Letters to the Editor
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What Glenn is missing
I mostly agree, but I think Glenn is ignoring two important points:
- The end of the Cold War. A large portion of the world that loved to have the U.S. as a counterbalance to the Soviet Union is now less than thrilled about a unipolar world. Bill Clinton's personal charisma helped slow the shift away from the U.S. as a global force for more-good-than-bad, but I think an eventual decline in world opinion of America was inevitable. There were ways to mitigate this, of course, but the current administration has not exactly prioritized it. The U.S. is just too powerful compared to the rest of the world today and there is a lot of natural resentment. If China emerges as a true superpower, or Russia becomes a threat to American allies, there may be a major shift back towards American popularity.
- The style and attitude of the Bush administration. The U.S. has often gone its own way in past decades, ignoring world opinion, but rarely with such scorn. The Bush crew have really made it clear that they simply are not interested in what the rest of the world thinks. This starts with policy statements that flatly reject any acknowledgment of world opinion, and trickles down to the simple level of diplomatic protocol blunders. Instead of politely differing with allies the U.S. has often said "we just don't care what you think; we'll lead and you have to follow."
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@Anon
Sure, if one equates the little guy with the civil liberties of american citizens, I absolutely agree. But I took the original context to mean a stabilizing force among the world's 'lesser nations'-- with 'little guys' being the really small and pathetic 'lesser nations'.
And thank you for the comment--the way I'm typing today I'm surprised anyone can read what the hell I'm writing.
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Paul Rosenberg
Paul Rosenberg, thanks for your constructive, informative posts. I especially like your concluding thought in your last post, “Satisfying our own sense of moral superiority, and thereby alienating the vast majority of people who would otherwise agree with us is neither very smart, nor, in the end, very moral, either.”
Far too many American politicians have used moral tricksterism to confuse voters. Candidates who claim ownership of morality at the exclusion of others, just as religions that claim they have the only real God or gods, don’t truly understand morality or why the only just outcome is doing what is best for the total community not the most powerful.
What we need in our next president, his staff and cabinet are citizens who have exhibited the kind of morality in their lives where humility and humanity are far more important than power. The life of politicians today, especially in a fish bowl world, makes this choice far from easy. While the MSM and authors are busy trying to show us the so called dark side of a candidate, the more details we learn about the character of a candidate, the better. The more times we watch them on c-span or shorter bursts on MSM, the better. The more we talk about candidate character on the Internet or in person with our friends and associates, especially those of opposing views, the better.
We have seen the signal importance of character when we erred in the 2000 and 2004 elections and in the presidents we have elected throughout our history. As important as the issues are in the 2008 election, character and morality by far, trumps issues.
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Self-interest
It's sort of pointless to argue whether we have acted well or badly, whether we are inherently good or evil. What the U.S. has done is what all nations have done - act in our own self-interest. That has indeed benefitted others across the globe, on balance moreso than the harm inflicted elsewhere. No system of government is perfect, all have flaws, ours - inspired by those ideals - is about the best we're going to get. The difference between conservatives and liberals is that liberals, I think, always want to strive for the ideals, mourn when we fall short; whereas conservatives think the existence of the ideals is in itself enough, makes us superior.
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Vietnam: The Model?
Every now and then our Laureate, AJ aka bebop-o, posts about his experiences in Vietnam both during the horrors of the conflict and upon redemptive return.
He reminds us in no uncertain terms that redemption is not only possible, it is essential, and it is never guaranteed.
Americans "forgot" about Vietnam once the troops pulled out and the Embassy evacuation was complete and the helicopters were thrown over the sides of the carriers to drown unmourned in the South China Sea. And the Vietnamese under Uncle Ho's successors went about their business recuperating from the devastation, reuniting their own country and rescuing what survivors there were from Nixon's Death From Above campaign and the bloody reign of Pol Pot and his purists in neighboring Cambodia.
Revisionists tell us how horrifying the Communist victory was, how everyone was put on bonfires and the smoke from their pyres still wafts from the shores of Da Nang and Nah Trang and Beautiful Saigon, the Paris of the Orient. If only we'd had the stomach to stay in the fight, Vietnam would be Happy and Free. Instead, there is nothing but Communist Ruin and Despair as far as the eye can see; the horror.
All because we did not have the stomach for the fight.
When actually, by getting out and leaving those people alone -- and yes, by welcoming fleeing anti-communist refugees to our own shores -- they somehow managed to reassemble the parts of their nation, their culture, their souls that we had so carelessly torn asunder, and in a very modest way, recreate themselves.
Americans who visit Vietnam are still astonished at the widespread lack of bitterness over what was done to the people. They're surprised to see that battered land largely put back together, industrious, relatively prosperous, and shockingly at peace with the whole world.
No, it's not a "free" society in our narrow conception of the term, and as one of the few remaining Communist dictatorships in the world, its government is an anachronism. Destined to fade away, but possibly not to be overthrown.
And even the Most Hated Man in the World, George W. Bush, can be welcomed in Vietnam, and pose with a bust of Ho Chi Minh, and seem to have no self-awareness at all, and no consciousness of the symbolism of his presence.
Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia, and soon, perhaps, Iran, are the latest venues for America's adolescent need to project power, and except for Somalia (where we really know nothing about what's going on) things aren't going any better for us than they did in Southeast Asia, and our government and its armed forces are just as ignorant of the peoples they are determined to force to submit as they were of the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Lao, Hmong, Mien and so many others back in the day.
Nothing is learned?
We learned, to our surprise, perhaps to our shame, that these "backwards, uncivilized Natives" are quite capable of handling their own affairs, so long as we left them alone. And that apparently is a lesson we will have to learn over and over and over again.
But it does provide some hope of redemption once the Imperial Forces withdraw from their latest failed conquests.