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When a country welcomes you it seems unjust to be critical of that country. That said I am amazed how blind the average US person is to the injustice they force on other people without any apparent understanding that their foreign policy is to blame and therefore they don't understand why people may dislike them other than a belief that they are the biggest and the best so they are an easy target for criticism. The vast majority of my friends here are against the war in Iraq; however we are talking about the average America.
Bush stands up and gives speeches saying that he was right to invade Iraq and over half the country are prepared to vote for him so they must think its right. He says he is decisive and the best choice during wartime. It seems to make the majority of the American people happy that at least someone is being punished and its happening miles away.
The reality is that the war was created by Bush and there was no justification for starting that war. As far as I am concerned the US is not at war it is an occupying force in a country. More people are dying from violence each week in Iraq than were dying in one year under Saddam. Who is doing all this killing - the majority of it is carried out by Americans. I saw an interesting quote by Nader (the 3rd and distant candidate for President; even if he does speak more sense that the other 2 put together) when he said "the US media shows the rockets taking off, Al-Jazeera shows them landing".
When I was in the army some of the guys used to wear t-shirts that read "Join the army, travel the world, meet interesting people and kill them". I always thought they meant the British army, I may have been wrong...
The US is the only true super power and it has to make a decision about how it uses that power;
It can use its great power to create world justice, an act that requires a fair and equitable set of rules, rules that may at times not be in the US best interest, but rules that it has to evenly apply.
It can follow the route of using its military and financial strength to bludgeon the world into doing what it wants. The Bush administration appears to have made a conscious decision to do this.
The unfortunate consequence of forcing people to do things that they don't want to do is that they eventually get p***ed off. The more extreme people strap explosives around their waist and blow themselves up. People in the west wonder how someone could do that and label them as fundamentalists and extremists. Perhaps we should label them as oppressed, helpless or doing the few things open to them to try and help their fellow people (ok, some of them are terrorists).
Before going any further let me say that I do not condone suicide bombings, just as I don't condone creating situations where people feel that blowing themselves up is the best use of their lives.
The US attacked Iraq. They did this because it was claimed that they had WMD, however Hans Blicks the head of the weapons inspectors kept telling the Americans that if they know where the weapons are they should tell him so that they can check the facts; that they did not should have been reason enough to not attack.
They said there were links to Al-Querda, when there are no such links. The British security services said that attacking Iraq would increase the number of terrorists.
They say Saddam was an evil man. I'm fully aware that he was harsh and abused his power to gain wealth (sounds like he should be defined as royalty as that's a method out of their book). Equally he kept his country united; this did involve killing many people to put down rebellions - but isn't that what the US are doing at the moment.
Saddam Hussain spoke to the British Member of Parliament Tony Ben before the war. He told Tony that they did not have any WMD any more but that Bush was not interested in listening and was going to attack anyway. Turns out he was being honest. Perhaps he was being honest when he threw out the original weapons inspectors saying that they were spies. Of course it turns out that he was right then as we now know that there were people in the inspections teams acting as spies.
I thoroughly recommend watching the DVD "The Fog of War" a documentary about Robert McNamara the US defence secretary during the Kennedy and Johnson years. He candidly talks about past mistakes. He took part in bombing Tokyo and killing 100,000 people and Vietnam where he found out years later that they had gone to war on a mistaken assumption. In Vietnam about 50,000 US soldiers died, the forgotten number is the 3,000,000 Vietnamese that were killed.
News
03 November 2004: Bush wins the election. Strange thing is that everybody thought the US people were not particularly behind the Bush policy, now they know they are. Look out, once the local disturbance in Iraq has been put to rest the military become available for the next mission.
29 Oct 04: The Lancet medical journal was published research which suggests that Iraqi's are 58 times more likely to die from violence since the US invasion. Turns out that Saddam was less dangerous than Bush >>
29 Oct 04: 8 US marines killed near Falluja. I include this because the US media gives very little time to the soldiers dying and being injured. Here the big story last week was Kerry talking about Chainey's gay daughter in his speech. Now THAT was an important subject!
"The Fog of War" DVD where Robert McNamara, ex-USA defence secretary discusses mistakes >>