<Being the world’s only true superpower involves taking some level of responsibility for the growth and development of every nation on earth. In some places our effort is minimal, in others, far more decisive.
We want as many people on earth as possible to be free, prosperous and democratic. >
Hi Michael, I'm not all that enthusiastic about democracy. I find it a very repressive way of running the show. It really is just confiscatory mob rule, expressed through some central bossy britches. There is nothing much ideal about it. It's lowest common denominator stuff. There's no shortage of bigotry, ignorance and suffocation of individuals in democracies and I mean carried out by the state, not by individuals.
"Taking some level of responsibility" would mean forming the United Nations into a sensible rule book instead of a WWII Victors' Club.
The specific objection of so many people around the world is that they do NOT want the USA to take responsibility for their growth and development. They want the USA to keep their hands off them.
The USA now has prisons with untried people held incommunicado in concentration camps. How many decades will this situation continue? While the exigencies of action and war mean the luxury of civilized laws such as habeas corpus aren't always available, at some stage, every human who is held by a civilized country should be tried under a common law rule book.
If the USA doesn't do that, the similarity with the usual repressive, totalitarian, thuggish, malevolent dictators becomes too close for comfort. Sure, the USA isn't far down the road. But when the human race sees the biggest ape in the jungle adopting threatening characteristics, it's not surprising that they get the heebie jeebies.
History is replete with expansionary empires. The USA was born in one and wrote a good rant about it in The Declaration of Independence, which wasn't intended to include slaves, aborigines and others who weren't worthy of independence and were specifically excluded. Those of us around the world who bear more than a passing resemblance to natives and slaves worry when we see unilateral 'with us or against us' superstitious ravings of 'God on our side' directing a vast military machine.
To overcome this fear and still get security for the USA, the USA needs to take up the responsibility you suggest, and declare they intend to conquer Iraq, set up a United Nations reconstitution convention there, [good riddance to France's pre-eminent position in that], and get a new and improved international rule book developed, then hand Iraq over to that new federal system as the first entry, with the USA as the second, simultaneous entry.
If the USA is serious about some level of responsibility, that's what they should do. If they are not prepared to do that then you'll have to accept that I don't believe that the USA has actually got the great intentions suggested and is really interested in a crusade, oil, hegemoney, hegemony and concentration camps for unapproved persons.
Sure, initially they are really bad people in Guantanamo Bay and only one or two innocents are having their lives collaterally damaged, but give it an inch and pretty soon they have gone all sorts of non-persons crowded in. Homeland Security will look suspiciously like the KGB. You know the old story, "First they came for the terrorists, but I wasn't a terrorist, so that was okay, then they came for the enemy combatants but I wasn't one of them so that was fine, then they rounded up some security risks, but I wasn't a security risk, I was worried about my security, so that was good too, .... well, you know how authoritarian people go when they've got the bit between their teeth".
That's our fear anyway.
We, the Nervous Nellies,
Mqurice |
