And one more thing, Wouter,
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<br>I think that if anything, the fact that it was on American soil has less to do with this than that it is such a huge expansion of the conflict quo ante.
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<br>As my wife just mentioned, if this had been, God forbid, done to the Brandenberg gate, the Arc de Triumphe (Sp?) or Buckinghgam Palace, many Americans would feel, I think, less conflicted, and more committed to a remedy. We'd pick up our gear and open up a nice can of whup-a$$ on whomever slapped your face quicker than you could start whining about it.
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<br>See, then, Wout, nobody could call us anything but "good guys" in our response, intent, etc. There's a wide streak of self-doubt in our national conscience. It dates back to two signal events in our modern history: The end of the Viet Nam Conflict, and Watergate.
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<br>First, both events happened when a sizeable majority of today's professional journalists were at or near the beginning, formative phase of their carreers. What truly ended the Viet Nam conflict, more than any debate about endss justifying means, was a pulitzer winning photograph, of a little asian child, running away from a napalm attack on his village. It was on the cover of Life magazine (Time?) It was then that Americans began seriously to question whether any ends could justify such horrible means. That photographer is widely credited, among journalists, with ending the war, and his colleagues have all been, with a small part of their minds, on the lookout to duplicate his feat, if you could get them past the embarassment of admitting it. The national self doubts already expressed by the young spread to enough other parts of our culture to make the end inevitable.
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<br>A few years later, Wout, Watergate Hotel was broken into, touching off an awful scandal, the worst mostly because it was the first of such public extent. Later scandals, which arguably involved greater transgressions, seemed milder, mostly because we'd already lost our faith that American Government had to be right, just because it was American.
<br>Again, Wout, it was journalists who brought Nixon low, at least, Woodward and Bernstein are more famous than the informant whose tool they allowed themselves to become. So journalists are also on the lookout to pull off another grand expose of American Governmental abuse.
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<br>It is this sub-text to American journalism that you have missed in your Euro-centric analysis of our info- infrastructure. I referred to it before to you as that "hip student national self hatred" but you see it's deeper than that, and, oddly enough, Wout, it's centered in mainstream broadcast journalism, and CNN is often cited as its bastion.
<br>So you see, Wouter, we'd truly march off to defend you from your neighbors faster and surer of purpose than to defend ourselves - - our own tortured conscience, our own contingent of professional self critics, would rest easier in that case. Ask any American, we see old pictures of Allied soldiers greeting the liberated French in the streets of Paris, and we thnk, 'that was one time not even the reflexively anti-American types could make up some kind of complaint about how we were just being imperial." We really did go over, take it all back from the invaders, give it all back to the owners, and we came home. I get choked up.
<br>Come to think of it, that's what we did in Kuwait too. And to those who say, "America just did it for the oil" I'd say, no. Plenty of Americans hate bullies, and would go anywhere the bad guys are whuppin on the little guys. Trouble is, we catch so much resentment, at home and abroad, from the likes of you Wouter, that we debate it to death and nothing happens. In Kuwait, the Americans of good conscience who felt it was the right thing to do were joined, sure enough, by the pragmatic, who felt it was the smart thing to do, and together, they shouted down your spiritual brothers who reflexively cant that it is always the wrong thing to do, and we just did it.
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<br>We went over, by invitation of the victims and likely victims of aggression, we did the job, we gave incalculable wealth back to the lawfull owners, we forged a coalition of hereditary enemies, and we stopped short of our own best interest, at the expressed will of our coalition partners. The Saudi's don't want Saddam Hussain out of there, he's at least only paying lip service to Islam. Without him between them and Iran, well, Kuwait and Saudi fear fundamentalism so much that they'd rather leave a proven agressor in place to insulate them. Saddam's minority Ba'ath party, if overthrown, might well be replaced by a majority fundamentalist movement.
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<br>So we stopped where the locals wanted, left a man in place with good reason to hate us, and again by request, left a garrison in place to protect his neighbors from him. What happened next is typical of us. I'm proud to say that by failing to cheat our allies, by being a good, honest partner in securing their homelands, but not going beyind their wishes to finish what we started, we engineered much of our present troubles. See, Osama Bin Laden, fresh from his victories in Afghanistan *which we supported* returned to his adopted homeland, Saudi Arabia, and found himself fresh out of enemies, and looking at infidel troops quartered on Saudi soil. He protested so loudly that his own government threw him out. And Saddam, well, even you must remember how much rabble rousing he's done.
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<br>Is it any wonder we find Saddam's and bin Laden's fingerprints all over this thing? And still, knowing all that I now know, I'm still proud of our conduct in the Gulf, and that, Wouter, is mostly because the outcome, so painful to us, proves you so fatally wrong about our actions, intents, and probable future.
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<br>People like you, Wout, who use their intellect as tools, not to find the truth, but to twist it to their emotional preconceptions, sap what is best and brightest about my country:
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<br>That we have in the past, and remain willing to in the present and future, shed our blood, toil and treasure to defend your right to criticize and belittle us. And oddly enough, if you and your ideological kin spent less time in the way, Afghanis and Rwandan Hutu's alike would be living better lives already. If we were like your countrymen, we'd have kept Berlin, instuted Goebel's style of journalism (The 'Big lie') and you couldn't find a place to air your fatuous prevarications. This very internet you use to disseminate your prattle wouldn't exist, certainly not in it's free and open condition.
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<br>But don't ever change Wouter. It's by your very freedom to bray on that I measure the greatness of my country, seen clearest in the purity of her intent and the outcome of her actions.
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