Raymond: Your points about US Mideast policy and resentment
of it don't negate the justness and necessity of retaliation.
For the sake of our fat-assed SUVs, and before that our luxury sedans and extravagant skybuses, we have meddled incessantly in the affairs of the Middle East since the 1930's.
Truth in that, but there's also the little matter of so many Arabs being explicit and serious about wanting to push the Jews into the sea, and trying since 1948. Granting that dispossession of many Palestinians in setting up and sustaining Israel was/is illegitimate, many Arabs' notion of who are proper targets of retaliation forecloses any chance of a peaceful balance there. I agree with George Washington's farewell address, but since Tuesday I would not leave Israel alone to fend off the region's hyenas.
We are deeply resented in that part of the world for propping up some of the most wretched monarchist and fascist regimes in the world.
Yes, but they grew their own even if we watered them. From my Eurocentric perspective there's an obvious cause and effect relationship between Islam and what I'll accept from consensus reports (from Arabs as well) as the wretched state of so much of the Arab world. Sadly, we chose our interventions and now reap the long-simmering hate, but they manage to be wretched all by themselves. We just make a rich target to vent their anger. The parlous state of the Arab world, which bin Laden is exercised about in his 1996 tract, is the worldly realization of their primitive philosophy. It leads to primitive lives. I sense the usual envy behind the mask of asceticism and purity.
. . . all this is lost on the great number of contributors here who simply want to think about the next level of escalated involvement in the affairs of parts of the world where the bulk of ordinary populations are repulsed by the American approach.
I doubt most of us speaking out the last few days want much "involvement" for our nation in the Arab world. We just want to exterminate the terrorists. Kill and leave. If we had a president with a command of history, smart, who could speak (no, not Al Gore), he could address the Middle East troubles (speaking, even, directly to the Arabs) in a way that acknowledges the Palestinians' legitimate grievances yet explains why we will find and kill terrorists wherever and whenever we can. But our president would first have to begin visible retaliation before he could even hint that our Middle East policy may change in any way. Much as I disagree with our past ME policy, I wouldn't do or say anything that gives even the appearance of kow-towing to terrorism.
I find it fascinating that the "libs" on this thread (if I can use that discredited term) such as Cosmo, you and I can clearly empathize with the equivalent of Joe Six Pack in Cairo, Tehran or Kabul and understand their deep frustration with U.S. meddling. Others on this thread are blissfully unconcerned about these ordinary humans who've been pushed beyond their boiling point by U.S. arrogance.
The US, like the rest of the world, doesn't divide neatly into liberal and conservative. Many persons who call themselves conservatives would like to avoid foreign entanglements, but not because our nation is wrong or arrogant in the sides it picks. Rather, we can't do a good job of improving the situation by force, except in nations that share our European-born but now much more freedom-oriented value system and have seen it overriden by tyrants without popular support. Rarely turns out to be as temporary or as tyrannical as we think. Avoiding cesspools is common sense as well as good foreign policy, but that oily sheen on the cesspool has tempted us too often in the ME. |
