Originally posted by: Genx87
For now, give it 100 years and see what your ancestors have to say about those horrible christian fundies when Islamic fundies are running the show.
I find myself boggling at the delusions of the right on this topic.
Under what conceivable set of circumstances could the incredibly far more militaily powerful US be conquered by the middle eastern nations in the next century?
It's just paranoia, and it's so far out of the military facts that it makes zero sense.
What *does* make sense is the *US* wanting to implement imperialistic aggression in the Middle East, and getting the public to go along the usual way, by calling them a threat.
There is some threat of terrorism - which increases as the US adds to its wrongs and aggressions against the middle easterners. The thinking of the radicals in the middle east has been around a long time, yet it hasn't been much of an issue for the US in previous decades and centures; why is that? Why isn't there the famous war where the middle east invaded the US in 1875 or 1955? Because *we're* the ones with the aggressive policies, not them, and the few who are problems there can be pretty well controlled.
We're not justified in oppressing entire nations and regions in order to have 'protection' against a small number of people, and in fact, trying to can *cause* the problems.
Are we going to betray the principles in the founding of our nation out of greed, are we going to become the England of George III and try to screw and exploit foreigners more?
We cannot prevent terrorism, ultimately. We've had millions of muslims living in the US for a long time, amazingly peacefully - so any broad terror generalizations don't hold up.
We can't stop people from taking a gun to any place people gather, an airport baggage claim, a supermarket, a school, and shooting several people.
What we can do is to stop overthrowing regimes out of greed, opposing democracy to ensure 'friendly' governments, doing things to make people have grievances with the US.
We need to concentrate on the important issues, such as spreading democracy - peacefully, the only way it makes sense - in an era of China surpassing the US economically. What is our plan to keep freedom and democracy popular against the threat that the power of the Chinese government poses? None? Currently, it's to ruin the US's good name in the world and harm the cause of freedom and democracy.
The right wing seems to be incapable of seeing any situation as something other than another Hitler. That's the only thing they know, so they ignore the facts and pretend that any foreign threat is the same as Hitler. And get posts like the one quoted above about how we need to kill masses of people or we'll be 'conquered' and the middle east will rule the world. That's just craziness without any sense of the reality of the military situation.
They say power tends to corrupt, and the right's corruption of their views and willingness to oppress based on delusions is a fine example.
If you were on the receving end of another nation's dominant might, you would want justice - but others don't get a vote. It's up to we Americans to force justice on ourselves.
9/11 was a unique incident, with contributing factors from our own complacency in air safety, to our being pretty recklessly provocative with things like putting our troops in sensitve areas there without any concern about the reaction of the people there, to the fact that Al Queda was a sliver of the middle eastern population who was dangerous and needed to be dealt with, while our own politics prevented us from doing so early on - Clinton while our awareness of the danger grew, and then Bush out of incompetence.
I've yet to see one right-wing person take any moral responsbility for our war of choice and aggression against Iraq turning out to be an unjustified war - one where the UN inspectors should have been allowed to complete what they were doing, and while we'd have had Saddam still in power for the time being, the international law against aggressive war, something the US is obligated to by the UN treaty we signed, would still be in power, too, and other efforts could be taken against Saddam.
Let's face it, our policies to Iraq have caused its citizens great damage, from the sanctions which primarily served to kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis horribly by denying them clean water and such, leading to disase, to our inept 'rebuilding' of the destruction we'd caused, we are pretty galling to point and say 'but you have freedom now!' Right, I'm sure most Americans would say 'thank you' for the chance to have the conditions Iraqis have now. Americans confuse the price we pay for our policy, with the benefit it gives.
Instead, the American people too often are blind supporters of whatever the government says, just paying their taxes which allow the government to do terrible policies.
You see that above, as the poster buys into the paranoia of the middle east conquering the US. It'd be laughable if not tragic.