Pax Americana

I'm aware that the powerful Americans who promoted war in Iraq were looking at things in a way which obscured certain viewpoints; which tinted the world one way and not another. The combination of democracy and force would save the day, they thought. If only people experienced it, they would understand. Really, the oppressed masses longed for this liberation.

What I find inexcusable is that such tinting was the result of a deliberate choice not to be otherwise informed; in fact, to be ill-informed. To select some sources of information and not others is what we all do all the time. But when you are in charge of an empire, you do not have the freedom to be ill-informed; much less to refuse to wonder, even for a moment, upon such a basic question as why America is hated and mistrusted with such strength by so many.

The London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, considered the most important security think-tank outside the United States, reports that al-Qaida is only growing stronger; that it sees the war as a death struggle between civilisations, and that its complaints "have been transformed into religious absolutes and cannot be satisfied through political compromise". Political stabilisation in Iraq will require, it thinks, the impossible provision of 500,000 troops. In short, American imperial glasses have been proved very myopic.

God opposes the proud.