America's Role In The World

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

What is America's role in the world? I'm the first to jump on the America bashing bandwagon, so one could expect me to come up with a suitably cynical snark response to this. But I won't.

America's role in the world is to be a leader.

In most ways, America is the most powerful nation in the world. Militarily, it's not hard to think that America could fight off every other nation in the world if we all tried to invade at once. They have used this military to become the unquestioned economic and political power in the world as well. Colonial wars have been fought in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America, not to rule directly, but to install governments that will allow for a favourable economic environment for US corporations. Why the hell would you want to run a country when you could just be extracting their natural resources and abuse their labour?

America has actively worked to become the leader in the world. It has been an act of conscious free will. It has been the stated aim of generations of political leaders and the desire of the electorate that votes them in. "We're #1" they cry after singing the national anthem at a "World Series" to find a the "World Champion" in a sport in which pretty much only they play in which only teams from America compete.

With great power, comes great responsibility.

Because the creation of US world supremacy has been a conscious act of free will, then the responsibilities that come along with that power are non-negotiable and must be entered into with a sense of duty, not obligation. The President of the United States has been called the "Leader Of The Free World" (and I've noticed, is still called, which I find a bit of an anachronism). The Constitution is, rightly, held up as one of the grand achievements of humanity. Americans like to believe that the ethics and values of their nation, that all men are created equal, that we have the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If this is so, then their act of conscious free will to become the world leaders and the responsibilities that are the duty of the power that comes with such power, then they must lead with these values in mind as well as in practice.

Acts like unilateral military action and avoiding international treaties that are in the global interest, but may be questionable for the national interest, is failing these values.

Comments

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Ah, the newest flavor of Marxist thought...

So you completely discount dialectical materialism as a valid way of viewing the world, bully for you. Let's thank zeus you aren't an Historian then. Not that I discount other, valid, lenses through which to interpret the world, but to discount an entire field of knowledge because of ideology seems a bit ignorant to me.

Unilateral action is the realm of any state. Should a state have to seek authority from other states before it acts? Uh...sovereignity.

I specifically avoided using words like obligation and law in favour of duty, responsibility and values. I wasn't trying to say that a state shouldn't have the right to act unilaterally, I was perhaps waxing too poetically...

Doing the right thing, outside of the opinion of others, should be the goal.

... is, in essence, what I was trying to say. If you have the ability to act unilaterally, and choose to act unilaterally, then you absolutely must be doing the right thing. The values that the US sells to the world as the pinnacle of human achievement and the values they practice are very wide apart. If all men are created equal, and we have the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness then when the US's actions cause untold suffering to a multitude of people, then they are in violation of their responsibilities.

Iraq- Nah, not so friendly. And absolutely no threat to anybody but themselves. Afghanistan- Totally justified by any definition of war It's good to know you think harbouring a criminal is a justifiable reason to invade a nation. We have a guy in prison here, who committed a murder here, who has served his sentence here but is now being extradited to the US to face the case again (interesting since both of our countries have double jeopardy laws), but if the US government don't agree to take the death penalty off the table, we won't send him. Should the US invade Australia? Hyperbolic, I know. But where do we draw the line? Because someone commits an attack on the US? What does this mean? If a guy in Melbourne organises for his friend in the US to blow up a building (and fails, or not, doesn't matter), and we won't extradite him because you won't guarantee not to kill him, should we expect the US fleet on our doorstep?

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

"If a guy in Melbourne organizes for his friend in the US to blow up a building (and fails, or not, doesn't matter), and we won't extradite him because you won't guarantee not to kill him, should we expect the US fleet on our doorstep?"

It would help at this juncture to be a mite bit transcendent and put yourself in the other man's shoes for a minute and ask yourself what your response would be to a 9/11 type action on your own soil?

Mind you, from my own personal perspective, the reaction would have been better handled strictly by the CIA and perhaps covert forces, but say that your condition is that extradition is indeed untenable, are you prepared to shrug the whole matter off?

[prader.livejournal.com]

the reaction would have been better handled strictly by the CIA and perhaps covert forces

I agree with you. At least if we were serious about ending- or at least minimizing- the threat Muslim extremists pose. But a full scale war is so much more profitable to the interests I allude to in my comment below.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

the reaction would have been better handled strictly by the CIA and perhaps covert forces

You raise an interesting thought. I don't know if I would have a problem with that. I'm not saying there should be no judgment, and I don't think violating another sovereign nation's borders and dealing with that judgment in a precision manner is necessarily violating the values I'm talking about, but I don't think carpet bombing a country was really necessary.

[woopflying.livejournal.com]

Those who organised 9/11 new exactly what the response would be from the worlds most powerful, tweak my tail? ROAR ROAR ROAR and plunged into a world whose multicultures it new fuck all about.You are opening Pandoras Box it was warned, bunch of cowardly cheese eating monkeys was the scornful response.
Tens of thousands killed and maimed, a generation of children traumatised by war with hatred in their hearts.
America is now saying, hey guys we should talk to these guys.
World leader my arse

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No they did not. Bin Laden and his ilk considered the USA so decadent that it would simply withdraw from Saudi Arabia with its tail between its legs. It's the exact same misunderstanding of how the USA would react that Imperial Japan had for the exact same things.

