I just get a little irked whenever I see people claiming that Europe has special moral high ground and that if just Europe would have been in charge of the world we wouldn't have acted like assholes. Chances are that, given the opportunity, Europeans would be just as likely to throw a small third-world country against the wall and beat the snot out of it as Americans. Which is why a lot of our work in building a better EU will have to go towards making sure the EU never gets the opportunity to throw small third world countries up against the wall...
Soft power instead of hard power. It's not the only foreign policy question that matters, but it comes pretty close.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
As you point out its the ideas that matter, not the people who hold them. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
Shouldn't the focus be on taking down the ideas that lead to the Iraq war, instead of assigning blame for how it happened?
And how does one do that without holding the perpetrators accountable? The people who hold these idiotic ideas do matter, and they need to be discredited every time the opportunity presents itself. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers. - George Carlin
The drive to place responsibility for the way Iraq blew up in our faces on the US is just as much about incriminating our domestic Quislings and making it harder for them to say "the international community" when in reality they mean "our sugar-daddy in Washington." That's more than a little rough on the Americans who are exposed to it. And it's going to feel mightily unfair to those Americans who explicitly voted against King George the Lesser. But if we don't drive the point home that the US is not, at the moment, a source of freedom and democracy, our Quislings can keep pissing European lives and political capital away. And that's simply not acceptable.
