Is the United States Becoming Too Dominant in the World?

Oh, Hayes St. I am sorry for doubting your wisdom. I am glad you, personally are manning the walls of freedom. Is that what you are saying? Did your argument really come to this? So, any criticism, or question of US policy is undermining freedom? There is only one approach? Why call yourself a democracy if honest debate over policy issues is deemed irrelevant, or worse, from the outset?
I don't weep for Iraq, or Hussein, or whatever you are trying to imply. Maybe this is difficult to grasp, but I am worried that a new war with Iraq without even the support of our closest allies might destabilize the region to the point that the US faces larger (re: nuclear) problems in the region. Tensions have risen in the region (Israel and the Pakistani-Indian border) even in the midst of a US involvement that has near universal support.
The whole point of this thread and recent threads is the question of why other countries - even our closest allies - are not going along with the Axis of Evil rhetoric. I have attempted to explain why other countries might be dubious of the good results of unilateral US action. I am not trying to prove some hypothetical question of whether any other superpower would do better. That is truly irrelevant. Just like the USA, other countries have good and bad intentions and do good and bad things. What is different is that the US and no other country claims to be the "beacon of freedom and democracy" and acts on it. If the history of US involvement has often been counter to these ideals - and it has been conclusively proven that this has been the case at least thirty years ago, right Hayes? - one might be able to understand why the rest of the world doesn't always fall in love with Big Brother.
In any case, I hope you stop quoting bad outtakes from "A Few Good Men" from behind a f*cking computer screen in London, Rambo. You had the kind of meltdown that comes from somebody who is not interested in further debate. I will agree with you on this one...have a nice day.

 

Uh, I thought the quote would be humorous. Jesus...

It seems this conversation has taken a turn for the worse, despite my attempts to lighten up a little bit.

There are really two threads in one: (a) Is the US, the current dominant world power, benevolent in its foreign interventions; and (b) is there a reason that other countries distrust American motives.

Elvis, your examples are old and irrelevant to (a). They certainly go a long way to explaining (b).

See, that wasn't so hard, was it?

BTW: Specifically you said...

I've engaged you on every point so I hardly think I'm excluding debate.

And I already answered this and you are now merely regurgitating the same arguments. As I said before - if a US attack on an Islamic state was going to result in an seizure of nukes or destabilization of Pakistan by Islamic extremists, they would have done so when the US attacked Afghanistan. They didn't which emperically denies your theory. When you consider the fact that Pakistani extremists were very close to the Taliban, it even further discredits your concern.

Oh, ok. I thought this was the 'Is the US becoming too dominant in the world' thread. Not the 'Axis of Evil' thread. *Edit after reading Jeff's last post...

Since I've answered every one of your contentions (or agreed with them), I don't know where you get the idea that I'm avoiding your arguments or that I've had a meltdown.

 

Princess: Lay off. I am <b>ALSO</b> an administrator and I think you are spouting off in a situation when you probably should just walk away. Don't assume that BK's post gives you licence to be antagonistic just because you agree with him. BK and I are friends AND we are almost always in agreement when it comes to posting priveledges. I can almost guarantee you that if I went after you with the same statement, BK would afford me the same backup that I afford him. We've known each other and been around here alot longer than most everyone else.

You ever heard the statement in basketball that the person who retaliates gets the foul? You are treading in retalitory territory. Rather than using BK's post as some protective umbrella that allows you to take shots at Elvis and dimsie by default, you should probably just leave it alone and move on.

You've been here a month and yet you've managed to piss off more than a few people. This is your cue to take it easy.

<b>Elvis and dimsie:</b> I don't always like the "I'm an administrator, so chill out" post, but I've used it too and I will 100% back up BK's choice to use it because he would do the same for me. And, you are both overstepping your boundries here. One of the things we all try and abide by is the "no personal insults" concept. Argue, disagree and debate all you like, but make it personal, espeically with someone in charge, and you are more likely to get the boot.

Many times, I agree with what you say, but I often disagree with HOW you say it and it would not be out of line for BK to say what he said. Frankly, if you had said the same thing to me, he would probably help me tell you to chill out just as I help him. This board is NOT going to turn into some ESPN freak fest.

<b>Everyone:</b> I tried to point out in another thread that people need to chill, but no one seemed to listen.

