The E-Word
The U.S. Has Rivals and Competitors, Not Enemies
by Ted Rall
from TedRall.com
“A Gallup poll,” Libby Quaid wrote for the Associated Press on June 2nd, “found that two-thirds of [Americans] said they believe it would be a good idea for the president to meet with the leaders of enemy countries.”
Who are they referring to? An enemy is a country with whom a nation is at war. “Enemy countries”? We have enemies (hi, Osama). We have critics. We even have competitors. But the United States doesn’t have enemy countries.
September 11 aside, citizens of the United States should feel secure. We border big oceans and two close allies–more like wholly owned subsidiaries. As for the rest of the world, well, they’ve been pretty nice to us.
Not that we deserve it. Since 1941, the U.S. has attacked, among others, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Grenada, Panama, the Philippines, Libya, Iran, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Not once were we defending ourselves. We were always the aggressor. Over the course of six decades during which we were the world’s leading instigator of armed conflict, no one attacked us–not even the people we attacked! No one declared war upon us.
Yet everywhere you turn, on every channel and in every newspaper, there’s some politician or journalist using that word to describe another country: enemy. John McCain bashes Barack Obama for appeasing “the enemy” (he means Iran). Writing in the Wall Street Journal, also about Obama and Iran, Joe Lieberman sniped: “Too many Democrats seem to have become confused about the difference between America’s friends and America’s enemies.” After 9/11 self-loathing gay neoconservative blogger Andrew Sullivan called opponents of the Bush Administration “the enemy within the West itself–a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column.” The Bush Administration even incorporates the E-word in a term it invented, found nowhere in U.S. or international law, to describe its political prisoners: “unlawful enemy combatants.”
Enemies! Enemies! Enemies! Enemies everywhere, but never an attack.
(Continued here.)
by Ted Rall
from TedRall.com
“A Gallup poll,” Libby Quaid wrote for the Associated Press on June 2nd, “found that two-thirds of [Americans] said they believe it would be a good idea for the president to meet with the leaders of enemy countries.”
Who are they referring to? An enemy is a country with whom a nation is at war. “Enemy countries”? We have enemies (hi, Osama). We have critics. We even have competitors. But the United States doesn’t have enemy countries.
September 11 aside, citizens of the United States should feel secure. We border big oceans and two close allies–more like wholly owned subsidiaries. As for the rest of the world, well, they’ve been pretty nice to us.
Not that we deserve it. Since 1941, the U.S. has attacked, among others, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Grenada, Panama, the Philippines, Libya, Iran, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Haiti, Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Not once were we defending ourselves. We were always the aggressor. Over the course of six decades during which we were the world’s leading instigator of armed conflict, no one attacked us–not even the people we attacked! No one declared war upon us.
Yet everywhere you turn, on every channel and in every newspaper, there’s some politician or journalist using that word to describe another country: enemy. John McCain bashes Barack Obama for appeasing “the enemy” (he means Iran). Writing in the Wall Street Journal, also about Obama and Iran, Joe Lieberman sniped: “Too many Democrats seem to have become confused about the difference between America’s friends and America’s enemies.” After 9/11 self-loathing gay neoconservative blogger Andrew Sullivan called opponents of the Bush Administration “the enemy within the West itself–a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column.” The Bush Administration even incorporates the E-word in a term it invented, found nowhere in U.S. or international law, to describe its political prisoners: “unlawful enemy combatants.”
Enemies! Enemies! Enemies! Enemies everywhere, but never an attack.
(Continued here.)
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