misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

This movement across the country to place blame for last week's attacks on the US government is perhaps partially founded, but is getting a bit annoying. Read my roommate's posting about the faustian deal that Bush made with Afghanistan. And then read the links from the site he references:

Here's a short list of additional recent American war criminals -- essentially the American leaders of the last decades:

George Bush, former President, for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and thousands of Panamanian civilians (along with kidnapping the country's leader, a former CIA prot�g�).

Now, that is simply a sampling of the rhetoric this site uses to portray American politicians and governments as equatable with Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot. They reference world conflicts without any illumination behind the history of that conflict. Reading their articles, you get the sense that American politicians have supported the blatant massacre of citizens in these perfectly innocent cities and countries that were going about their lovely habits of planting flowers and hugging one another before American missles came from nowhere and blew these nice people up. Read above: He references Panama and Iraq without referencing General Noriega and Saddam Hussein, both military dictators who brought levels of oppression and pain to their countries that American missles never could have. American intervention in these countries, and a number of others, resulted out of an international call to put these dictators out of power and restore human rights to the countries they ruled. Citizens that were killed during American intervention most likely would have occured tenfold at the hands of their own leaders had America not attempted an intervention of some sort. A majority of the time, American intervention is part of an international effort, involving most of the countries of the United Nations. This includes Iraq and Yugo. We are the big brother, and sometimes need to regulate when the little brothers are fighting and hitting each other. We've obviously proven to the world that we know how to do things well, that is how we got to the top in the first place. It is the same way you might listen to the Lakers on how to play basketball--they obviously have proven that they know a thing or two about the subject. That is the point of being a world superpower. I am not naive enough to claim that all American foreign policy has been intelligent or beneficial to the world, and some of it may have been downright damaging. But neither has it been purposefully misguided and intended to bring ruin to innocent citizens. Most politicians are highly educated and intelligent people--you don't get to that post by being an idiot. Many of these countries brought the problems on themselves, America came in long after these countries were so jacked up they had proven to the world they needed help. There is a world balance of peace, and fighting countries break that balance. It is an international responsibility to attempt to bring that balance back to a high level. That is why there needs to be an international effort to get rid of terrorism. Obviously, terrorism isn't beneficial to the world community. Either is the conflict between palestine and israel, serbia and bosnia, sudan and the rebels, etc. We continue to attempt to keep peace in these places, even if bringing peace sometimes requires utilizing violence and force. So insinuating that the American government should be blamed for the recent attacks on our soil seems incredibly ignorant, as much as saying that all of our foreign policy has been successful the past few thirty years. Learn your world history before bitching at the American government. Most people didn't even know who the hell the Taliban was before last Tuesday, and so a week's worth of reading on CNN's website doesn't qualify you to become an instant analyzer of American foreign policy.