[mburbank]

I was going to say something clever about how you pretending that this was an "Aw shucks" argument was kind of cute, but Ziggy already said it. Maybe you know people who make that argument, but you haven't met any here.

"If you were actually doing this I'd say yes. But what you, and others are actually doing is playing the moral equivalence game. Some look at history and see it as a reason to take action. Others seem to look at it and take it as an excuse for apathy and blind relativism. As if suicide bombing and intolerance were just phases these nations go through, heck, they'll grow out of it. We did!

I mean, how could we POSSIBLE criticize Islamic extremists who killed a reporter this year? WE BOMBED JAPAN! AND WHAT ABOUT VIETNAM, AND THE NATIVE AMERICANS!!? IT WOULD BE SOOO HYPOCRITICAL!! "

1.) Try not to tell me what I'm actually doing. It's extremely rude. Except when I do it to OAA and then it's hillarious. I would never dream of doing it to you. I may cry.
2.) Moral equivalence is not a game or an excuse. It is an acknowledgement that all societies risk falling into evil. It is a call for vigilance, not an excuse for apathy. I personally apologize for the bad moral relativists who frightened you in your youth.
3.) I have yet to hear any countries public presenation that were not ludicrosly hypocritical (forgive my relativism). I am unconcerned with hypocrisy, whicyh I believe is the language of national speech and take with a grain of salt. I do think, though, that the more we insist on believeing any wrong we ever did was an accient or no big deal goes hand in glove with foreign policies that have at very least encouraged tyhe spread of te same extremism we are now fighting. Hind sight is twenty twenty, but until we stop seeing oursleves as vastly superior to the wee brown froggy peoples of the earth, we will make the same mistakes. I think beheading journalists and dropping nuclear weapons on cities are very ugly things, and both should be worked against strenously. However, I think beheading the pilot of the enola gay would not have solved anything and it doesn't look to me like bombing Iraq is working very well as a method of decreasing beheadings.

"I feel like I'm perfectly capable of feeling guillt for our own wrong doings, for the wrongs of my country, my religion, and whoever else, while at the same time calling out other evils. My guilt-meter can multi-task. "

Lovely. Kudos. I think your guilt meter works a lot better than the collective guilt meter of the people instituting our foreign policy, but that's neither here nor there, since guilt and learning are to entirely separate things. HOW did we as a civilization pass out of barbarism? HOW do we keep from slipping back into it on a daily basis? Those are things to think about and we might actually come up with a more productive foreign policy or at least do less damage if we at very least concidered the matter. But why would we do that when we can drop cluster bombs on evil doers? The very fact that cluster bombs, land mines and other totally indiscriminate weapons in our vastly superior arsenal are there shows that we are not overly concerned with who we kill. I am not saying we target innocents, the way the terrorists do. We just care way more about killing the guilty than about not killing innocents.

Yes, yes, yes, they are worse than we are, hugely worse, nothing relative about it, but that's the whole point. It isn't enough to be savagery lite, especially when we have the money to do much of our savagery at a very civilzed remove. Dropping a bomb on a building is easier, cleaner, and you are targetting bad guys and their infrastructure as opposed to civillians, but it's also so expensive!

"it doesn't mean there aren't serious cultural and governmental problems that encourage terrorism."

I couldn't agree more. Do you think our current methods are working? I respect you far more than the president or the secretary of deffense, as I respect others who think our current course of action, while horribly costly, may wield worthwhile results in the end. I know people who think that the results already yielded in voting and the current governments are worth the cost in anguish. Respectfully, I don't. I do not think the path we are on can result in stability. I think it is fatally flawed. And yet, somehow, I think you ahve arrived at your conclusions without 'playing games' or 'being apathetic'. Hmmm. How could this be?

"AND OMG, THE GUILT!!! HELP ME, I'M LIBERAL AND FEEL SHAME!!"

While certainly liberal, the only things I'm ashamed of are things we've done in my lifetime. Things we did in the past might be humbling or instructive, but I see very little value in being ashamed. Again, for all liberals everywhere, I apologize for the bad hippies who frightened you at some critical point in your developement. You should talk to more angry socialist grandchildren of labor activists. We're lovely.

"Do we let radical Islam slide"

I'm sorry for the bad hippy that suggested that. I'm certain he or she is an idiot. I'm sure there's almost no groiund to stand on between 'letting it slide' and invading and occupying a country on false premisses. As for the 'sure, but that's the distant past, now we're there, what are you going to do now?!' argument, I'll admit I'm not sure. I'm far more sure of what we shouldn't do, which is build really large permanent bases on account of it makes us look like we plan on staying for a while. I also think Invading Iran might not be a great idea. I know we haven't done that yet, and the days when we did things like that are in the past, but I do worry. I think it might be good to try some new approaches to dealing with radical islam, because killing them in droves does not seem to be working.

"It's his fundamentalism that has helped free a heck of a lot of muslims from a tyrannical regime."

While that may at some future point prove to be the case, I do not think the Iraqis are free of anything yet. They have traded terror for terror, misery for misery. We will never know if or when Sadaams dictatorship woud have fallen or to whom or what might have repalced it. But without implying that Sadaams dictatorship wasn't a very, very bad thing, I think what they have now is also very, very bad. And if any of this was ever about freeing people from tyranny... I'm sorry, I just don't see it. That's a label we put on things way after the fact, and to any degree it's true, accidental. If that was ever in any way his aim, his fundamentlism, simplistic and brutal, couldn't comprehend the seething stew of ethnic, tribal tension he was wading into. I have no problem with faith informing a world leaders decisions. I have serious, serious problems with fundamentalism informing them. Fundamentalists are not keen on doubt, and are not known for flexability.