an entrenched black market mafia gaining more and more power, militarily and politically.
Sorry to say, broad sanctions only help the bad guys.
It isn't, of course, but remind yourself that we haven't killed anything on the order of a million Iraqis; that's simply a number some propagandist picked out to sound good. How many people believe it, though? (Please, don't rejoin that "our" trade embargo is responsible for Iraqi kiddies dying from lack of medicine in those numbers - for one thing it isn't "our" embargo, it's the U.N.'s, for another, such numbers are purely speculative in any case).
And, by the way, not everyone in Iraq mourns the demise of the Republican Guard, those that actually did die, that is. They were noted for their enthusiastic repression of the Shiite population, at the very least.
But other than that, I agree with you, at least insofar as there's actually U.S. foreign policy activity that people don't like. Lots of people; you can't please everyone, but not everyone responds by murdering 5000 innocent people, and we absolutely have not. I'm not buying the moral equivalency of that activity with the pitfalls and mistakes of five decades of U.S. foreign policy, it's simply not the same thing.
I still say that we all are advocating the most LONG-TERM policy suggested. We should inflict such carnage that, unto the 50th generation, their children's children's children cringe when they hear an aircraft overhead or hear the roar of a diesel engine. It should be a destruction so vast and so complete that it enters their mythology as God himself taking vengeance on their people.
You can call this feminization or whatever you want. I want them dead and, if it comes to it, it will be face-to-face if necessary. I see it as feminization and hysterics when someone decides that they would just as soon not do anything about the situation, just lay there and take it.
Just like a pu$$y.
It dismays me that these people, these "push button warriors", are, in essence, chimping for this:
"The U.N. is not just, as many Americans suspect, a group of incompetent busybodies. It is, instead, a global criminal enterprise determined to shift power away from individuals and sovereign nation-states to a small band of unaccountable international elites." –Joseph Farah
"Their vision, in a sentence, is a nipple ring on every chest, a homosexual on every student body council, a Satanist at every religious gathering and an imperial militia to enforce it all." --Dorian Ian Atherton on the NWO Globalists ****
Agreed.
They killed thousands of truly innocent people.
Yup, they did.
They knew in their heart of hearts that they were being evil, and that the true Creator was grieved by their bitter hatred.
Nope. If you believe this, then you don't have a clue. They honestly believe, in their heart of hearts, that they are fighting injustice in the only way left to them; they see themselves as David to our Goliath. They believe, in their heart of hearts, that the true Creator will justify them in their actions at the last day.
They chose Allah (which is just another name for Satan)...
References for this piece of information?
... as their god, and obeyed him, instead of the one who made them, and their consciences were screaming at them, as they would be in ANY man.
Nope. Their consciences are telling them that they've done the right thing. They're sleeping just fine tonight. They're dancing in the streets at the idea that the little guy may have finally got the big guy's attention.
They rejected God, in their bitterness and pride.
Nope. They believe, in their heart of hearts, that we did, long ago. They don't believe that God is a capitalist.
Thanks...I caught my mistake in post #59...sorry, I hate botching details... :-(
So those are the only choices, huh? And here I thought we could use force to retalliate against the perpetrators of an act of war. I didn't realize we'd have to nuke New Zealand and Outer Mongolia also. Dang, I guess I didn't read the rules real carefully...you're morally superior to me so you must be right.
Because of your superiority, I nominate you to be our ambassor for "getting along with everybody." Please hop on the first flight to Baghdad and tell Saddam we want to be his friend. Then go take a plate of cookies to Quaddafi and bin Laden.
After that, we can all hold hands and sing "We are the World".
That is simply not true. You crush the Arab terrorist network and you put a financial and military gun to the head of every Arab/Muslim nation. You apply the pressure and you ignore their whining and you squeeze. You hunt the b#stards down before they can do anything , you torment their newspapers, you harrass their leaders, you squeeze their banks. You arrest them, uou harrass their families, you track them, you make their lives miserable and their sponsors jittery.
All this other handwringing is for pople who didnt lose 30,000 civilians in a single day
The United States has repeatedly bombed and starved innocents around the world. The generally-accepted figure is that 750,000 to a 1.5 million Iraqis have died due to the US embargo (and, yes, it is a US embargo - the UN was bullied into accepting it). Not to mention that 200,000 were killed in the Gulf War, many without any reason except slaughter. What exactly do you think the difference is?
Oh (be still dear heart!) the wonderful bits of news -- nay, history! -- one learns from one's intellectual betters here at FR!
And many thanks for the caps. Otherwise I may have missed you wisdom.
This subject is roiling beneath the surface of so many of the other subjects that pop up around here; the relationship between our transformation from a Republic--which is a masculine form of government--into an empire--which is always effeminate; the ways republics make wars as opposed to Empires; the war between the sexes that has been sponsored by the very people who are whipping up blood lust today. (Gender feminists, as we all know, are the geisha girls of plutocratic capitalism.)
Oh, it's a rich, rich vein to mine. Maybe too rich....
My ancestor who fought with Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours (against Islam!!) was prepared to die to defend Christianity and the West. My ancestors who brought King John to book at Runnymeade were willing to die to protect their liberties. My forebears who fought in the French and Indian War, the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, WWI, and WWII were willing to die, and in several cases did, to preserve their liberties and way of life. We must be prepared at this time to do whatever is necessary to defend the West and our liberties against radical Islam. It will neither be easy nor quick. We have no other choice but surrender. And, I, for one, am not willing to stand aside and let these scum, for that is what they are, win. I hate war, as Sherman did. But if we must wage it, we must wage it with the utter ruthlessness that ensures that no one will ever desire to fight us again.
If you haven't the stomach for the coming war, then stand aside and let America get on with what's necessary.
Because of the Iraqi regime, you mean.
Of course , youre suggesting that our actions should have been different, right? Like what? Befriending Hussein and telling "The Jews" to take a hike ? (thats usually the underlying theme with "you people")
Yes, Fitz, I just knew there would be some idiots on FR, that would defend the attacks. I was right.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.