Today's News: The Figures Are In. The USA Wins.

[infrogmation]

Two items from today's news:

From CNN: "The death toll from the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center has been revised down to 3,050, the New York Office of Emergency Management said Saturday. "
Source(at bottom of page)

From CommonDreams: "More than 3,500 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan by U.S. bombs, according to a study to be released December 10 by Marc W. Herold, Professor of Economics, International Relations, and Women's Studies at the University of New Hampshire. "
Source

So, apparently, we've killed more innocent civilians in a nation with less than 1/10th the population of the USA than the terrorists killed on 11 September.

Do we get to declare victory now?

Will I be forgiven if I decline to wave a flag and shout "USA! USA!" in celebration of this news?

Comments

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

Hm. Well, if our message is simply "If you kick me and kill thousands of innocent bystanders in the process, I'll kick you and kill thousands of innocent bystanders in the process" I guess we're on track in delivering it.

The "don't fuck with us, we'll kick your ass" message may be a bit clouded if it's been preceeded by decades of a "we'll fuck with you all we want any time we want and there ain't squat you can do about it" message.

[ernunnos.livejournal.com]

Yes, we are on track to deliver that message. It's not a pretty message, but it happens to be better than, "You can kick me and I won't kick you back."

And excuse me, but who have we been fucking with recently? Russia. Iraq. Somalia. Serbia. All of those on behalf of Muslim peoples. Hell, if we get blamed for anything it's not fucking with people quickly enough! This is why I'm a strict non-interventionist. It's a thankless fucking job. We intervened to defend two countries against invaders, intervened to stop a famine that was the result of internal strife, and intervened to halt a genocide, and how does all this intervention get summed up?

"We'll fuck with you all we want any time we want and there ain't squat you can do about it."

If that's the way it's going to be, I say we take our fucking ball and go the fuck home! The next time you're starving or getting invaded or dumped into mass graves don't come crying to us. We learned our lesson.

Except we didn't. Because I'm not in charge.

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

I think we've both been deliberately oversimplifying for the sake of an easy metaphor here.
And you just changed the context there-- though I suspect you know that the "We'll fuck with you all we want any time we want" bit was a reference to interventions of types like military invasions, droping bombs & missles, overthrowing governments &/or installing new ones, supporting dictatorships, etc.

Well, we're both philisophically non-interventionist.
Personally I believe neither the "it makes us safer domestically" nor the "it's for the foreigners own good" arguements in favor of the USA in the role of cop/bully of the World.