From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Aug 13 2002 - 18:32:40 MDT
-- Amara Graps <amara@amara.com> wrote:
>
> >There is a huge missed opportunity here: right after 911 the US
> >government could have acted as a paragon of democracy, the open
> >societiy and human rights. It would have earned it further respect
>
> 100% in agreement !!
>
> During the week after September 11, I was finishing my bike trip in
> Tenerife and spending it with a group of volcanologists on the top of
> El Teide volcano in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.
> They were expecting something like
> WWIII to break out, and instead the U.S. government deliberated long
> and hard about how best to respond. That impressed the nonAmericans
in
> this group of people.
FIne. Though just because our leaders decided to respond in a way your
buddies didn't agree with does not make the response wrong.
> It makes me sad and also angry that such a great opportunity was
> missed. The U.S. government has a most amazing document called the
> Constitution
> and an amazing ability to be open to changes, but instead it followed
> a
> very old and well-worn path that thousands of years of human history
> has shown will fail. Following fears.
I don't call cleaning out the vipers that have infested your home to be
'following fears'. If vipers have stung you in bed one morning, any
sane individual is going to call the exterminators and impose a very
severe 'no snakes in the house' rule from there on out. Being cozy and
cuddly to snakes just gets you bitten again.
> Instead of the world being more open,
> and differences between cultures and religions being accepted and
> understood better, now the world is more closed, much much less free
> and several orders of magnitude more paranoid than it was before.
Who created the paranoia? Who created the violence? The muslim world
has consistently shown that it is the one that makes the biggest
miscalculations and misunderstandings. First they thought we wouldn't
defend Kuwait and Saudi Arabia against Iraq, then they thought,
primarily because of the wimpy 'I feel your pain' politics of the
1992-2000 period here in the US, that we wouldn't respond to the 9/11
attack. The muslim press continues to promote lies and misperceptions
about the US, as has been reported by many muslim Americans who have
gone back to their home countries to visit relatives. Their relatives,
they say, have a very distorted picture of the US and do not understand
us at all.
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