See axis, your answer to people wanting to kill us is to kill all of them first.
My answer is, to stop acting like pricks and giving people reasons to try to kill us.
Some actions are indelible. The ink of history cannot be removed – merely cut out.
“Acting like pricks?” That’s subjective. The old adage: “If I don’t do it, somebody else will,” is a maxim of geopolitics. A constant. Bush’s aides, however repugnant to some, are essentially correct. It
is competent foreign policy to do now what we will not necessarily be as able to do down the road – even if that means engendering hatred or suspicion.
Again, you’re missing the point that certain people cannot effectively strike back. Vietnam, Cuba, and Libya all come to mind. Even Iraq was impotent to carry the war outside the Middle East. We can – for all intents and purposes – make far more enemies with far greater impunity than you realize.
yes yes, and everyone is jealous of us and THAT is why they attack us, it has NOTHING to do with the years of abuse, tyranny, and bullying that we subjected these people to consistantly...
Time to turn on your Reality mode,
people hate the US because we have been royally fucking them for decades, period. We have gotten involved in their private internal matters, destroying democratic and popular governments and replacing them with bourgeois and aristocratic tyrannical petty dictatorships that brutally oppress their own people. And that is only the start, You are deluding yourself if you think that any of the anti-us sentiment in the world today is to be blamed on anyone or thing other than US foreign policy.
Like the years of tyranny and abuse the United States sponsored in Afghanistan. Oh, wait …
Wake up and understand that some of the most potent threats have also been the most unlikely. Baader-Meinhoff were a bunch of bourgeois trust-fund socialists. Osama Bin Laden gained popularity by opposing what only a few years ago was seen as a necessary deployment by Saudi Arabians themselves.
As Phongn struggles to prove to you, certain issues are murky at best. The Middle East has three key problems: (A) a predisposition to embrace Islamofascism and theocratic rule that set themselves against the West even without instigation, (B) a history of corruption in the highest levels that routinely inhibits the growth of meaningful infrastructure for future sustenance, and (C) a mindset of institutional rape. Millions of Arabs know that they are nothing but whipping boys and trading cards for the Western world. Tokens on a game board valued for absence, silence, and ignorance above all else. We cannot step back. The global economy is too reliant on oil to spare these people. No matter what we do, they will hate us.
No. The anti-American sentiment in Europe is a result of a feeling of disenfranchisement with their own limited power in recent years. Nobody wants to play backseat driver to Washington anymore. They’ve got the can-do example of a fledgling European Union and a powerful motivator in Jacques Chirac’s France. They are increasingly jealous of George Bush and his unilateral prerogatives. They are increasingly concerned that our “rash decisions” will cost them something in the long run – all without their input. It’s not because of our foreign policy. It’s because of theirs. Or the lack thereof. It’s plain and simple want by the have-nots.
The anti-American sentiment in Russia? We toppled an empire in 1991. Reagan is the anti-Christ to those people. At least the Soviet Union kept the trains running on time. Hell, the whole reason Putin gets away with closing the doors and pretending he’s moving from within is because of his insistence that Russia do on its own in decades what American money could do in years. There’s a certain pride that comes of potential. There’s also a certain bitterness that comes of past glory now out of reach. Moscow didn’t oppose us because the war was “bad” or “unjust.” They did it because coordinated opposition helps the European Union come to fruition and puts egg on George Bush’s face. They want to see us stumble as badly as anyone.
China? Just like Britain vis a vie Germany c. 1900, the People’s Republic has no other worthy competitor but the United States, anathema to all that the Communist system holds dear. As with Russia, it’s more a matter of clashing giants bound to duke it out than true, meaningful griveances.
