We’d been at war a full 60 minutes before I found out about it last night. Except for the 5 hours of patchy, broken sleep it has been constant war coverage from both the television and the myriad e-mails sent to all staff at my office. Links to copies the psyops flyers we’re dropping on Iraq, links to alternative media coverage, links to pictures of the devastation of the ’91 war.
And Peter Jennings is on ABC telling me that we now have the first confirmed U.S. and British casualties, not of direct conflict but of a helicopter crash (21:36 U.S. ET, 20 March 2003).
Yesterday’s Washington Post reported that 71% of Americans surveyed were in favor of war with Iraq. This brings up a couple of question:
1) Who the fuck are these people and where do they live? No one I know has been contacted by a pollster at all. Yes, the U.S. has a lot of population but still…no one at all. The paranoid part of me thinks they surveyed 1,500 people in Kansas and extrapolated statistically.
2) Why do these people support this war and do they realize that we spent the 1970s and 1980s funding or otherwise supplying Hussein with weapons?
What makes me ambivalent is that countries with officially sponsored state religions give me the creeps. More damage has been done to humans by humans in the name of God than for all the other reasons combined. I freely admit that I’m particularly biased against Islam. Any religion that so fundamentally denies the basic rights and humanity of more than 50% of the population simply because those people are female inspires in me the most visceral desire to violence I’ve ever had.
What makes me ambivalent is that we are, to a greater or lesser extent, responsible for the mess in the Middle East. We funded, directly or indirectly, the continuation of Saddam Hussein’s government in just the same way we funded the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Is there an easy solution? No, but who the hell promised us life would be easy?
You say, “What makes me ambivalent is that we are, to a greater or lesser extent, responsible for the mess in the Middle East. We funded, directly or indirectly, the continuation of Saddam Hussein’s government in just the same way we funded the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan.” I’ve also heard a number of times that it is actions of the US that have generated such anger and hatred against us. I don’t know if you subscribe to that particular view, but if you’d like to comment on it I’d be interested.
Why is the U.S. so hated on a global scale is definitely a question worth pondering, Hayden. I would argue that there is a strong case to be made that the U.S. is not hated so much as envied. After all, how seriously can one take a 15 year-old who is busily burning an American flag to demonstrate his hatred of the U.S. while he’s happily clad in an LA Lakers jersey, Levi’s jeans, and Nike tennis shoes?
Some of my EU born and based friends would say that not only is America physically imperialist (witness the current war) but it is also culturally imperialist. My response to that is, fine, if you don’t want American culture, don’t buy its products. It’s called capitalism folks and consumer rejection is the ultimate power. If no one in Europe bought McDonald’s hamburgers, McDonald’s would stop opening outlets in Europe. If it worked with Euro-Disney it will work with everything else. Then my friends from the EU would say that it’s not a free market, that the U.S. has used its influence to tilt the market in its favor. Then I would say that part of the problem is that elected leaders in the EU aren’t listening to their constituents…and then the yelling starts and we usually have to go to another pub. 🙂
In all seriousness, I think that, excluding religiously motivated opinions, the U.S. not purely regarded by anyone at all, inside or outside its boundaries. I think that as a country the U.S. is both hated for its actions and admired for its achievements and its standard of living by many who claim to hate the U.S.
It was quite interesting to be stuck in a very small space with a lot of non-U.S. folks on September 11, 2001. There was the knee-jerk reaction of “well, you brought it on yourselves” which was immediately challenged on many fronts and, if not totally at least partially, retracted. After all, just as the average Iraqi teenager did nothing to deserve to be bombed to death, your basic 24 year-old file clerk did nothing to warrant death in the flaming collapse of the World Trade center.