Over at Red State they ran a poll on what our best option is in Iraq. Here are the results.
Cut and Run11% (62 votes)S-U-M-M-I-T3% (19 votes)Stay the Course9% (52 votes)Can we unleash hell yet?63% (357 votes)Redeploy to the country of Kurdistan (which we create by fiat) and wait six months.14% (78 votes)Total votes: 568
This is what the teaching of the American myth does to the people that are subjected to it. Sixty-three percent of Red Staters think we have not yet unleashed hell, but that it is now our best option to do so. Another fourteen percent think we should create a Kurdistan by fiat. I doubt any of these 77% of respondents have ever questioned our right to go around unleashing hell and creating countries by fiat. And if we ever get attacked again, I doubt any of them will be able or willing to marry up the cause and effect of the event. In their mind, it is our right to do whatever we want to do. We can invade a country under false pretenses. We can rip up all their contracts and sell off all their state-owned property. We can carve out little nations out of bigger ones. If they don’t like it, we can unleash hell. And if we are hated for it, it is not our doing, but a result of Islamic fascism. If they make us uncomfortable, we will just kill more of them and turn the desert into glass.
Here’s a typical comment from the Red State thread:
I’d destroy every mosque whose imams promote violence, and do it with pork products.
ALL allied ordinace would be slathered with pork fat, and loaded down with ampules of bacon cologne.
All terrorists’ remains would be buried by the military with pork products, especially pork weiners, and a pigskin shroud.
Anyone considered target worthy of being kidnapped by terrorists would have their clothing and skin be pork slathered and saturated.
This type of thinking is a direct result of a total lack of self-reflection on how our policies effect other people. It’s too simple to accuse the left of hating America. We love America as much as anyone. But we don’t look at it with rose-colored glasses. We are not always in the right. Our leaders’ motives are not always altruistic or noble. Some people have legitimate problems with how we conduct our foreign policy. And I don’t mean just Bush’s foreign policy, but our foreign policy since World War Two. Winning the Cold War doesn’t atone for sixty-years of failed policy in Iran, in Vietnam, in Angola, in Central America, in the Middle East…
Hunter S. Thompson put it best, “America…just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
That perfectly describes the attitude at Red State.