So, I'll say it again. STOP INSULTING EACH OTHER. It shows a lack of respect by ALL of you.

 

England, Frace, America, Russia, Germany, China...

Just cause we're the Strongest doesn't mean we're the most dominant does it?

 

HayesStreet:

Dude... whatever you're quoting, you're starting to sound like Rudyard Kipling on an opium binge. Such fevered and purple prose! Neither Elvis nor I, obviously, recognised the source and thought you had had a complete meltdown... care to enlighten us?

Jeff: thanks. Although I don't agree with this theory that either of us were personal with BrianKagy. Elvis called his *argument* stupid, and gave reasons why. I've seen much worse on this board. But whatever. Shrug.

 

dimsie,

Elvis said:

In any case, I hope you stop quoting bad outtakes from "A Few Good Men" from behind a f*cking computer screen in London, Rambo. You had the kind of meltdown that comes from somebody who is not interested in further debate. I will agree with you on this one...have a nice day.

That WAS where the quote was from (A Few Good Men). I just changed 'Santiago' to Saddam, and Lt whatever her name was to Lt Costello in an attempt to be humorous. Then when he said 'stop quoting A Few Good Men' I thought you knew I WAS quoting it, just as a joke...

I would have indicated the source but thought that would take the fun out of it. Sorry it was confusing instead of funny.

And I avoid computers when I'm on an opium binge...

 

Only for the US, or for all countries?

Should we still be concerned about Germany and Japan? What should we infer about New Zealand from the way Maori land was treated?

Times change.



'More foreign aid per head' is meanigless without looking at the big picture. First, Dallas/FW has more population than New Zealand. The difference in scale makes it a difficult comparison, at best. I imagine you would need a certain base amount simply to play the game; do we really need to spend 80x what NZ spends? At some point, additional expenditures are ridiculous. They don't grow linearly. (BTW, no offense to NZ, which by all accounts, is a beautiful country)

Secondly, a point HayesStreet I believe raised already, how about private charity contributions? How about military support?

Similar arguments abound about the UN and what the US owes there. We have less than 5% of the world's population, and we fund 25% of the UN, but people only mention that we owe a debt.

 

Was that really necessary, or helpful?

 

Cohen,

Good posts! It does seem that the US history is under seige here, but we're not the only country that has made mistakes. And in comparison, ours don't seem as bad in some cases.

I understand that people might not trust us for these reasons, but if we're looking at history, no one should really trust anyone.

And why do people always focus on the bad history? The US, as well as other countries including the ones you named, have done wonderful things. It's not just in this case, but people tend to focus on the bad. Some argue that we should give Iraq the benefit of the doubt, but why not give the US that same benefit?

Does anyone have an answer?

 

Are you serious? I wasn't peeved until your replies to the question. Do you really think you and your husband have responded in a reasonable, polite way?

that is the common response of many on this board when a woman whips their ass in one of these debates.

You know, it is actually possible to support and disagree with different aspects of a country. It's called thinking.

your Grenada argument is so stupid!

I find your kneejerk response to my criticisms frustrating.

his little groupie Princess

the 'don't call my argument stupid because I'm an administrator' card is *really* lame.

I didn't tell Elvis not to call my argument stupid "because I'm an administrator". I told him I didn't appreciate it because it was impolite. That I donate my time to help administrate this site compounds the impolite nature of that remark.

Your husband did not give reasons why my "Grenada argument" (a misnomer, since it was nothing but a statement that there were American medical students there that required protection) qualified as "stupid". He made a serious of statements that demonstrate he has a rather nebulous grasp of why America intervened in Grenada. Wag the dog, honestly.

Well, ma'am, when you want to start paying me (and the other admins) what my employer pays me, I'll quit my job and administrate the BBS full time.

Until then, it's going to be hit and miss, and just because you've "seen worse" in other threads, don't feel justified in behaving rudely yourself.

 

Cohen, you ask if all countries should be held to the same standards, and of course they should:

What should we infer about New Zealand from the way Maori land was treated?

You can infer that New Zealanders were racist and discriminatory. Some of them still are. As a result, you can understand why many Maori in New Zealand still persecuted against and why the New Zealand government should *acknowledge* its own guilt (it has) and *respond* with reparations (which it is doing through the Waitangi Tribunal). So times change, yes, but memory and history are still important in determining future policy.

