Teevee, You write,
America has eliminated 100's of thousands of enemies of
America, with high percentages of innocent civilian deaths, through proxies such as Pinoche, the Shah, the Royal Saudi family
etc.
Lets suppose that foreigners perhaps killed some people at the behest of the US government. Has this happened in the last ten years? US policy did change after the Soviet collapse. Not consistently, but it did change once the Perfectly Stupid (communist) Idea failed in the Soviet Union. Much less interference in the affairs of other countries the last ten years because they aren't fighting communism anymore.
Unfortunately US policy makers have the attention spans of gnats.
They are hypnotized by oil Saudi problem was brought to their attention years ago but with the apparent stability of the regime US let it slide. And anyway, what could they have done about it? (Quite a bit, I think.),
Policy is distorted by internal US interests (eg Cuba and the Senator from Bacardi, Jesse Helms),
Policy is shaped by insularity and ignorance - Rice, Bush's security adviser didn't even know what US's largest trading partner is. What other gaps might there be in her knowledge?
US policy makers pay far too much attention to the desk bound and not nearly enough to those in the field.
US intelligence employees are far too under represented in terms of minorities.
US let their "proxies" finance the spread of their totalitarian Islamist virus throughout the world. Careless, very careless. US woke up 9/11 (as did Britain). There is a choice here: let these people become more established and go through another 40 years of combatting yet another Perfectly Stupid Idea or deal with them directly now which will take a while but probably not 40 years.
What the Taleban did to Afghanistan could be done to (eg) Egypt, an important country, and make the people there as poor and miserable as those in Afghanistan.
These Islamists are far more dangerous than the Communists ever were.
The US is a pain in the ass to a lot of folk (us Canadians know it) but as countries go, it's not bad and it's the world's only super power right now and they're starting to get it. We can't get too fussed about their plentiful past errors. What we have to be clear about is what they're doing today. |
