The horror of Sept. 11th, 2001

if you are to argue that lives actually matter and are not just arbitrary statistics then they shouldn't suffer inflation

I realize it's a case of the ends justifying the means, but I think it is quite good enough for me to know that Bin Laden is dead as a direct result.

I have no idea what might have happened had we not pursued the course of action we did.

I don't believe it was simply a matter of payback.

Pearl Harbor, Internment, and Hiroshima: Historical Lessons

by Paul D'Amato

...

The United States had its origins in a rapacious expansionism, beginning with westward conquest at the expense of the Indian population and the forcible seizure of Western states from Mexico in the 1840s under the rubric of"manifest destiny."

After the Civil War, American capitalism exploded in a fury of growth. Domestic manufacturing, worth $2 billion in 1860, was worth $9.5 billion by 1890. In the same period, the population tripled, agricultural production tripled, and the total value of manufacturing products went from $ 1 billion to $11.5 billion, pushing the U.S. into first place over Britain. Like other relative newcomers to the game of world power politics, Japan and Germany, the U.S. began to seek its place as a "great power"-on the level of Britain and France-commensurate with its new economic weight.

The new impetus of the U.S. to project its power internationally was expressed clearly by Indiana Senator Albert Beveridge in 1898: "American factories are making more than American people can use; American soil is producing more than it can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours.... We will cover the ocean with our merchant marine. We will build a navy to the measure of our greatness."

What such "greatness" would mean was soon demonstrated in practice in the war with Spain that started in the same year. The U.S. fought this "splendid little war" under the guise of freeing oppressed peoples from Spanish tyranny. But the people of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines quickly discovered that they had only shed one colonial ruler for another-the United States. Together with Hawaii, which the U.S. had seized in 1898, the Philippines became the steppingstone for U.S. power projection in the Pacific.

...

That the U.S. wanted to create an empire-not free oppressed peoples-was clear in what it did in the Philippines. After defeating Spain in a decisive naval battle in Manila Bay, Admiral George Dewey concluded an agreement with Spanish forces. The Filipino nationalist rebels who had risen up and laid siege to Manila would be kept out of the city while a mock battle was held between Spanish and U.S. forces, after which the Spanish would surrender to the U.S. military. The Filipinos struggling for independence were held at bay outside Manila while their homeland was transferred from Spanish to U.S. control.

From the beginning, it was clear that the U.S. was measuring its colonial aims in the same racist manner as its European counterparts. President William McKinley, in an 1899 meeting with a Methodist delegation, explained that-after much nightly pacing and prayer-he had come to a conclusion: Since the U.S. could not hand the Philippines back to Spain or turn them over to France or Germany, and since the Filipino people were "unfit for self-government," "there was nothing left for us to do but take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them." General William Shafter made clear the same year just what "uplifting" Filipinos would mean:

It may be necessary to kill half of the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher plane of life than their present semi-barbarous state affords.

In its subsequent three-year war to subdue the archipelago and destroy the independence movement, U.S. forces conducted a scorched-earth policy that devastated the country and its people, the majority of whom supported the independence fighters. The populations of entire islands were herded into concentration camps, and hundreds of thousands were killed. One general reported that as many as 600,000 people were killed or died of disease on the island of Luzon alone-and an estimated 1 million Filipinos were killed, according to one historian.

"Kill and burn, kill and burn, the more you kill and the more you burn the more you please me," General "Howlin' Jake" Smith told his troops. An American congressman who visited the Philippines in 1901 reported on what these bloodcurdling pronouncements meant in practice:

You never heard of any disturbances in northern Luzon because there isn't anybody there to rebel.... The good Lord in heaven only knows the number of Filipinos that were put under ground. Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country and wherever and whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him. "

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Civil_Liberties/Pearl%20Harbor_Internment.html

I think I can agree with you when stated this way. My whole problem is with the portrayal of America as supporting the results of these unsavory characters policies.

By extension that may be philosophically true, but within the complex frame of world politics it is misleading and emotionally charged, leading the average American voter to an uninformed and emotional position.
I thinks that's one of the reasons we fall so easily for agendas.

This pretty much sums up everything I disagree with in American politics today. We've degenerated into schoolyard tactics and inflamatory statements rather than productive discourse. There is way too much delusional and self-serving propaganda.

I think I am pretty much in agreement with your views, we of course will differ on semantics and such. I learn quite a lot from you're intelligent and articulate responses.

I haven't really thought about being an American without taking some pride in it. I'm a child of the cold war and proud to be an American was/is taken in stride.
I will think about what that might mean.

It's a pity that real tragedy and grief gets misused so because i think that feeling supported in such mass grief is a truly good thing for those who suffer.

That's pretty cute, Robert, but you actually knew exactly what I was requesting of you.

Cold comfort to those dead Iraqis and their surviving family members. The deaths are deaths, Robert, and whether or not those deaths came directly at the hands of the US, they are people who would not have died but for the US illegal invasion, people who would not have died save for the conditions created by the initial war crime.

Now I'm actually not sure. Explain it to me like I'm Sarah Palin.

Sometimes JTT, I think that your real motivation is to disuade people from the "truth".

I was citing the number directly killed, and with a semblance of accuracy, not maximum rhetorical effect, in mind.

This is my primary objection to the way 9/11 is invoked in America. The memory of 9/11 was used to prosecute a war of choice that itself represents an evil that is orders of magnitude larger. Commemoration of it is thusly sullied to me, in that if it doesn't tip the hat to the pain caused in reaction at all it's national shortsightedness......