BrianKagy: look, whatever. I don't think you're right, but winning the whole 'who's polite and who isn't' argument isn't as important to me as it clearly is to you, so I'll shut up now. If you'd like to ban me from the board, of course that's your right and your call.

 

EVERYBODY !!!!

We are the world, we are the children...if you want to make a better place, so let's start living.......theres a choice were making, we're saving our own lives.......


COME on..SING !!!!!




DaDakota

 

I made a serious effort to stay out of the fray for a while, feeling that there is no room for meaningfull discussion, but a couple people still keep posting the same response to everything, and it's driving me nuts...

Princess...

1) You keep saying things like.." Oh, well, we may have screwed up some times, but some times we didn't! In fact, most times we didn't! " as if that somehow explains why the U.S. has the right to determine the fate of other nations...

Without getting into a discussion about whether or not your historical math is right or wrong, I would like to point out a couple of things about the non-relevance of that position to the discussion at hand..

A lot of us feel that NO DEMOCRATIC NATION can enforce it's political philosophy on other nations, especially in contradiction to the will of it's people, and call itself democratic. Doing that ONCE is enough to discredit that nation as a representative of self-determination, and the United States has done it many times...It makes no more difference to point out how many times they didn't do that than it would for a defense lawyer to say his client wasn't a murderer by pointing out all the people his client HADN'T killed...

2) Americans aren't attacking or beseiging thier history by pointing out facts any more than you are by pointing out the things you want to look at. How can we attack a nation's history by stating it? You repeatedly state things like...( paraphrasing, but really trying to be fair/accurate ) " Our presence in the Middle East is justified because the British caused the situation after the war by trying to divide it amongst Euro-powers, and only the Americans prevented it. Then the Brits wrecked everything by staying to 'help', while really just looking out for themselves...so we're just cleaning up their mess." Then when someone points out that we are now doing the same thing for the same reasons, you'll say we're attacking American history...I just don't get it.


There's more I have to say, but I'm already doubting if there is any point to even saying what I have so far...We'll see, I guess...

 

Originally posted by Grizzled

... Perhaps you got lumped in somewhat unfairly.

I juts don't care for words being put in my mouth. No problem.

But to address your post…
In this or any of the other related threads, I don't see anybody disputing the fact that Sadam is a threat. ..

This article deals with the 'Axis of Evil', and states:
Instead, this is a war against regimes the US dislikes: a war for heightened US global hegemony ...

To me, that sounds like the writer questions the veracity of the charges leveled against these 3 countries. It sounds like the writer believes we have no positive motives; only self-serving power-hungry ones. The writer does not care about our tactics, about how we get rid of Sadaam, but WHY we are condemning these countries' regimes.

I don't necessarily accept or approve of the term 'evil'. I don't 'just brush it off', I just try to come up with an explanation that I could find understandable.

Personally, I would not consider using the term w/o providing supporting evidence of 'evil'. Some speculate that the term was carefully designed to pressure these countries to the negotiating table and ultimately cut-off resources to terrorist networks.

"Proactivity for once"? It seems to me that that has been one of you problems in the past. You have acted before you thought a problem through thoroughly and you have ended up making the wrong moves.

In many instances, probably. But in very important ones, we either waited too long to do anything or did nothing at all: Rwanda, Khmer Rouge, Bosnia, even WWII.

Maybe the internal debate about whether or not we should be the World's policeman has created doubt and hesitation when we should have acted.

Easier to sit back? In some circumstances this can be true, but in this case I think it's easier to simply wade in rather than to take the time to build a coalition, consider the tertiary issues, as treeman calls them, and devise ways to address them. In almost any project that you can think of that experiences problems, one of the major causes is insufficient planning, problem solving, and risk identification and mitigation in advance. Fast-tracking a project is risky business, and fast-tracking when it's not necessary is simply foolish.

This administration is far from foolish. You and I disagree that taking on Iran, Iraq and North Korea is the easier path.

Think about where we are on this planet and where they are; we could really ignore the problem. Unfortunately, we would have to get involved later when our friends would be in compromising positions, assuming things got out-of-hand.

...The US's track record and methods, however, I do have concerns about.

As do most, if not all of us. But its not white-and-black.

 

If the only topics that showed up here were about how great we are, I would probably be mentioning our errors and transgressions.

