There is a new strange mood of acceptance among Americans about the world beyond our shores. Of course, we are not becoming naïve isolationists of 1930s vintage, who believe that we are safe by ourselves inside fortress America "” not after September 11. Nor do citizens deny that America has military and moral obligations to stay engaged abroad "” at least for a while yet. Certainly the United States is not mired in a Vietnam-era depression and stagflation and thus ready to wallow in Carteresque malaise. Indeed, if anything Americans remain muscular and are more defiant than ever.
Imagine a world in which there was no United States during the last 15 years. Iraq, Iran, and Libya would now have nukes. Afghanistan would remain a seventh-century Islamic terrorist haven sending out the minions of Zarqawi and Bin Laden worldwide. The lieutenants of Noriega, Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam, and Moammar Khaddafi would no doubt be adjudicating human rights at the United Nations. The Ortega Brothers and Fidel Castro, not democracy, would be the exemplars of Latin America. Bosnia and Kosovo would be national graveyards like Pol Pot's Cambodia. Add in Kurdistan as well "” the periodic laboratory for Saddam's latest varieties of gas. Saddam himself, of course, would have statues throughout the Gulf attesting to his control of half the world's oil reservoirs. Europeans would be in two-day mourning that their arms sales to Arab monstrocracies ensured a second holocaust. North Korea would be shooting missiles over Tokyo from its new bases around Seoul and Pusan. For their own survival, Germany, Taiwan, and ***an would all now be nuclear. Americans know all that "” and yet they grasp that their own vigilance and military sacrifices have earned them spite rather than gratitude. And they are ever so slowly learning not much to care anymore.
In fact, an American consensus is growing that envy and hatred of the United States, coupled with utopian and pacifistic rhetoric, disguise an even more depressing fact: Outside our shores there is a growing barbarism with no other sheriff in sight. Any cinema student of the American Western can fathom why the frightened townspeople "” huddled in their churches and shuttered schools "” almost hated the lone marshal as much as they did the six-shooting outlaw gang rampaging in their streets. After all, the holed-up 'good' citizens were always angry that the lawman had shamed them, worried that he might make dangerous demands on their insular lives, confused about whether they would have to accommodate themselves either to savagery or civilization in their town's future, and, above all, assured that they could libel and slur the tin star in a way that would earn a bullet from the lawbreaker. It was precisely that paradox between impotent high-sounding rhetoric and blunt-speaking, roughshod courage that lay at the heart of the classic Western from Shane and High Noon to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Magnificent Seven.
The U.N., NATO, or the EU: These are now the town criers of the civilized world who preach about "the law" and then seek asylum in their closed shops and barred stores when the nuclear Daltons or terrorist Clantons run roughshod over the town. In our own contemporary ongoing drama, China, Russia, and India watch bemused as the United States tries to hunt down the psychopathic killers while Western elites ankle-bite and hector its efforts. I suppose the Russians, Chinese, and Indians know that Islamists understand all too well that blowing up two skyscrapers in Moscow, Shanghai, or Delhi would guarantee that their Middle Eastern patrons might end up in cinders.
So an entire mythology has grown up to accommodate this false world of ours "” sadly never more evident than during the recent tsunami disaster, a tragedy that has juxtaposed rhetoric with reality in a way that becomes each day more surreal. The wealthy Gulf States pledge very little of their vast petrol-dollar reserves "” swollen from last year's jacked-up gasoline prices "” to aid the ravaged homelands of their Islamic nannies, drivers, and janitors. Indeed, Muslim charities advertise to their donors that their aid goes to fellow Muslims "” as if a dying Buddhist or Christian is less deserving of the Muslim Street's aid. In defense, officials argue that the ostracism of "charities" that funded suicide killers to the tune of $150 million has hampered their humanitarian efforts at scraping up a fifth of that sum. But then blowing apart Americans or Jews is always a higher priority than saving innocent Muslim children.
So even in death and misery, the world's pathologies remain "” as Israel is disinvited to help the dying as the most benevolent United States, which freed Afghanistan and toppled Saddam, is supposedly under scrutiny to "regain" its stature for its "crimes" of jailing a mass murderer and sponsoring elections in his place. Last year alone the United States gave more direct money to Egypt and Jordan than what the entire billion-person Muslim world has given for the dead in Indonesia.
China, flush with billions in trade surplus, first offers a few million to its immediate Asian neighbors before increasing its contributions in the wake of massive gifts from ***an and the United States. Peking's gesture was what the usually harsh New York Times magnanimously called "slightly belated." In this weird sort of global high-stakes charity poker, no one asks why tiny Taiwan out-gives one billion mainlanders or why ***an proves about the most generous of all "” worried the answer might suggest that postwar democratic republics, resurrected and nourished by the United States and now deeply entrenched in the Western liberal tradition of democracy, capitalism, and humanitarianism, are more civil societies than the Islamic theocracies, socialist republics, and authoritarian autocracies of the once-romanticized third world.
