Subject: "look what they have", Lad?
Let me see if I can make as much sense of this as you seem to have made. By "they went and poked a big stik up our nose" I presume you are referring to... Al-Qaeda, a terrorist group comprised almost exclusively of expatriates of Arab extraction.
This group of Arab terrorists ingratiated itself to the totalitarian Taliban oligarchy (presumably with money and/or military aid) which had already, of its own volition, imposed itself on the citizens of the nation of Afghanistan. Presumably, that dictatorial government known as the Taliban is the government to which you refer when you write of "the WHOLE GOVERNMENT of Afghanistan!"
Then, the indisputably most powerful nation on earth drops some thousands of tons of explosive ordnance on the third-world backwater rabble and rubble of a horse-drawn army and its rag-tag warlord leadership, successfully throwing their dominance into disarray while the principal enemy of the day slips the net and retreats into some other third-world nation, perhaps one with nuclear resources.
I am still trying to determine how the gleeful boast "How's THAT for spreading our influence?" proceeds from this series of events. It is the nature of the strong to tread upon the weak, and no one is ever surprised when extreme strength prevails over fragility and weakness. When a tiger pounces on a small child and rips it to shreds it surprises no one. What is astonishing is when a small child steps on a tiger's tale without coming to harm.
You are certainly under no obligation to care about how "wrong" we are, so long as I may exercise my caring by pointing out to you that that is precisely how every government's highest echelons prefer its citizens to be... cavalier, nonchalant, and undiscriminating. Smug self-righteousness accords the permission and arrogates the needed authority upward to do anything, no matter how errant or brutal, to anyone so long as they appear to be somehow supportive of or related to the designated evildoers.
In an earlier post of yours several months back you asked pointedly, "Why do the terrorists hate us?" The answer is obvious. It's the arrogant attitude embodied in statements like "Well, I don't care how wrong we are..."
I can easily imagine these exact same words appearing on some message board frequented by the extremist Islamic terrorists themselves. Everything you said about them here could readily have been said by them about us! Let's see if I can rewrite it for them (this is called playing the Devil's advocate):
I don't care how "wrong" they think we are...
...they've been poking their big stick up our *@#* since the Balfour Treaty of 1920 and now...
...look what they have...
...We went over there and knocked down their two TALLEST BUILDINGS and crashed a jetliner into their MILITARY HEADQUARTERS while their generals sat staring in disbelief at their TV sets! And it cost them trillions of dollars in economic suffering to boot!...
...How's THAT for "teaching them a lesson?!"
Get the picture, Lad?
I wonder if the average citizens of this world are ever going to evolve past the Hooray for our side! mentality. For US citizens, can it really be because the complexities of trying to sort out all the pertinent factors are just too difficult to encompass with our limited global perspective and our characteristically American TV-commercial-length attention spans?
As for me, my paramount struggle is to keep my eyes always open wider than my mouth. PEACE ON EARTH (all of it) and GOOD WILL TO ALL LIVING BEINGS!
|
|
|