But with you around glynch, I never get the opportunity.

 

JAG,

I am not saying we should ignore the past at all. What I am saying is that just because we did wrong in the past does not make all of our plans bad as well. It's like the "once a cheater always a cheater" line from Friends. The US has made mistakes and no one is agruing that. But you can't instantly label all of our actions as bad because of it. Why is doing something bad once enough to label someone as bad? If you use this, I don't think any country or person would be good at all. And what a sad place this would be. (I'm not saying that we haven't done bad things. But if I'm willing to see the bad things, shouldn't the people on the other side try to see the good things as well. IMO, they're not.)

If you feel that no democratic nation can enforce its political philosophies upon other nations, then nothing I say will change your mind. So perhaps we just need to agree to disagree.

While America's intentions might not be what you like, you can't do much about it. If we're looking out for ourselves, that works for me. I work and live in America and want us to have the best. If we're looking out for the world, even better. I really don't think though that we just want to go out and kill people for fun.

And what specifically did you mean by "other people point out the same things?" I really don't know what you are referring to and I don't want to reread every post to find out.

 

I appreciate ya Hayes! One of Nicholson's greatest scenes ever. You can't HANDLE the truth!

 

It's not about 'good' or 'bad'..it's about right or might. What gives us the right to decide what form of government other nations have? We were formed on the basic principle that people have the right to decide for themselves in their own land...And when we go against that, it's not 'bad' or 'good', it's simply contrary to our proclaimed belief. Has nothing to do with 'once a cheater always a cheater', and that's the kind of thing that makes me think you're not really reading what I, at least, say.

Yes, I guess that we need to agree to disagree if you don't see a contradiction in the self-proclaimed world advocate of self-determination determining the practices and policies of foreign nations.

I don't know what you're talking about with your last point...

 

This is what I was referring to. What do you mean in your last statement.

We were formed when England denied us our rights. And we believed in self-determination. And we still do. Sometimes, however, that isn't always the best situation. All countries are not always able to rule themselves. If the economy is bad or the society is poor and corrupt too, how can a country survive on it's own? This doesn't give the US the right to rule them, but I think it warrants our being involved.

I think that if we help a country fight against its government that gives us a right to have a say in how the country should be run. Hopefully, we would leave the decision up to the people.

 

Yeah, I know the feeling

Ah, but a prosecutor can not bring up prior convictions, as they are prejudicial, inflammatory, and irrelevant to the discussion at hand, which is: "Is the US becoming too dominant in the world."
The discussion (check out the title) is not "has the US always been consistently democratic in its foreign policy."

I think your analogy is silly. Almost as bad as your decapitation analogy. But since you continue to use them....how about this...
Am I to be put on trial for something my grandfather did in the Pacific in WWII? Can I not say I am a pacifist because he was a soldier? Can the US not say its against slavery since we once we slave owners? Could Athens never have been called a democracy, as they waged war on their neighbors?

Also, the problems with your particular philosophy are massive. Was it anti-democratic for the French to support the Americans? If the regime in place is not legitimate, can action against it be democratic? Who decides? Does an indigenous populace always have the ability to overthrow a regime that is undemocratic? I don't think you really believe that (although please spare me a 'can you read my mind' retort)...

Can the US never call itself a democratic nation because we committed genocide against the so-called Native Americans? If there are no temporal boundaries on what is relevant to evaluation of motives and actions, such parameters would make the discussion of ANY country as democratic useless and a waste of time.

As I've said before, the commentary on US actions that have been non-democratic ARE relevant to outside perception of the US, and we should keep that in mind in formulating our foreign policy (although it may not be the defining variable in our deliberations). Those same actions are irrelevant to a discussion of whether or not US actions recently (I've been saying the past 10 years) ARE actually democratic and whether they DO uphold the ideals our country was founded on. The fact that our interventions in the last 10 years, which covers three Administrations and a radical change in the international structure, are uniformly consistent with those ideals is much more relevant that what we did before that.

Add to that, JAG, that you have been called to task multiple times for your cultural/moral relativism, each time clearly sidestepping an answer. If another country says 'Rape is cool - everybody join in,' or 'genocide rocks - c'mon everybody,' is it UNdemocratic or anti-American ideals to intervene? If so is that a standard we should use? I don't think so. And while you say 'a lot' of you believe this, I don't think that is true either.