And the USA did not create this mess. Well, it created Khomeini, sure. The Afghanistan War, I might remind you, began in 1979. The USSR invaded for what was a perfectly rational means but the USA decided once the Soviets were on the verge of victory to prop up the Mujahideen, which created a Soviet Vietnam. Then once the USSR withdrew they simply propped up their puppet state that *also* was within a second hair's breadth of victory until the Worker's Paradise dissolved.

By the mid 1990s Afghanistan became the world's most infamous dystopia.

There was already a generation traumatized from the USSR's invasion.

[woopflying.livejournal.com]

Bin Laden thought the USA would withdraw from Saudi Arabia you are joking, Saudi Arabia with its autocratic royals was pumping out black gold for america.
When Mossadeq threatened to nationalise Irans oil the brits and americans organised a coup and replaced him with the brutal Shahs regime and western style capitalism, he was thrown out and in came the Mullahs.
In 1978/9 Afghanistan was a tourist centre, it had a university, it was modernising despite the rabid islamists and war lords who saw there power being threatened. In comes the USA arms the Mujahadeen, the ruskis leave, the USA leaves too leaving chaos behind, the Taliban take over.

Bin Ladens letter to america stated his demands, leave Saudi Arabia and ensure a just peace in Palestine, he was ignored, how possibly could america leave their proud royal family that kept the nation as america wanted it.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No, I'm citing the man's own words. He thought the USA would abandon Saudi Arabia because people like him have a very skewed view of the USA as a dystopia based on US pop culture depictions of the USA, skewed overwhelmingly to cop and doctor shows.

Mossadeqh was also overthrown because when the USA took over Britain's role as the prime imperial power in the Middle East it found that the people there liked it no more than the British did.

Was it? I don't think a country devastated by Soviet-style warfare (war is never nice, but the Soviets kept WWII-style brutality as an integral part of their doctrine) would be a tourist destination in any sense of the term. The Russians left....to prop up a puppet regime within a whisker's breadth of winning. The fall of the USSR secured the disaster, if it lasted another year or two Afghanistan would be very different today.

[woopflying.livejournal.com]

There is a novelist in you.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And you are on par with your fellow Briton 67th Tigers and my countryman with the Goldwater icon in being unable to form an any kind of argument whatsoever.

[woopflying.livejournal.com]

Briton 67th Tigers?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

A guy that happens to make arguments on your level. Well, a little less than your level as he sincerely believes the British military is invincible.

[woopflying.livejournal.com]

Having served in Europe, the Middle East and Far east I can only conclude that this concoction has come out of your very own waffle bag

[woopflying.livejournal.com]

Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America'

C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\My Received Files\Full text bin Laden's 'letter to America' World news Observer_co_uk.mht

The source which enables you to quote from bin laden?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://www.mideastweb.org/osamabinladen1.htm

[woopflying.livejournal.com]

**Text Supplied by : Muhammad A. S. Al-Mass'ari; CDLR (Committee For the Defense of Civil Rights in Saudi Arabia

From democratic Saudi Arabia WOW WOW WOW

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

Unhelpful comment is unhelpful.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

If efficient destruction of terrorism is the goal, the Soviet and Nazi systems were extremely good at suppressing any and all opposition. There were no Armies of God or Fountainheaders in the Soviet Union. But if we want to live in a society that does not make a virtue out of Terror and Purges, OTOH.....

[ninboydean.livejournal.com]

For the "Melbourne" example yo umight think of Cuba and the US's harboring of anti-Cuban "terrorists."

Or the military aid the US has given to anti-Iranian groups that congress considers 'terrorist.'

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Iran might disagree that the Ba'ath regime was never a threat. The Saddam Al-Majid dictatorship fought the longest war of the 20th Century and was quite keen on strategic bombing. That broke the power of the state to fight anyone bigger than Iran thereafter, but still........though to see them as a threat in 2003 requires the same jaundiced view of history where by the Soviet aspect of WWII from 1939-May 1941 is completely overlooked.

I should note also since you believe Soviet-style communism was better that when proto-Hezballah captured two Soviet attaches the Soviets sent the terrorist a package with some family jewels in it and the terrorists never fucked with the Soviet Union again even when it was falling apart at the seams.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

What did I say about Soviet style communism? I don't recall mentioning it...

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Or am I misreading where this is in response to...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a two-fold response: the second part brings up why "efficiency" is a dangerous buzzword as it's very possible to be an efficiently evil motherfucker at repressing terrorists.

The first part was about how the Iraq of the 1980s and early 1990s was a threat, the one in 2003 was in no serious means any sense of one.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

So you think that the idea of looking at history as a series of paradigms that are challenged by opposition to that paradigm, the resulting conflict creating a new paradigm is LOL worthy? You think trying to understand the world in terms of economic forces is LOL worthy?

Do you even know what I'm talking about? I'm pretty sure you see Marx and think "Communism", when in fact, dialectical materialism has nothing to do with Communism other than Communism being Marx's solution to the paradigm in which he lived.

If you don't understand what thesis, antithesis and synthesis is referring to, you have no right commenting on Marx.