All? No. Not even most. But many.
There is no contradiction between not wanting Australians to kill innocents and hoping that an aggressive, terrorist nation gets its arses handed to it in an unexpected manner.
It is startling that American people manage to see themselves as good guys. Maybe it’s that they don’t know what they’re responsible for. Maybe they don’t realise that living in a democracy means that they are personally responsible for things their government does in their name. Maybe they’re sufficiently morally flexible to disown responsibility for the deaths they cause. Maybe they’re just able to maintain a comfortable level of ignorance. Maybe they’re happy to buy into the hype of a ‘freedom’ that they work so hard to supress around the world. I don’t know.
It still doesn’t absolve responsibility. And the worst part is that until something brings it to their attention, they can live in a comfortable little cocoon.
Is the US worse than any other empirical power throughout history? In moral terms, probably not. Empires have always had the problem that those living in the provinces and outside the empire have objected to living in repression for the benefit of their imperial masters. It’s just that a combination of modern weaponry that makes it easier to cause massive casualties with less relative cost, combined with a media that - if it chooses, and very recently it has chosen not to - can bring the grim realities home, has the ability to throw the grim side of imperialism into sharper relief.
If you do not accept that an unwilling empire is morally unacceptable to maintain - and this is a view that has only come to be accepted by the public relatively recently - then this is not a problem. It wasn’t for the Romans. It wasn’t for the French. It wasn’t for the British. Hell - it wasn’t until Viet Nam that it became a problem for most around the world.
If you believe, however, that there is no moral imperative for maintaining an empire, then one must accept that turnabout is fair play. If the US and its allies are willing to massacre, then so must they be willing to be subject to massacre. If the US sees fit to cluster bomb civilians in Afghanistan, it cannot morally object if others choose to slaughter its otherwise unwitting civilians. If Bush orders the death of another head of state, he too is fair game.
This is nothing to do with Hussein. He’s a regional thug that should be removed. But this is not something that any other nation, or small group thereof, is entitled to do. And, as has been proved, Iraq is not the greatest threat to order that the world faces right now.
