Quote:
Originally Posted by f3lix
My flaming liberal economics teacher wouldn't turn it on either, but I wrote a reaction letter to the editor of our school paper saying that this is what we deserved. The main point of the LtE was "We stuck our noses in everybody's business, and we got our noses bloodied."
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Of course there are unintended consequences to our foreign policy, but no, we didn't
deserve it.
And everybody's business IS our business. We operate within an international system, in a globalized world. Shit that goes down from Columbia to Japan effect us, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly - it's naive to think otherwise. If you let the rest of the world burn the fire will eventually spread to your doorstep.
The kind of stance you're taking leads to such logical conclusions as turning your back on Nazism, food shortages in Africa, humanitarian aid to flood victims, the spread of totalitarianism masquerading as communism, currency manipulation, and on and on and on. No power is benevolent. Of course we're going to increase our chips at the poker table of geo-politics, but people focusing on that are missing the larger picture. America really does represent the free world - people too often forget that before America came into existence as we know it today most of the world was still practicing monarchism and autocracy. The
universal values of liberty, freedom and democracy have to be pressed in all corners of the globe, because it IS what all people want, even if government controlled polls suggest otherwise. The fact that it creates an international order in which the US is at the top, and therefore enjoys all of the benefits that it entails, is just part of it.
You need to wake up, buddy. There's a reason we're interfering in, for example, Iran's internal politics - because we don't want a theocratic autocracy whose president wants to bring about apocalyptic conditions for the return of the Islamic messiah to acquire nuclear technology. If that pisses a bunch of extremists off then so be it.