spoogenet

We'll never see their side of the story either. The US isn't the innocent "good" in the latest "Good vs. Evil" standoff that Napoleon Bushopart is trying to portray. The US trained Osama and gave him money to fight the Soviets....and now we're fighting him. The US trained Noriega....anybody remember what we did to him? We have a long history of this kind of action....and now who's our buddy? Pakistan? We'll see how that pans out in the future.

If you take a step back from patriotism and the US media and look at things from someone else's perspective, the US can look extremely bad. In many ways we're the big bully on the block, we get away with so much just because we're so powerful. With power comes responsibility, and not everyone who's wielded the ax of the US government has used it with responsibility. We are one of (if not the most) highest polluting countries in the world, yet we don't sign Kyoto. We pride ourselves on justice and war crime tribunals, yet we will not subject ourselves to the same justice system that we expect other countries to follow. We don't think abortion is right (or at least Bush doesn't) so we don't donate money to the UN family planning. We think Castro is evil so we embargo his country.

While these are just a few examples of bad things, there are many more. Of course when you really dig down into the subject you will find that the headlines (similar to what I wrote above) don't tell the whole story. They never do. So maybe we're not as bad as the above paragraph makes us sound. Keeping that principle in mind, though, take a look at the supposedly good things that we do. The US does donate lots of aid to other countries, but aid is a very powerful political weapon. We don't just blindly offer aid to countries. Aid comes with all sorts of restrictions and other policies that must be adopted. Rejecting aid to the UN family planning deal is a prime example of it.

World politics are much more complicated than any average person really understands. There is so much that we don't actually hear that goes on. Our media is often very misleading with their stories, but foreign media is just as misleading. Each side tries to present the story to make themselves sound better. Just watch some European news on top of your CNN watching and see how differently the stories are reported.

The terrorist acts that have struck our country happened for a reason. I'm not arguing that they were justified, but the people who committed them certainly felt justified. While not justified, they still happened for a reason. Americans keep asking why and the answers point to hate and jealousy....but nobody takes a step back to analyze why they hate us because Americans can't get over the "but we're good" attitude and see the bad things the country has done. Americans also don't understand the whole concept of sacrificing their own lives for glory to be a hero. It confused us in WWII with the Kamikazes and confuses us again with suicide bombers and the likes.

Has anybody on here heard of the term "Ugly American"? Lots of Americans haven't, much less read the book.....I suggest everybody read it. It gives a little insight to how sugar coated things are sweet when you just take a small taste, but bite into the center and it could be pretty sour.

And please, please don't blast me as a terrorist. I'm far from it. I'd like to see a peaceful solution to this more than anybody else. I just feel that the US government has taken a huge step backwards from peace recently and acted with too much passion and not enough logic. One thing we've certainly done a good job of in this war on terrorism is to create more terrorists......unfortunately there will be more attacks for a long time to come.

b