<The difference between the US and a dictatorship like SH's is so obvious to me.>
The main reason I see a similarity, is that I believe the Means Determines the Ends. If you use certain methods, you get certain results, and you won't get certain other results. I see Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1991, and the U.S.'s invasion of Iraq in 2003, as essentially identical in Means. Both were wars of conquest, and any differences are only details. Using those Means, I don't believe you can achieve the Ends of democracy and freedom. If it happens, I will be very surprised, and forced to re-evaluate my beliefs.
<Most Americans have so little tolerance for pain and suffering of the innocent and helpless that we forget we look like a bully trying to end it.>
America tolerated the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of Native tribes, from the 1600s until the early 1900s. America tolerated slavery until the 1860s, and a status for blacks that was little better than slavery, until the 1960s. Many urban black and native rural communities remain in 2003, pockets of poverty and social chaos, (=pain and suffering), equal to that seen in the shantytowns of Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia. America tolerates a foreign policy that brings oppression and poverty to many nations. We mostly tolerate it, by pretending it isn't so. I am constantly amazed at the mental gymnastics my fellow Americans go through, to ignore/minimise/rationalize all the evidence that the above is true. |
