A few days ago in my international affairs class, there was this girl in front whose shirt made me angry. It said “Let them hate us, as long as they fear us,” and it had a big picture of the US flag.
How can anyone be so naive, so ignorant, so myopic to have that view? The festering hate of the US is what causes (in large part) terrorism directed against it. And yes, those people are afraid, but sometimes your only option when frightened and cornered is to fight back. This very attitude of “let them hate us” is what’s currently not being addressed in any meaningful way, and that’s why this “war on terror” is doomed to only an abeyance of terror, at best. If we truly wanted to go the route of making everyone one else fear us, we could. But then we better as hell adopt the rest of Machiavelli’s precepts, because while fear can be useful as a means of coercion, it cannot be applied indefinitely.
And yes, the US can act alone in the current world, because it is the most powerful nation on ear no matter what metric you use to measure it. But how can anyone with any grasp on history whatsoever believe that it will remain that way forever? People argue that this is a completely unique moment in history. Bullshit. Every moment in history is unique to those living in it. Yes, there are very many unique things to our time, but to think that America’s predominance in the world is so unique in history as to defy its lessons is just stupid.
And people say that we should not get involved in anything outside our country except when it directly affects our interests (the essence of the Realist conception of the world). But what puzzles me is that these are the same people who argue that we should be in Iraq. These are the same people who say that we should be supporting our troops and to say anything in opposition to the invasion of Iraq is to not support our troops. Well I ask you, how is wishing that they were not there in the first place, that they were not getting killed by the scores everyday, that they weren’t giving their lives away so certain people can become rich, powerful, and reelected, NOT supporting our troops? How is saying that they should be not doing missions for which they have not received adequate training, for which they are not actively supervised, for which they are not wanted by the people they are “liberating“, NOT supporting our troops?
Either give our troops the numbers, the training, the legitimacy, the full support, and the real reasons for being there or apologize to them, to us, and to the entire world for this mess, for which the US is fully and solely culpable, and then do something to actually help, rather than merely proclaiming “Let them hate us, as long as they fear us.” Because the hate is there already, and it’s not gonna go away unless we do something.
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