From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Thu Dec 26 2002 - 09:33:35 MST
On Thu, Dec 26, 2002 at 10:22:03AM -0500, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
> Um... I suspect that the specific aspect Charlie Stross and I are both
> referring to is the manner in which the US clearly wants war, is looking
> for the slightest excuse, and failing the existence of any excuse will
> manufacture one while claiming that it is Iraq's fault and we were provoked.
Spot-on. You said it better than I could.
> Perhaps a case can be made that the US needs to pre-emptively invade Iraq
> in order to prevent them from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, but I
> don't think the current party line of "They're making us do it! Really!
> We were provoked!" is fooling anyone outside the US. And it *is* rather
> reminiscent, historically speaking, of Poland 1939.
What's more: there's a widespread lack of understanding of *WHY* so many
people in the middle-east or South America hate the USA. It's not a
fact of nature, it's not inevitable, and it doesn't need to be that way.
For about three or four generations, the State Department has approached
foreign affairs in a manner that has done an almost unimaginable amount of
damage to the USA's reputation in the world. There's a huge gap between
the USA's political self-image (cradle of democracy and so on), and the
way US superpower realpolitik since 1899 or so has functioned in the
rest of the world. As often as not US foreign policy fosters fascist
dictatorships and islamic theocracies in preference to democratically
elected parliaments -- especially if the corporate interests of US
multinationals with ties to members of the administration might come
under scrutiny by such governments. (This isn't news and it isn't an
accusation specifically aimed at the Bush presidency: read up on the
history of United Fruit if it doesn't ring any bells.)
The current business in Venezuela is just the latest in a sorry string
of incidents that include coups in Iran, Chile and Greece, invasions
in Panama, Cuba and Grenada, support for terrorists and war criminals
in Afghanistan, Iraq, and ... oh hell. The list goes on. Manuel Noriega,
Leopoldo Galtieri, Alfredo Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden --
they're all on the list of *BENEFICIARIES* of US largesse, until they
bit the hand that fed them. (Doubtless there are other, similarly nasty
specimens that haven't gnawed the feeding finger yet: a certain General
Musharraff springs to mind as a candidate, as does a King Fahd.)
Basically, US foreign policy has largely been based on supporting people
who do *not* share core American values, often at the expense of people
who do, or who are much more amenable to them. (The glaring exceptions
to this rule, western Europe and Japan, are special cases. And when
the shit hits the fan, these are the countries who are on the same side
as the USA, not the other side.)
I'd like to see a US administration try to reverse the long-term pattern,
and start making friends rather than enemies. But the pattern is so
entrenched that it would take a generation for such a program to bear
fruit, probably with some setbacks along the way -- and the term limits
imposed by the US political system make it difficult to see how such a
program could be sustained.
-- Charlie
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:58:54 MST