Links

Ok. There's one thing about this link to terrorists issue that I don't fully understand.

If those guys (the guys with all these links) had dealings with the terrorists (the bad guys they were linked to) at the same time that we were sending shoulder-launched missiles to rebels in Afghanistan and intelligence and chemical weapon know-how to the then enemy-of-our-enemy in the Middle East, weren't they just being good guys then?

If they were doing this while our envoys were courting Saddam Hussein and our intelligence agencies were arming fundamentalist freedom fighters in their holes in the mountains, weren't they being patriots?

Do I have this straight? They were good guys then because they played by our rules, and they're bad guys now because the game didn't turn out the way we had planned? Because all our scheming went awry? Right? That's our thinking on this matter?

Everyone is getting bent out of shape about these links, but weren't those guys just being good card-carrying friends of ours? Patriots even?

Or is our own foreign policy not the measure by which we judge such things after all? Of course. That's where I go wrong. How naive of me to think that in the real world our own actions would have any relationship to anything at all. Realpolitik and all that. You gotta do what you gotta do. It's a changed world. Yesterday is gone. Public safety. War on terror. OBL. WMD.

Now I'll be darned if I'll be painted as an apologist for a bloodthirsty dictator or a supporter of backward fanatics with medieval sensibilities, but how is it that we wonder why everybody seems to hate us so?

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