06-03-2002, 02:44 PM
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#68
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retired
Join Date: Dec 2001
Location: Toronto, Canada
Posts: 1,930
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Why Do People Hate the USA?
Quote:
But when Americans ask, "Why do they hate us?" and "Why do these Islamic radicals on the other side of the earth want to come over here and commit hara-kiri killing us?" we get responses that ought not to satisfy a second-grader. They hate us, we are told, because we are democratic and free and good, and we have low tax rates.
Well that is no longer enough. Before, not after, the next terror attack on this country, America's leaders should start telling the truth: Evil though they may be, Islamic killers are over here because we are over there. They are not trying to kill us because they dislike our domestic politics, but because they detest our foreign policy.
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. They did not fly into those twin towers to protest universal suffrage or to advance self-determination for the Palestinian people. As Osama bin Laden said, they want us to stop propping up the Saudi regime they hate, and to get off the sacred Saudi soil on which sit the holiest shrines of Islam. They want our troops out of Saudi Arabia – and if we don't get out, they are coming over here to kill us any way they can.
That is reality. Now while America should use every weapon in her arsenal, from intelligence to diplomacy to war, to prevent terror and to punish terror, we must address the central issue: Terror on American soil, and eventual cataclysmic and atomic terror on American soil, is the price of American empire.
Is the empire worth it? French, Brits, even Soviets said no. They went home. And nothing over there – not oil, not bases in Saudi Arabia, not global hegemony – is worth risking nuclear terror over here. I may be the only right-winger in America who loves D.C., but then I grew up here. Washington is my hometown. It comes first, and empire isn't even a close second.
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He's not my favorite political analyst but he's got a point here.
And in a photographic montage here, that was my point, too.
P.S. I don't know why I keep looking for this thread in Politics. I must remember: "There's no place like Home, there's no place like Home." -- Dorothy
Last edited by Nic Name; 06-03-2002 at 02:50 PM.
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