In Reply to: I fully agree (with one exception) posted by Alan on June 23, 2004 at 12:40:02:
There's what George Bush has said and not said and there's what various people in the Bush Administration--such as Dick Cheney and the neocoms--have said and not said.
Polling shows that most Americans believe there is a direct link between 9/11 and Sadam Hussein. How did most Americans get this impression? You cannot convince me that people in the Bush Administration didn't go to great lengths to create this impression by putting their particular "spin" on the complex relationship between Hussein, terrorist activity, and 9/11. The simplistic linking of 9/11 with an "immiment threat" of terrorism on the part of Hussein was put forth by the neocoms in the Bush administration to justify a pre-emptive strike. I didn't need that rationale for the decision to invade Iraq, and I'm tired of hearing about it. It's so freaking legalistic and totally misses the bigger picture.
Instead, I want a frank discussion about the responsibilities of American empire and how an honest appraisal of those responsibilities affects our decisions about national security, going to war, the sacrifice of human lives and limbs, the expenditure of billions of dollars into the largest deficit of our history, and the condition of the planet after I'm dead and gone in 30 years (if I'm lucky).
The model for my thinking are the Brits at the peak of their colonial empire. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Brits were THE economic and military superpower. WWII changed that. However, while they were top dogs--the superpower of their day--they didn't make a lot of pretense about why they put down this or that insurgency in the Middle East, India or South Africa. They did it because it was in the strategic interests of their economic empire and they weren't ashamed to say exactly what motivated their foreign & domestic policies.
I think American credibility in the world would go way up if we said, "Yeah, we are a 3,000 pound gorilla and sometimes we act in brutish, arrogant ways because we can't be honest with ourselves about who we are and what really motivates us." At the same time, a lot of people depend on this 3,000 pound gorilla to keep the jungle in order, so it behooves us to remember that we may be the biggest gorilla, but we aren't the only animal in the ecosystem.
So as long as we're burning up all those fossil fuels, we might as well concede the scientific evidence for a changed planetary environment is in and find the political will to deal with the meltdown of polar icecaps and gaping holes in the ozone. That's what I mean by taking responsibility for empire. Walking away from Kyoto may have been good in the short term for the US economy, but it was not in the best interests of my grandchildren.
Finally, I don't pay much attention to mainstream media. I don't think mainstream media are necessarily liberal or conservative--I think they're primarily commercial, self-serving, and superficial.
Recent research on US news coverage suggests PBS is more balanced than any of the major, mainstream networks. I listen to PBS, which is sometimes labelled liberal media, but any approach that tries to look indepth at various sides of the picture can be labelled "liberal" because images don't resolve into clear categories of black and white. You have to take an open-minded approach if you're going to follow indepth coverage, which means learning to discern shades of gray and avoiding polarized categories of interpretation like liberal or conservative, pro-Bush or anti-Bush, Christian or non-christian.
I have to admit that my mind is pretty much made up that our president has been ill-served by the neocoms who planned the execution of this war. There are conservative & moderate Republicans who hold the same view. Unlike a lot of left-leaning types, I'm not willing to demonize the president. He's a limited human being with a tremendous burden of leadership at a critical point in our history.