FrankW - I just wanted to thank you for taking time to compose a rebuttal to this "You're scared" nonsense.
My own feeling about the situation in Iraq is that there are certain people in this world who only understand the use of force to keep them in line, and that's just that.
I'm sure Faultline knows about East Palo Alto, down on the peninsula. That was recently the "Murder Capital of the Nation". Until, after this was written up in the national news, the police literally cleared the slum. They went in with heavily armed squads and applied zero tolerance and three strikes and you're out where it was needed for a change. Today, that's history. The crack dealers are gone, either in prison, dead from trying to take on the police, or else they've gone back to wherever the hell they came from (because it wasn't actually residents of East Palo Alto selling crack....), and the neighborhood is in the process of gentrification. It's possible for someone like me to rent an affordable apartment on the border, and I won't risk my life being out at night like I would have if I'd set foot near the area when I was working in Palo Alto in 1992. More work in the city needs to be done, particularly in the public school system there (you can get an earful talking with teachers...), but things have dramatically improved for the better.
This is just one of those examples where force was regrettably necessary to get anywhere. New York City was another example. The city had become a cesspool till they finally decided to clean things up.
In both NYC and EPA, there was some complaining about the fact (horrors!) that real estate companies and others could turn a profit on the gentrification; in NYC it was property values in the Times Square area and elsewhere which went way up in value once the pimps, hookers, and peep shows were cleared out and Disney moved in. And so ? Maybe it was so much better before....
The situation with people like Saddam Hussein, North Korea's leaders, and many others is that these people are like the crack dealers in East Palo Alto. The only way to rid the world of these sociopaths is by force, unless one is content to let them retire in comfort after generations have suffered at their hands.
Now, whether it was our job to deal with Iraq or not is the real question, not this peacenick blather we hear about. It was not NYC's job to clean out East Palo Alto, and it was not California's job to deal with the crime in NYC. These things had to be done locally, and the same could probably be said of Iraq.
The hypocrisy of having the world descending in the street (for once in their lives), to spew excrement at my head as an American for the fact that we took out Saddam Hussein makes me want to puke. I never see anyone in the world lift a finger when it's only Africans murdering a million other Africans (Rwanda...) At this point I could give a rat's ass what "the world" and above all what the Europeans in Brussels think any more. It's nothing but sour grapes at the United State's success. The day they show the same concern for all the real inhuman behavior that exists in the world is the day I'll take what "they" think seriously again.
It was not our responsibility to see that the violent "crack dealer" in Iraq was finally dealt with. The fact that there was money to be made on the side by associates of Bush in connection with the military industry is really besides the point. Now we've taken on the responsibility and inherited the mess and all the blame, while it's perfectly OK for a Roberto Mugabe to commit ethnocide under the flimsy pretext about genetically modified foodstuffs....
People like Jacob can dream on if they think I'm "scared". I'm not the one who's scared, as I haven't retreated up to Alaska with my vegetable garden. I simply consider terrorist criminals like bin Laden to be vermin that need to be hunted down and neutralized, the same way we have had to deal with individuals like McVeigh here. I'm not afraid of those losers. They will never change anything for the better in the world, and it's only the most delusional lunatics who can believe otherwise, or who take the rants of Islamists seriously, with their roadmaps for how everyone else should lead their lives. History will simply pass these people and their believers by.
Above all we should be moving to a sound long term energy policy, with greater self sufficiency, and let others in the world do business with the "drug dealers" in Saudi Arabia. |
