The last 15 years without America?
Victor Davis Hanson asks us to imaginea world without America in his Friday column:
"Imagine a world in which there was no United States during the last 15 years. Iraq, Iran, and Libya would now have nukes. Afghanistan would remain a seventh-century Islamic terrorist haven sending out the minions of Zarqawi and Bin Laden worldwide. The lieutenants of Noriega, Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam, and Moammar Khaddafi would no doubt be adjudicating human rights at the United Nations. The Ortega Brothers and Fidel Castro, not democracy, would be the exemplars of Latin America. Bosnia and Kosovo would be national graveyards like Pol Pot's Cambodia. Add in Kurdistan as well %u2014 the periodic laboratory for Saddam's latest varieties of gas. Saddam himself, of course, would have statues throughout the Gulf attesting to his control of half the world's oil reservoirs. Europeans would be in two-day mourning that their arms sales to Arab monstrocracies ensured a second holocaust. North Korea would be shooting missiles over Tokyo from its new bases around Seoul and Pusan. For their own survival, Germany, Taiwan, and Japan would all now be nuclear."
posted by Chester at 1/08/2005 01:44:00 PM
1 Comments:
It is always wonderful to witness a complex, international, multi-cultural issue reduced to a simple sound bite of information and the response...it's all McDonalds fault.
Things are never that cut and dry. And in todays world it takes years to find out the cause of issues, and even more years to find out the truth.
In a world where the facts are slow in finding their way to the surface, it is always fun to see the opinions and perceptions of truth find their way to the masses in the blink of an eye...or the spin of a sound bite.
When the dust settles on this, when the Neo-Cons have left, when Americans have come home...we will learn the facts. For now...we will just continue to think we are right...like we have always thought we are right until the truth...and the facts show their face.
Over 50 years ago we were started on this path by two men...one an Eqyptian teacher who went home and single handedly started the Islamic Militant movement after witnessing what American truely was...and correctly blameing freedom and lack of religeous (read moral) fiber in it's people. And at the same time a Professor from Chicago who witnessed the same thing at the same time but blamed it on the Liberals and our country lacking moral fiber.
There solutions were different...one believing that Western (read Democratic) influence should be fought at all cost inorder to save Islam. The other felt that a new conservative thinking needed to be put in place, and that only a strong, unified conservative nation could survive.
Now we are paying the price...as one thinks that the only way to save their world is to fight ours and its influence...and the other feels the only way to save ours is to propogate our percieved values of freedom and democracy on the rest of the world.
And now we are locked in a War on Terror that we created...and that we fuel.
The facts are that you can't make a blanket statement like "The world without American for 15 years", because that list is dynamic. Some we caused. Some we helped. Some we fueled. It's not that cut and dry.
As a people we should play more chess...and spend less time at the checkers table.
CL
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