Something's Been Bothering Me

Whenever I hear or participate in a debate about American Foreign Policy, one thing always astounds me. People apply different standards to themselves and the country they identify with than they do to other countries. It's a pretty simple concept, and it's somewhat understandable, but it's also completely morally indefensible. When people were discussing the lead-up to the War in Iraq, it would've been ludicrous to point out the hypocrisy of the only country in the history of civilization to use atomic weapons on actual humans talking about Iraq's WMD's. Hell, at that time, mentioning the fact that if Iraq were to still be in possession of any Biological or Chemical Weapons, we most likely brought them there. Of course, the accusation of hypocrisy is only appropriate when attacking the bad deeds, not the lofty goals. So the fact that we sold weapons to Saddam Hussein or killed a couple hundred thousand Japanese citizens on a whim couldn't really be used to protest the impending war (of course basic moral decency and those pesky little "facts" did a pretty good job), but the point is that these points never come up. OK well that's not true. A couple instances of wrongdoing on the part of the higher-ups come up after they're no longer relevant, but for some reason people never seem to put it together.

Slavery, The Indian Removal Act, The Dred Scott Decision, Jim Crow, the Sedition Act, Japanese Internment Camps, the War in Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Operation Ajax, the Iran-Contra Affair, NAFTA, the War in Iraq. That's a relatively random sampling of shitty things perpetrated by this government since it's creation. Of course I have very limited historical knowledge, and that was just a list of some of the few things I could think of off the top of my head in about 5 minutes. The point is that these aren't really isolated instances of individual corruption or government oversight, and you can't chalk it up to people being products of their time. The way I see it, the main difference stuff like the Trail of Tears and Operation Ajax is that the government was open about what it did back then. Nobody knew about the latter when it was going on in '53 (actually I highly doubt that many people know about it even now). So I guess that means that the people are changing their values, which is forcing the government to become less democratic. Of course, if you were to review the historical record with a fine-toothed comb, you'd come up with probably (conservatively) thousands of equally appalling acts. It would be psychotically paranoid to claim that that US is unique in this quality, but at the moment it is probably the most prolific. It's also important to note that many of these actions which are seen in retrospect as "setbacks for democracy" involve US intervention in foreign countries.

The point is that so many people take the word of their government for law (which I guess is actually technically what it's supposed to be), and refuse to critically examine it the same way they would the policy of other countries, especially non-western countries, and - almost exclusively in recent times - muslims, arabs or desis (for reasons most likely related to above unthinking acceptance of government proclamations). It would be really nice for people to actually examine US foreign policy in the future from a stance of neutrality, which wouldn't yield a perfect discussion (much of what the government does is not revealed to the general public - democracy anyone?), but with the knowledge that does trickle down to the common man, we can actually engage in reasonable discussion. Of course, since the people in this country are pretty much removed from direct political or economic influence in this country, it doesn't really matter.