You people say this is such a bad idea, but it’s exactly the American way & the CIA way. That’s what the USA govt has been doing for 55 years & you finally agree that you’re government is wrong. Can’t you see the irony in what Chomsky says? He’s mocking the USA. He does the USA better than the USA does!
Say, I would like to redirect you to my post and then discuss it in the context of the topic of the cold war. I understand from your previous post that you are 22 years old. Many people of our generation (I am only 25) do not understand the reality of the cold war, but from a historical perspective, I think it is necessary to be familiar with the mind set of the leaders of the west at that time before making a judgment on whether the decisions and policy was right or wrong. Without the proper historical perspective, it is easy to look at the outcome of the cold war and then scrutinize what aspects should have been different; indeed hindsight is 20/20.
From your post, I gather that you believe the foreign policy of the United States during the cold war was a failure. Specifically, “that’s what the USA govt has been doing for 55 years & you finally agree that you’re (sic) government is wrong.” I’d like to point out, however, that the outcome of the cold war: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the avoidance of nuclear war made the foreign policy a success. There were three possible outcomes of the Cold War, the preservation of the United States and capitalism and the ensuing collapse of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the United States and the spread of Communism, or nuclear war in which both sides and most of the world would be destroyed. When I read about Khrushchev taking a shoe and banging the podium of the UN shouting, “we will burry you!” to the United States, it is a wonder that we are not all typing in Russian on this forum.
There was a time when many people in this country thought nuclear war was eminent; some people even went so far as to build bomb shelters. Children were instructed in schools to not look into the light from a nuclear explosion and to put their face down in gutters, much the way we teach fire safety drills today. I’ve heard stories of kids in New York City even being given dog tags for identification. If you consider the spread of communism to places like China, East Germany, and the support the Soviet Union was trying to garner in many Middle Eastern and other Asian countries, the leaders of the United States acted in a way to preserve the American way of life. Since Canada is a NATO ally, I would imagine that much of our foreign policy helped preserve the Canadian way of life as well, how many ICBM’s do you think were pointed at Canada?
The United States and much of the west started forming allies with countries around the world. NATO was formed as a pact between nations as a show of force against the Soviet Union, united we stand was the message and with out allies we all stood together. Indeed, with the spread of communism and the Domino Theory, the foreign policy could be crudely described as two brawlers in a bar about to square off and looking for friends when the “shit hit the fan.” Unfortunately, many of those that we sought as allies did some pretty bad things to their own people. In hindsight it is easy to see that the governments of some of the nations we supported around the world did not uphold the values that we believe in, but when you consider the context of the times, we were trying to keep a favorable balance of nations that were against communism.
In the context of this post, it is easy for Chomsky to mock the United States. However, if you consider that the Dooms Day clock was ticking away, there is nothing funny about the policy to mock. At this day and age without another super power to challenge the very nature of the way you and I live (and that was literally what was happening, a challenge to our way of life) the United States can afford to take the high road and not use a country like Iran as a potential ally in the Middle East, unfortunately that wasn’t always the case.
Was that policy right? The fact that we avoided the end of the world, the policy can’t necessarily wrong. However, now that we won, it is time to be accountable for our actions and take responsibility for places like Iraq and Afghanistan. We don’t need to continue to follow the policy that Chomsky proposes, because in this day and age, it is not the right thing to do.
I think if you were to spend some time thinking about modern history and how drastically different it could have been, you may not be so critical of all of our past actions. And if you are critical, good, get on the right path and lead the fight to rid the world of the problems we face today. But don’t criticize a policy that allowed the perseverance of your way of life, and then be critical when we take the initiative, financial burden and responsibility for our past actions by ridding the world of one of the most ruthless dictators of modern history.
I read Say’s last post right before going to workout. The whole time I worked out I was trying to figure out how to explain exactly what Anderson so clearly stated.
Say, common courtesy requires that you at least acknowledge the arguments of the post if you are not going to respond with a counter of your own. In my opinion it is a sign of a spoiled child to take your “toy and run home.”
Anderson: Haven’t you dealt with Say before? He won’t respond because he can’t. He does not know what he is talking about. He is incapable of independent thought, one of the “Artificial Intellectuals” I was talking about on the other Chomsky post. A person who repeatedly speaks in quotes. They hang out with other “Artificial Intellectuals” often at coffee houses trying to sound smarter then each other. They can be easily found by their use of the words Multinational Corporation and Industrial Military Complex. They too often ignore reality and facts in their arguments. Anything that disagrees with their view of the world is immediately dismissed without thought. A good example is stating that Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction when the army couldn’t drink out of the river because it was full of nerve agents and mustard gas. And stating that we are hated in the mid-east without mentioning that their entire media is first run through a propaganda filter that Orwell feared, and Goebbels would have been proud of.