“After leaving Afghanistan, the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle, thinking that the Americans were like the Russians,” bin Laden said. “The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized more than before that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat. And America forgot all the hoopla and media propaganda . . . about being the world leader and the leader of the New World Order, and after a few blows they forgot about this title and left, dragging their corpses and their shameful defeat.”
There sure were plenty of the them at Bekeley. It was a pretty common among the anti-war folks that Ho Chi Minh was a hero who deserved to govern all of Vietnam and who would do a better job than a US-backed government.
I thought I recognized you, december. I was there as well. Were you the guy who grew his hair just over his collar and looked about nervously worrying that somebody from work might see you? You were in the White Studies Program, were you not?
You were really just hoping to catch a little of that Free Love, weren’t you? Can’t say as I blame you. It was far-fucking-out!
And as to whether this debacle is seen by the American people as a shining moment in our history, well, that remains to be seen. From here, its starting to look very much like a qwagm…a quaggme…a quackmire…hell, I cant spell that quicksand/tar pit kind of swampy thing.
So what do you think? Take a guess. At what point in time will our loses to “nation building” actually exceed our losses to the actual “war”? September? Sooner? Starting to look like August, at this rate. How many victory celebrations, how many Gloat on the Boat photo ops can GeeDubya get away with before America collectively pukes our guts out?
december:Uh, we have overthrown an evil regime that practiced widespread, barbaric torture, and which killed millions of people in the wars it started.
Most of them with U.S. encouragement and support, of course, since most Iraqi-caused casualties occurred in the 1980’s Iran-Iraq war, during which the U.S. “renewed ties with Iraq” and “provided intelligence and aid to ensure Iraq would not be defeated by Iran”.
In fact, when the government of Iran declared its commitment to overthrowing the very same Iraqi regime that you’re now so proud of our having overthrown, our government responded: “The United States finds the present Iranian regime’s intransigent refusal to deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of neighboring Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behavior among nations and the moral and religious basis which it claims.”
Another important lesson to learn from this situation, ISTM, is that we should avoid supporting evil, torturing, warmongering regimes in the first place, rather than building them up when we find them convenient for our interests and then knocking them down when they’ve outlived their usefulness.
Kimstu, whatever blame the US deserves for Saddam’s atrocities is separate from the question I was addressing, which was whether our victory in Iraq did any good for the world.
december:Kimstu, whatever blame the US deserves for Saddam’s atrocities is separate from the question I was addressing, which was whether our victory in Iraq did any good for the world.
It’s actually not separate, but quite closely related. It has a direct impact on whether the world sees our invasion of Iraq as a courageous altruistic effort to destroy tyranny, or as a cynical self-seeking decision to get rid of an ally-turned-enemy who’s no longer any use to us.
Whatever good or ill our presence in Iraq may do will be largely determined by what the rest of the world believes about our motives for being there. Brushing aside the issue of our previous relationship with Saddam Hussein (especially considering that we still continue to support several similarly repressive regimes) is not likely to reassure anybody that this time they can trust us.
Give me a break. If anti-war types really wanted the world to have a positive view of the United States, they wouldn’t devote so much energy to exaggerating our faults while ignoring all the good we do.
Mmm… well, we DO have a fully functional counterculture at the moment, but it’s nowhere near as plugged in, politically, as the one during the late sixties.
I do suspect, however, that if today’s teenagers and twentysomethings had to worry about being drafted and shipped to Iraq, whether they felt like going or not, that the current counterculture would get real frickin’ political, real frickin’ quick. Sometimes I look at a string of school shootings that shook up the nineties, and I wonder if we will ever see “conscription” again.
Then again, maybe we will. After all, the politicians who vote for it will not be the ones in a position to get shot by resentful draftees.
I might also point out that the war in Iraq is not over (regardless of what the President thinks), but it has been going on for less than a year.
There were no protests against the Vietnam War of which I am aware within the first year of our involvement in it.
december:If anti-war types really wanted the world to have a positive view of the United States, they wouldn’t devote so much energy to exaggerating our faults while ignoring all the good we do.
I don’t think that honestly criticizing particular US policies, past or present, equates to “exaggerating our faults” or “ignoring all the good we do.”
And I certainly don’t agree with you that it’s more patriotic just to propagandize and downplay your country’s faults than to try to actually fix them.
december: *The public can’t lose interest in the Iraq criticism, because they never even became interested in it. It’s just some anti-Bush folks looking for something to bitch and whine about. *
You mean “anti-Bush folks” like Republican Senator Richard Lugar, who recently "said he was “concerned that the administration’s initial stabilization and reconstruction efforts have been inadequate”? And
complained even more recently, “This idea that we will be in just as long as we need to and not a day more - we’ve got to get over that rhetoric! It is rubbish!”
Or like Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who said that “we may have underestimated or mischaracterized the challenges of establishing security and rebuilding Iraq”?
These and more severe criticisms have been all over the papers, december, in the US and worldwide. You are deluding yourself if you imagine that dissatisfaction with the invasion and occupation of Iraq is just the partisan bickering of a few “anti-Bush folks”.
december:If you think all the anti-US rhetoric is honest, then I’d like to offer you the chance to buy a bridge in Brooklyn.
Oh, I would no more claim that all anti-US rhetoric is honest than I would claim that all pro-US rhetoric is honest. I’m just taking exception to the idea that positive propaganda is necessarily the best way to show one’s patriotism.
Let’s take a real-life example here, december. Here are you and I, two American posters on the Straight Dope, both of us to some extent affecting the views other Dopers have of the US. Which of us do you think projects a better image of our country?
I’m an anti-war liberal who frequently criticizes the current Administration’s policies (and plenty of those of the previous Administration too), and a vocal critic of many US actions. Sometimes I’m wrong about what I say, and sometimes I’m right but annoying. Yet I think overall, I’m perceived more or less as a reasonably honest and intelligent person who tries to get the facts right, acknowledges common ground with opponents, and doesn’t skimp the details on complex issues. (Please correct me if I’m just deluding myself here, folks!
You’re a pro-war conservative who never misses an opportunity to boost the current Administration (and previous conservative ones) or to contradict its critics, and you’re always on the spot to point out positive effects of American actions. Yet you’re widely perceived—even by your fellow conservatives—as a stubborn ideologue much more interested in propaganda than in truth. Your name is practically synonymous around here with dishonest debating.
Now, which of us would you say is giving a better impression of America and Americans to the rest of the world? If pro-US boosterism is all it takes, then the answer would be you. Is it?
R_M: I challenge you to name one good thing the us has done in the last 40 years.
I’ll field that one, just to prove to december that it’s not true that we liberals just want to criticize the US. How about our donations for foreign aid, and our tax laws’ liberal stance toward private international charitable contributions?
