giza | More botched foreign policy (or: Just how fscked we really are) (Reply)

It's been awhile since I posted anything subversive, so I figured it's time to criticise the current administration again. What I'd like to talk about today is an article in the Sunday Herald that I saw linked to from IO ERROR recently.

The article talks about a rather blunt "strategic communications" report from the Pentagon. Here are some choice blurbs from the article:

On “the war of ideas or the struggle for hearts and minds”, the report says, “American efforts have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended”. “American direct intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of, and support for, radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single digits in some Arab societies.”

And here's another one:

Referring to the repeated mantra from the White House that those who oppose the US in the Middle East “hate our freedoms”, the report says: “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedoms’, but rather, they hate our policies. [...]

And my response would be: bingo! I twitch every time I hear someone say how the terrorists "hate our way of life and our freedoms". Hogwash. They don't care how we live our life over here, but they do care about how they are treated by us. Whether suicide bombings and other forms of terrorism are justified over this is another matter entirely, one thing is very clear: there are lots of people who are very angry at us.

“Americans are convinced that the US is a benevolent ‘superpower’ that elevates values emphasising freedom … deep down we assume that everyone should naturally support our policies. Yet the world of Islam – by overwhelming majorities at this time – sees things differently. Muslims see American policies as inimical to their values, American rhetoric about freedom and democracy as hypocritical and American actions as deeply threatening. “In two years the jihadi message – that strongly attacks American values – is being accepted by more moderate and non-violent Muslims. This in turn implies that negative opinion of the US has not yet bottomed out"

This is also kind of sad. Us Americans tend to be isolated, sitting over here in one big country that stretches from one end of this continent to the other, and we tend to forget that there is a whole world out there, and if we mess around with the structure of other countries, people in those countries are naturally going to become unhappy with us. Make them angry enough, and there can be very real consequences for our people, both overseas and domestically.

Here's a fun little experiment to try for those who live in the USA. Pick a foreign country. Prefarably a nice big one, such as Russia or China. Germany, France, and England are also good choices. Now, pretend for a moment that you've just heard that they intend to place a military base with a few thousand troops just outside of the nearest major city, and that the United States Government happily lets them do this. Such a base would merely be to "guard their interests in the country", of course.

How would you feel about this? Would you be angry? Upset? Scared? Would you be concerned that the other country might have some sort of agenda, and that they might be placing parts of their own military in your country just to keep it in line? People in other countries sure are suspicious of the US's movtives for doing this.

Feel free to discuss.