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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam Citron who wrote (68382)	3/9/2003 11:09:30 PM
From: Cary Salsberg	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 70976

RE: "...relative to the power we wielded, we have behaved more nobly that any other nation..." I think you and Sun have missed my point. For all of human history, the more powerful conquered the less powerful and the most powerful conquered the world, or tried to. In some cases, the conquerors were more benign than others. At the end of WW2, the US had the greatest margin of superior power, economic, military, nuclear, that has ever existed. At that time, we helped rebuild Europe, including Germany, and Japan. We helped establish th UN. We did not use our power to create an American empire. We did not use our power to launch a pre-emptive attack against the Soviet Union. Most of the US failings came during the Cold War, when we no longer had superior power and we faced a mortal threat to our existence. We generally followed the idea that "the enemy of mine enemy is my friend" and jumped into bed with all sorts of evil and criminality. The Vietnam War was the gravest error during that era. I think that the period after WW2 provides a good contrast to current times. The supposed fear of terrorism is prompting this administration to use our pre-eminent position of power in ways that were rejected after WW2. I think that patriotism and the understanding that this nation once acted nobly to rebuild the world from a position of unprecedented relative power is the best frame of reference from which to criticize the current administration.