blingair said:
Seems the world is spring loaded to hate the U.S. and interprets anything we do as hostile. Case in point: new pictures of Saddam in his underwear. Now it seems world opinion has got it's panties in a twist. Didn't this guy commit genocide but we're in the wrong because he's in his thong? Also was Abu Gharib all that bad? Its not like we lopped off heads or anything like that. Just wondering, I think I may be losing my persceptive on the whole thing.
Nah, you're not losing perspective... You just don't understand the rest of the world (and nor do I). You're exactly right, to "the rest of the world" everything we do is bad. It's been this way for a good long while, and none of it is particularly surprising to me anymore. P.J. O'Rourke wrote an entertaining piece pooh-poohing the Europeans about 20 years ago, the title of which escapes me, but I think it was called "Among the EuroWeenies", from his book "Holidays in Hell". I admit that it was a seminal revelation in my mind, that the world hates us, and to hell with them anyway.
Is Abu Ghraib all that bad? Nah, not to us. The problem is that it made us look even WORSE, which in the eyes of the world didn't take much. I think the reaction of the media in THIS country was completely over-the-top, but maybe (to give them the benefit of the doubt) they did it to make the world think that we thought such behavior was so atrocious that we needed to fling the perpetrators off a cliff.
Not that I necessarily believe that, but not much else makes any sense.
Not to make this overly political, but this is one reason why I'm glad Kerry isn't our president right now... He'd have made a much bigger deal of Abu Ghraib than the media already have, and he'd be trying very, very hard (unsuccessfully) to make me feel that it was a tragedy. Gotta do something to make the world happy, right? Not that it would improve our lot in the MidEast... I'm pretty much of the opinion that nothing we could ever do, short of pulling out completely, would make those people happy.