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AnimusRex -> RE: Iraqis outraged as Blackwater case thrown out (1/3/2010 6:42:57 PM)
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Sometimes I wonder if the neocons ever consider what would happen if the shoe were on the other foot.
Suppose an alliance of China/Venezuela one day decides that America should be liberated, to establish a government that they consider to be more just, more responsive to its people?
Suppose they declared Pro-Tibetan or Taiwanese independence advocates to be dangerous terrorists, and started snatching American citizens off the streets of Dallas?
Or if they suspected one of those Taiwanese "terrorists" was living in Savannah, and so they lobbed a few missiles onto the city, in hopes of killing one. The other 40 people killed would be collateral damage and deeply regretted by the Chinese government.
If the Chinese security guards gunned down 17 civilians on the streets of Atlanta? And got away scot free?
If it turned out that people connected to the Venezuelan government were on the boards of corporations that got first dibs on American oil fields and timber forests?
If they set up permanent Chinese military bases in Kansas and San Diego? If Venezuelan jets and helicopters swooped over Denver's skyline?
I suspect- and I could be wrong- but I suspect a lot of people at National Review and Fox news would develop a sudden appreciation for "quaint" concepts like international law and the Geneva Conventions. Dick Cheney might reconsider if torture was really as effective and appropriate as he thinks it is now.
We were shocked and stunned when violence struck us on 9/11. The concept of foreign troops on our soil is so shocking as to be inconceivable. Yet we have absolutely no regard for "sovereignty" when it comes to other people's countries; we lob missiles into Yemen, without a second thought; we invade other nations carelessly, recklessly, as it it were of no great consequence. We are waging war on 4 nations simultaneously right now, and yet they keep baying for more war, more invasions, constantly more.
We snatch civilians off of the streets in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, we set up 1,000 military bases all around the world, we have casual national conversations about whether or not we should "allow" other nations to develop nuclear weapons.
And none of this is in line with the vision of the Founding Fathers; we were established as a resistance to empire, and yet the neocons have based their entire philosophy around the concept of American Empire.
In Victoria's time, it was said that the "sun never sets on the British Empire"; and it was literally true- the British Empire spanned the globe, and ever minute of the day, the sun was shining on some bit of the Empire.
Today, the same can be said of the American Empire.
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