Arrogance, Indifference, Ignorance

In the rise and fall of great nations, power tends to breed a sense of arrogance which sows the seeds of indifference and which inevitably leads to ignorance. Perhaps this is amply demonstrated in the visit of Dr Mahmoud Ahmadi Nejad, President of Iran, to the USA and to Columbia University.

Whether we agree with his policies or not, Dr Ahmadinejad is the elected president of a soverign nation. Added to this, he is an educated science academic. Inviting him to address the students at Columbia University was admirable. Lee Bollinger's insulting introduction was America at its worst. Freedom of speech does NOT mean introducing a guest speaker as being a "petty and cruel dictator", nor of tainting the water by claiming that "I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions". Freedom of speech does NOT mean taking up more time introducing the speaker (with your own views) than the time allocated to the speaker (to hear his views). Perhaps Lee Bollinger was concerned as to whether the Columbia students were smart enough to listen to Dr Ahmadinejad with critical ears and thus felt the need to vaccinate them with his own bias before they became exposed to Dr Ahmadinejad?

America sees itself as all-powerful - militarily, economically and politically. We have become arrogant. We have become indifferent to opposing views, we belittle our critics and insult those who disagree with us. And we have become ignorant about the world we profess to 'govern'. And we do this at our peril.

Sun-Tzu said "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer." Whether Dr Ahmadinejad is our friend or our enemy, insulting him and denegrating him will not make him go away nor silence his voice - all it will do is silence our own ears and add to our own ignorance.

The War on Terror

How do you fight a war on terror? You can't. It's an ideology ... it has no country, no uniform, no face and you can't bomb it. I support the American troops in Iraq because they're giving their lives to do a shitty job. But they're only instruments of policy and I don't agree with the policy. To keep America free? Please! Free from what? Terrorist attacks? Iraq never attacked the US. OBL attacked the US because he hates us. Because the US has a military presence in Saudi Arabia (as well as over 700 other military bases on sovereign soil). And when we couldn't retaliate against OBL, we vented our 9/11 anger on someone else to make us feel good and to make Americans feel proud. We entered Iraq with GWB saying this was only to get rid of Saddam Hussein and that America was not at war with Iraq. True in part - we are not at war with Iraq - Iraq is just the battlefield, half a world away from home-plate, where we've been enticed, by a warped ideology, to expend our resources and to lose sight of other priorities. We use nice-sounding sound-bites like "completing the mission" ... what mission? If our mission is to destroy Al Qaeda, will this happen as long as the Wahabib Schools continue to flourish and preach violence, hatred and suicide as noble and honorable causes in the name of Allah? Is our mission to secure the borders of Iraq and to stop the insurgents? Iran has been aiming to claim a chunk of Iraq for years and if Iran didn't succeed against Saddam Hussein, America is a pussy in the long run. We can't even secure our own borders and if we can't secure Iraq's borders, how will the locals ever succeed? I somehow suspect that America is going to have to abandon Iraq sooner or later and unless we figure on staying there permanently, we should get out now and admit that getting rid of Saddam was probably our biggest foreign policy blunder. Sure, there'll be a civil war and the neighboring countries will grab at the scraps, but we spilled the milk and we cannot spend forever trying to clean up the mess. It's time to stop concentrating on a skirmish and time to focus on world events.