Zonder, I've got a lot to do the next few days so I won't be posting much. I'll try and make this a good one.
Are you under the impression that the US... as the defender of the "modern", has never supported fascist rulers and religious regimes?
No. It has done all the things you mention, and more besides, I'm sure. The concern of the US and its allies during the period when most of those things were done was defined by the Cold War standoff with the Soviets. Since the wall came down and Soviet "communism" collapsed as an effective, expansionary ideology we have seen practically no intervention by the US in the affairs of other countries on the scale or of type we saw during the Cold War.
The communist ideology the Soviets were trying to foster throughout the world was utopian, tyrannical, and undemocratic and, as such, was clearly archaic and directly in conflict with modernity. The US and its allies had to resist it. Just having better ideas does not guarantee success or freedom. Some of the regimes the US supported during the time were horrible and the only virtue they had was that they were anti-communist; quite a number certainly were not modernist. Both sides had some really nasty allies and clients.
A lot of bad things were done during the Cold War because it was a war, make no mistake about it, and a lot of folk suffered and died, as in every war. It was horrible and tragic and I think it regrettable monuments and observance days have not been established as they have been for WW1 and WW2.
But that was then, this is now. Nadine Carroll summed it up rather well in her reply to you and I think the final part dead on:
The Cold War is over, and the US won. Globalization is pushing the success and ideas of the US into the faces of many countries in the ME who are not ready to take it, thus we have the Islamofascist backlash, well funded with Saudi petrodollars. That is today's struggle.
She omitted to mention Pakistan and some other Asian countries where the same conflicts are stirred up financed also by Saudi money.
I describe it as a struggle between democracy/science and rulers/faith. (So do the islamofascists). This was posted here last Winter. You might find it interesting:
iran-bulletin.org
In the final paragraph you write:
"US as fighter against enemies of the modern world" sounds all well and good, but the reality is that it is just another country operating under its own risk/benefit analyses.
I think plenty of US citizens believe this also and looked at from a certain point of view is correct, but the US is more than just another country (I'm not a US citizen; it's not chauvinism makes me write this), it's also the world's greatest example of modernity and its citizens and ideas are necessarily in conflict with those of archaic people and places.
The US is not even particularly in harmony always with its own place in the world. I wrote this short comment to a board member recently:
"The West, and the US which is the embodiment of modernity, is pressing the archaic world to come along in the direction of modernity and this is good because it leads in the direction of democracy, freedom and material well being. But it's hard for folk willing to leave the archaic realm to start on the first few steps only to find the West saying, in effect, "Good for you, but actually, in your case it's only going to be pretend steps because we need to protect our cotton farmers [subsidies have reduced world price to the cost of South African producer] and so this year, and probably for the forseeable future, you'll have to put your kids out in the field rather than sending them to school. Nonetheless, despite this hiccup in the roll out of modernity, we do expect you to give us total access to your markets and resources...."
In addition to the understandable GFY reaction it leaves the citizen of the undeveloped place open to the dishonest, anti-modernist, obscurantist, totalitarian, anti-science, utopian messages of marxists, islamists, maoists, fascists and other denizens of various retrograde, anti-intellectual slums."
The US makes its role of leader of the modern world far more difficult than need be. I put out the modernity versus archaic description because it makes clear what the stakes are and what the strategy that will ultimately work should be. Part of that strategy should be to make embracing modernity easy as possible because even then, for an unprivileged person in a poor country, it's still hard, hard work.
Another part of the strategy should be to take the struggle to the aggressor and that does mean the ME and Asia. It does mean changing the conditions for the archaic (failed) states there and this does include regime change for Iraq which also is home to an expansionary ideology every bit as archaic, violent and expansionary as the islamofascists (see Big Bull's post today).
It means fully supporting those states which are trying to become modern.
It means supporting in a very real way with security and money those muslim elements who don't accept the Wahabist/Deobandist message and can provide it with competition.
It means tracking down and killing those terrorists who are operating a program of trans-national murder as part of the islamofascist program.
It means getting European politicians to take the islamofascists as seriously as their security services do. |