In the first days of the disaster, a Norwegian U.N. bureaucrat snidely implied that the United States was "stingy" even though private companies in the United States, well apart from American individuals, foundations, and the government, each year alone give more aggregate foreign aid than does his entire tiny country. Apparently the crime against America is not that it gives too little to those who need it, but that it gives too little to those who wish to administer it all. When the terrible wave hit, Kofi Annan was escaping the conundrum of the Oil-for-Food scandal by skiing at Jackson Hole, so naturally George Bush down in 'ole Crawford Texas was the global media's obvious insensitive leader "” "on vacation" as it were, while millions perished.
The U.S. military is habitually slurred even though it possesses the world's only lift and sea assets that could substantially aid in the ongoing disasters in Indonesia and Thailand. Blamed for having too high a profile in removing the Taliban and Saddam, it is now abused for having too meek a presence in Southeast Asia. No doubt America should have "preempted" the wave and acted in a more "unilateral" fashion. Meanwhile we await the arrival of the Charles De Gaulle and its massive fleet of life-saving choppers that can ferry ample amounts of Saudi, Chinese, and Cuban materiel to the dying "” emissaries all of U.N. and EU multilateralism.
All this hypocrisy has desensitized Americans, left and right, liberal and conservative. We will finish the job in Iraq, nursemaid democratic Afghanistan through its birthpangs, and continue to ensure that bandits and criminal states stay off the world's streets. But what is new is that the disenchanted American is becoming savvy and developing a long memory "” and so we all fear the day is coming when he casts aside the badge, rides the buckboard out of town, and leaves such sanctimonious folk to themselves.
Nor do citizens deny that America has military and moral obligations to stay engaged abroad "” at least for a while yet
thats debatable in most people's minds.
And remember, alot of the issue that you bring up we had a hand in creating. We (the united states) LOVE to put puppet dictators in foreign lands, only to find out 20 years down the road we did the wrong thing.
Remember, we put him in power after allende was actually formally elected.
Key Pinochet financial records seized in corruption probe
Thu Jan 6, 6:33 PM ET Entertainment - AFP
SANTIAGO (AFP) - Police and investigators raided the office of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (news - web sites) and seized an important cache of records linked to a corruption probe.
The move came as Pinochet, 89, was under house arrest at his coastal residence west of Santiago after Chile's Supreme Court upheld his indictment in a separate case on murder and kidnapping charges stemming from his 1973-1990 rule.
Judge Sergio Munoz, who is investigating the origin of up to eight million dollars that Pinochet held in Riggs Bank in Washington DC, carried out a surprise raid along with police on Pinochet's offices in the affluent Las Condes neighborhood, in east Santiago.
Pinochet attorney Pablo Rodriguez said that Munoz's order was "illegal and inconstitutional" because his client is protected by special privileges granted by the Chilean Congress for being a former president.
Munoz questioned staff who worked for Pinochet during the raid, Rodriguez said.
Munoz also interrogated Pinochet's eldest daughter, Lucia Pinochet Hiriart, on the origin of money in a US account her father opened in her name.
Although Munoz behaved as a gentleman, Lucia Pinochet told reporters she believes the investigation is nothing but "political persecution" against her father.
A 2004 US Senate investigation found that Riggs Bank had allegedly laundered money in Pinochet's secret accounts between 1994 and 2002. The accounts held between four million and eight million dollars.
Riggs also held accounts in 1985, when Pinochet was still Chile's dictator, and carried as many as 10 accounts for him, some opened with other names, The Washington Post reported in in November.
Pinochet had opened other accounts at in at least four other US banks, including Citibank in Miami, under his name and under the names of two of his children, Lucia and Marco Antonio, Chilean news media reported in August.
The Pinochets owned only a small house and car before the 1973 coup, but 17 years later, held 11 properties in Chile, including apartments in beach tourist areas and houses in the best areas of Santiago.
Eduardo Contreras, one of the attorneys who filed the case against Pinochet, urged officials to follow the law and book Pinochet as a criminal suspect.
"We don't understand why orders are not issued for his booking," said Contreras.
The process in Chile includes two face photographs -- one facing the camera and another from the side -- as well as the taking of a suspect's fingerprints.
Meanwhile in Brussels, Belgian investigators were busy gathering evidence in a case filed against Pinochet by six Chilean exiles in November 1998, magistrate Isabelle Van Heersch told AFP.
The case charges Pinochet with "assasination, abduction, torture and dissapearance." At least four of the six people who filed the case are Belgian nationals of Chilean descent.
Pinochet came to power after a 1973 coup that toppled a democratically elected government and ruled with an iron fist until 1990. By official count some 3,000 Chileans were killed by the state in those years.
And remember, alot of the issue that you bring up we had a hand in creating. We (the united states) LOVE to put puppet dictators in foreign lands, only to find out 20 years down the road we did the wrong thing.
True. And we always hope they would end up like ***an and Germany, peaceful countries that thrive in the world but these other countries have to help themselves as well as help from us.
I forgot to mention, this article is from the National Review online.
The disenchanted American
