Don't misunderstand the American character
The United States will do whatever it takes to win the war on terror
JoeUser Forums
All over the blogsphere I'll see people say "You Americans need to start asking yourselves, 'Why did they do this to you.'" It is a terrible misreading of the American culture. Americans don't care. You can argue all day that they should care. But they don't. I don't. There is nothing we have done that justified the events of 9/11. And those who try to justify the acts of terrorists will be ignored as sycophants and appeasers of evil.
After 9/11 the question is no longer "why did they do this to you?" The question should be what is happening to the Islamic world as a result of their growing culture of death and violence towards the west.
Perhaps the Islamic world needs to start asking, why the US does this to them. Because if the choice becomes us or them, Americans will choose us in a heart beat even if that means the Islamic world is a totally destroyed. Make no mistake about that. This isn't jingoism, far from it, it is the quiet knowledge of certainty. The clear understanding of the American character that is saying this.
I don't say this because I hope that happens, I don't. I hope that the Islamic World can live in peace with the west and in particular the United States. I just don't think Europeans and especially the Islamic world understands American culture. We try to do the right thing. But if we feel we've been wronged (and we do) our history shows that we will do whatever it takes to secure ourselves.
Remember this: Japan bombed a military base to start its war against the United States. The war ended with the United States vaporizing two of its largest cities after having used conventional weapons to flatten nearly every city in Japan with millions of civilian casualties. It is one of those things about democracy - it is slow to anger but once angered, once motivated, it is hard to turn it off. So I say to you, for the sake of the Islamic world, they will not continue the path of folly in trying to convince us that the fault lies with us. That sort of argument is interesting in intellectual forums. But in the real world, when people are getting killed, those who would start killing Americans need to understand the full implications of their actions.
Blaming Bush is convenient. But I can say this: Any President of the United States would have done at least as much or would have faced riots. The US federal government only has one job (the state governments do pretty much everything else): Take care of the personal well being of its citizens It's not designed to build roads. It's not designed to build schools. It doesn't provide the police. It doesn't run the water plant. It doesn't provide water or electricity. It just takes care of individual citizens. And it does this in two ways: Killing non-citizens who seek to harm us and provide services to individuals. That's basically all it does (all but less than 10% of the budget is dedicated to those tasks). It's not like a European government or the government in other countries in its design. And it does those things remarkably well. And democracies can be scary things. The average person acts out of passion, emotion. The government is merely the tool of the citizenry. It doesn't rule the people, the people rule the government. Blaming Bush for Kyoto or the International Criminal Court or the Iraqi invasion or whatever may make some quasi-intellectual feel better. But it's a delusion. It doesn't matter who the President was. Those things would have happened under any President one way or the other particularly after 9/11 in the case of Iraq.
So don't delude yourself into thinking that Americans are going to sweat about the "why" the terrorists murdered so many Americans. Most Americans care about how its government will make the problem go away in as permanent a way as possible. It's not the "Arab street" you should worry about, it's the American street people should worry about. Even 4 years after Pearl Harbor, poll after poll taken in 1945 showed that the vast majority of Americans supported the extermination of the Japanese as a people. Do you understand? The extermination of the Japanese as a race. It's not the terrorists that people should be afraid of. That is why the Islamic world needs to stop the terrorists. Why they need to do it on their own. They're not doing it to help us. They are doing it to ensure their continued survival.
It's impossible to Understand the American Character because we're not totally finished Defining what it IS to be American.