The Embattled Bipartisan

Author: Brian Ashley

So, Vice President Dick Cheney is off hunting in North Dakota. Oh, that's super; we are "at war" and our second-in-command is off killing helpless animals. No wonder everyone hates us. I know I am probably the last person likely to say this, but there has got to be a reason that so many people hate the United States of America. Sure, there are the obvious answers: we push people around on a false moral high ground; we breed concepts of immorality and portray them in every facet of our modern media; and we think we are the greatest people to ever walk the Earth. Just because Arab extremists call the United States "Satan" doesn't mean their only justification is that their religion says our country is bad. Within my short lifetime we have gotten ourselves into so many proverbial honey-pots that I have begun to wonder what, if anything, we have changed. Excluding certain obvious exceptions (World War I and World War II), I feel like we cause more problems than we solve, and I worry that I have been blind to the true effects of American international "conflict resolution."

"But wait," you say, "what about the Gulf War? We freed Kuwait from the Iraqis and saved millions of people from Saddam." Sure, we freed Kuwait, we put out the oil fires and we saved our asses and kept the black gold pumping. We told the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam and that we, the great army in the desert, would help them. Well, they rose up, they spoke out and they were slaughtered. They starved to death, and no one in the United States gave a crap. As far as we were concerned, every Iraqi was an enemy and still is.

The Middle Eastern peace conflict is even worse. I have yet to understand our support for the Jews. Was it World War II guilt? Do we as a country just hate people not of our color so much that we just picked the whitest side? Not only are we guilty of arming the Israelis and continuing the conflict, but we are so hesitant to scold them for infractions against their peace treaties that we let them get away with murder, literally. A few Arab kids throw stones at an Israeli officer from an apartment block and the Israelis send in the helicopter gunships (care of the USA) to blow up the entire housing complex under the justification that it is facilitating terrorism. Every time I hear about one of these events, I cannot believe that no one says, "What the hell is going on? Why don't we stop this?" Furthermore, we continue to turn a blind eye to illegal settlements in disputed lands. Colin Powell, the man who once said, "Get in it, win it or get out," should realize that we have no place in these conflicts. We sit around patting ourselves on the backs for spreading peace, but all we do is arm our favorites and hold their hand while they commit genocide.

It may sound a little crazy, but would the world really fall apart if we just called everyone home? How much are our armed forces really doing to keep the oil cheap and plentiful? I propose that the United States make a full tail-between-the-legs retreat from the Middle East and all other trouble spots for that matter. Our air strikes over Afghanistan are doing very little to keep the number of Anthrax cases down or the number of home-based terrorist cells low. In my last column, I said that we are making up for law enforcement failures with the revoking of civil liberties, and now I am saying that we are doing the same but in Afghanistan with bombs with catchy names like the "Bunker Buster."

Osama bin Laden is a pretty messed up guy. He is by no measure a balanced individual. However, he has a point. We have screwed over a lot of people and caused a lot of problems in the Middle East. We act like we know everything that we do is good and right and moral, but we are wrong. We can either keep fighting this war with impaired intelligence and a hidden enemy, or we can cut our losses and get back to worrying about pointless stuff like political scandals and movie stars and their lovers. I for one have had enough of everyone hating the United States, and I feel that if we just took a step back and assessed our place in this world we could realize our blunders and start over. I know one thing for sure; our choice of the Northern Alliance as our Afghani allies is going to lead to nothing good (they are just a bunch of warlord robbers too). We need to stay out of conflicts that have nothing to do with us and focus on our own problems, of which we have many. Go America, woohoo!