How can you have it BOTH ways. First you say, we shouldn't care that the rest of the world decries and condemns us for our talk of an attack on Iraq. NOw you do a 180 and say we SHOULD care that some perceive us as weak? Oh boy, are you confused.
No, Karen, I think you have conflated two things, actually four things, that are quite distinct.
1 & 2. Public diplomatic pronouncements vs. real perceptions. I've noticed before that you tend to take diplomatic pronouncements at face value. That's almost always a big mistake. They usually have some tangential relation to real opinions, at best. It's the real opinions that you have to try to fathom by reading between the lines, and most of all, noticing actions more than words.
3 & 4. Paying attention to the world's opinion vs. promising to be bound and tied by it -- to take no action unless we get a "Mother, may I?" from some international body. We need to pay attention to world opinion since it will affect us. IMO, the disrespect we permitted to grow in the Arab world has already affected us very badly. But that does not mean that it is at all in our interest to cripple the US foreign policy in the interests of the UN Security Council, as some would have us do. Considering the behavior of the UNSC, which generally acts for the naked short-term self-interest of the members, it's not in the rest of the world's interests that we do so either. It's very easy to call the US's foreign policy bad names, until you seriously compare it to any other country's foreign policy. Then, it looks positively altruistic by comparison. |
