Excessive Sensitivity to International Opinion

I get accused pretty often of being a bleeding heart liberal.  [Wonder why?  In my neck of the woods Jesus and the Founding Fathers are considered dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, Republicans before their time.  Why can't I be extended the same indulgence?]

Anyway, I got accused of being too sensitive to world opinion of us, of the United States.  There is something to this.  The poor of the Earth tend to be too critical, too envious of those of us in America and to blame us for all kinds of problems.  For example, in ans because of Iraq.

We spent a lot of money and lives trying to help out Iraq, and what do we get?  Except for those on our payroll, we are not terribly popular over there.  And after all we did for them!  Some people!  There ought to be statues of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld in town squares all over Iraq.

Yeah, Guess there were some hurt feelings over in Iraq.

We bombed them back to the stone age to the point that 8 years later, the capital city still does not have utilities that are on all the time. Took 2 years to get water and power working part of the time in Bosra, and that is the port city that was first to be liberated.   Not our fault.  Their infrastructure was antiquated ant not helped any by the years of embargo.

Ten percent of the population of Iraq became refugees, many of who are refugees still. Still not safe to walk or drive around in Bagdad, btw.  (Ten percent.  Hmmm.  That would be equivalent to 30 million Americans.  And look at the trouble we had with a few tens of thousands of refugees from hurricanes a few years ago.)

The number of dead is anybody's guess: Iraq Body Count is pretty  conservative and tolls about 100,000 non-combatants killed by coalition military action, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/ ;
then there was Saddam's military, which had to have taken at least 10,000-20,000 killed and maybe up to 40,000;   then there are the insurgent dead who might number anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000;
then there are those who have died because of bad water, sanitation, lack of access to medical services, and undocumented crime, and that is anywhere from 100,000 to a million.

Then there are those who were wounded or permanently maimed.  Does anybody try to count them?

[Remember estimates were Clinton's embargo in the 1990s killed 50,000 Iraqis a year from lack of medical supplies. That was another of President Bush's rationales for invading Iraq -- people were dying anyway because of the embargo.  After it was shown that Saddam was not running schools for al Quaida terrorists, after it was shown Saddam currently had no weapons of mass destruction, then our reason for invading Iraq was to help the Iraqi people, to spread democracy and capitalism and the American Way.]

No reason to get one's underwear in a wad over casualties.  We are all born to die, right?  We may have hastened the time and changed the circumstance of death, but we didn't kill anybody who wasn't going to die anyway.  So what's the big freekin' problem?

We spent a fortune building a great big American Embassy in Iraq.  We had to spend more in order to make it as strong and defensible as a fortress.  It sits there, a great gray half empty monument to America.  Iraqis ought to have appreciated the tribute to our relationship with their country.  But no!   (Maybe one day the Iranians will take over that big embassy building, so it won't be a completely wasted effort.  Or maybe it could become a bizarre bazaar.)

Them doggone Iraqis are too damn sensitive, ain't they? Get their hair mussed a little and they go all blame-mode, like the little woman who gets teary and upset and punitive because you beat her up a little.

We are the good guys here and we shouldn't forget it, right? We kill for the best of reasons, and if a few hundred thousand Iraqis no longer breathe because of us, well, hell, Saddam would have offed that many in less than 20 years, huh? At least now the Shia in Iraq have about the same or better prospects as those in Iran.