Re: Good news from Iraq!
Let's face it, the complete history behind this simply does not enter the public arena. Every time we look under the rug we find a whole stack of older, dirtier rugs beneath it... Most of you probably know that we gave the Saudis & Afghanis military and financial support in the late years of the cold war. Over the following decade, the soviets waged an imprudent war in the region that gradually weakened them to the point of collapse. Unfortunately, Bin Laden continued to receive at least $20Million a year from the CIA for several years after he had stopped fighting communism and had turned his attention to the looming threat of American economic imperialism. And of course that was around the same time that the Bin Laden family financed the 'Arbusto' Oil/Energy company that our minority elected president subsequently ran into the ground.
The point is, almost all of what we see and hear on the news (in ANY country) is propaganda intended to sway public opinion in favor of upcoming political initiatives. I surely don't have to remind anyone that the media in the states is privately owned, and the owners have their own political agendas as well. We don't hear about the back-scratching that goes on internationally among powerful families like the Bush's and Bin Laden's until well after the fact (or invasion as the case may be).
Is all of that bad? Truthfully I'm not sure, I mean it did win the cold war... but because of its clandestined tinkering with foreign politics (as well as flagrant war crimes and blatant civil rights violations), the United States no longer stands as the beacon of liberty and justice it once represented to the oppressed and downtrodden throughout the world. That will have a tremendous cost in terms of credibility,
which will likely take several administrations to repair.
Hopefully that'll give all the Faux news viewers a new angle to look at the war on terror from... and a realization that the US doesn't actually care about the tyranical dictators running the third world, since many of them were installed by us to begin with. What's in the best 'National Interest' as the popular term is these days, is to dismantle the economic and industrial capabilities of any nation that might one day pose a threat to our Unilateral policy-making, or better yet pit several of them against one another. The political realities are so incompatible with the self-righteous ideological fluff that we Americans are institutionally trained to believe from a very young age, that people dismiss the possibility and assume it really is a battle between good and evil...:| wake tf up please.
Sorry, I realize I barely touched on the Iraq situation, but neither did the president when convincing the public we needed to invade. All of the significant 'intelligence' they provided about WMD programs turned out to be alarmist nonsense (chem/bio weapons perhaps but that had nothing to do with 9/11, nor did Hussein). Hopefully I can go into greater detail in a later post.
Just because we're an ocean away doesn't mean the news is a damn soap opera, there are real people dying there every day, including innocent men, women and children...what will the survivors think of us? Will the United States be typecast on the global stage? Time will tell, but to the rest of the world: Americans are not all this way. The political experiment called 'America' provides glimpses into the best and worst of human potential, and most of us wrestle with that duality within ourselves on a regular basis. It is a human trait, not solely an American one.
Americans, stop marginalizing and trivializing other cultures and political systems.
World, I'm trying over here, don't generalize Americans as brainwashed Imperialists despite the evidence already presented in this thread.
-bt