"Publicly promoting democracy while supporting tyranny may be the most damaging thing we do."
are we safer...? no... does bush get why...? no... does bush care...? no... is bush going to change anything about his approach...? no...
i believe the muslims are solidly on track with their perceptions... everything the united states does in its foreign policy revolves around two things - the accumulation of unilateral global power and the control of energy resources, both of which are inextricably tied together by vast sums of money... it's really not that hard to see and it doesn't take a lot of time and research to figure it out... for most of the people who live outside the borders of the u.s., it's as plain as day, and there is hardly a taxi driver in any country i've visited that can't give you michael scheuer's diagnosis...
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Harper's Ken Silverstein interviews Michael Scheuer who served in the CIA for 22 years before resigning in 2004; he served as the chief of the bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center from 1996 to 1999. He is the formerly anonymous author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America.
[W]e're not safer because we're still operating on the assumption that we're hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we're hated because of our actions in the Islamic world. There's our military presence in Islamic countries, the perception that we control the Muslim world’s oil production, our support for Israel and for countries that oppress Muslims such as China, Russia, and India, and our own support for Arab tyrannies. The deal we made with Qadaffi in Libya looks like hypocrisy: we'll make peace with a brutal dictator if it gets us oil. President Bush is right when he says all people aspire to freedom but he doesn't recognize that people have different definitions of democracy. Publicly promoting democracy while supporting tyranny may be the most damaging thing we do.
i believe the muslims are solidly on track with their perceptions... everything the united states does in its foreign policy revolves around two things - the accumulation of unilateral global power and the control of energy resources, both of which are inextricably tied together by vast sums of money... it's really not that hard to see and it doesn't take a lot of time and research to figure it out... for most of the people who live outside the borders of the u.s., it's as plain as day, and there is hardly a taxi driver in any country i've visited that can't give you michael scheuer's diagnosis...
(thanks to raw story...) Submit To Propeller
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posted by profmarcus at
8/23/2006
