(no subject)
Jul. 31st, 2007 07:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_elyanUS planning massive arms deal in Middle East. Because obviously the way to bring peace to a war-torn region is by arming it to the teeth. I wonder how Condoleeza Rice washes the blood off her hands?
If I wanted to be more than usually cynical, I could say that if Al-Qaeda did not exist, one would be forced to create it, because since the Soviet Union's collapse, the US no longer has an equally mighty foe to play proxy toy soldiers with around the world, so needs new bogeymen to arise , which they have.
I increasingly suspect that the USA's epitaph in the Middle East is going to be borrowed from their own shameful past - "We had to destroy the region in order to save it".
But then, of course, inactivity was not an option either, and in the fever of anti-Iraq sentiment, it's easy to forget that Saddam Hussein was a monster too. Of all the lessons the modern world teaches us, one of the hardest is that in a world of infinite choice and opportunity, there are no unambiguously right or wrong decisions, and few if any entirely good or evil people. There is a freedom in that realisation, but a lot of pain too.
If I wanted to be more than usually cynical, I could say that if Al-Qaeda did not exist, one would be forced to create it, because since the Soviet Union's collapse, the US no longer has an equally mighty foe to play proxy toy soldiers with around the world, so needs new bogeymen to arise , which they have.
I increasingly suspect that the USA's epitaph in the Middle East is going to be borrowed from their own shameful past - "We had to destroy the region in order to save it".
But then, of course, inactivity was not an option either, and in the fever of anti-Iraq sentiment, it's easy to forget that Saddam Hussein was a monster too. Of all the lessons the modern world teaches us, one of the hardest is that in a world of infinite choice and opportunity, there are no unambiguously right or wrong decisions, and few if any entirely good or evil people. There is a freedom in that realisation, but a lot of pain too.
