On London

Englishman in New York29 Jul 2005 11:07 am
Manga Tak!

On London appeared in Danish today—in one of Denmark’s national newspapers Weekendavisen! Unfortunatel [...]

It’s interesting to see what happens to people who thought they knew what the
USA [...]

When I wrote my original On London post I never imagined the amount of feedback I would get. Comments were dropping onto the site at a rate tha [...]

Its worse now in your own opinion eh

Take the posters advice above and follow some links to the good news from Iraq

Consider the 10 MILLION Iraqi’s who risked their lives to vote in January

Would YOU dip your finger in the ink and mark yourself for attack like they did?

No – Iraq is not a disaster now – it is a country suffering countless attacks from terrorists – foriegn and domestic – who seek to prevent the rise of arab pluralism and democracy

That event would be the end of their dream of a return to a sharia caliphate

I hope you try to learn more about what is going on in Iraq today – how the people there feel about things ( there are many great Iraqi blogs to check out )

As for taking on ones host culture – I can say that as a New Yorker in London I did not acquire the Euro penchent for blaming all the worlds ills on Israel, the US and the West ( themselves ) in that order

Thank God

The WMD thing was a legal means to get rid of a regime that had caused nothing but trouble in the Middle East, and for the United States. After 9/11, no American President was going to allow Hussein to remain in power; he flouted international law, killed his own citizens, hosted international terrorists in Baghdad, and paid for suicide bombings in Israel. He was a throwback that we can’t afford in a world with WMD.

Meanwhile, the U.S. was – in the name of “keeping Saddam in his box” – severely punishing the Iraqi people with sanctions and propping up this noxious regime that slaughtered its own citizens. The war is a way to get out of the Middle East, and at the same time – hopefully – leave behind something much better and more positive for the future. The country was going to have imploded at some point, anyway; it’s a controlled implosion, this way. In any case, what we were doing was immoral; Hussein should have had his ass kicked a decade ago.

We’re the world’s pre-eminent power, whether we like it our not. (I don’t, particularly, but that’s really neither here nor there.) There are some seriously bad neighborhoods on the planet, and we’re left with the task of trying to do something about them, since nobody else seems to want to. The world is interconnected as never before. This is about geo-politics, and it’s silly to be talking about it as if we could argue about this fine point or that one.

Sorry. You just can’t allow 7th Century minds – like Bin Laden’s, and Hussein’s, for that matter – to get control of 21st Century weapons of mass destruction. We’re trying to do this in a good way – by spreading self-rule and self-determination. It’s terrible that people have to die in the meantime, but the world is not a nice place.

BTW, I think it’s true that some Americans are way over the top in being self-congratulatory about our freedom. I think, actually, it comes from the fact that some people haven’t caught up with history and are mentally living in a time about 50 years ago; that attitude abounded when the Iron Curtain was up, and many Americans don’t travel much, so don’t know what’s actually going on in the world today. And our media stinks.