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Sun. Jan 20, 2002

QuoteLog, 1/20

QuoteLog, 1/20 – ”If people want a statue to remember all the different races who died in the WTC attack, that’s easy enough to do. Take a random ’Portraits of Grief’ page from the New York Times and make a statue of those folks. You’ll get blacks, whites, Jews, Moslems, Chinese, Canadians, Catholics, Australians, Mexicans, French, men, women … Yeah, why not? Traders with briefcases, busboys in aprons, janitors, secretaries, security guards, executives, deli managers—everybody in their normal work clothes, going about their job.”

Ken Layne

”I shared those feelings of patriotism even as I criticized the president of the United States and his attorney general in the days after the attack, and I still do. Because that criticism was published, I was quickly called by the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corp., and asked to talk about the dangers of ’collateral damage’ and brutal American retaliation in countries as defenseless as Afghanistan. ’But I am for retaliation; we have to retaliate,’ I said. Then I quoted President Kennedy as saying he would have been impeached—and should have been impeached—if he did not respond militarily to the placement of Soviet missiles threatening the United States from 90 miles away in Cuba in 1962. The interview turned nasty, and I found myself asking my questioners whether they thought it was immoral to send waves of British bombers over German cities after the Nazi terror-bombing of London in World War II—even if that surely meant collateral damage, the killing of innocent German women and children in the wrong place at the wrong time. They hung up on me, more or less.”

Richard Reeves

”It is a simple conviction that America will decide. Her citizens do not see her as one country among many but as nonpareil, the biggest, the best, the one-and-only: final judge of her own interests and a pretty fair judge of whats good for the rest of us too. None of this is inconsistent with a strong sense of justice: a sense of justice characterises America at home and abroad, but it will be their justice and they will be the arbiters. Nor is it inconsistent with a wish to do good abroad: no people have shown such a consistently generous ambition to make our world a better place. But their help will be given ex gratia and its terms dictated by them. America will save the planet if America must, and it will pay the piper: but it will then call the tune. A negotiated process of cooperation is not what America has in mind [...] Washington’s way of ’fighting terror’ is not, despite appearances, the same as Britains. We seek to project the message that there are rules to which all nations are subject. America has a simpler message: kill Americans, and you’re dead meat. The British Foreign Office may huff and puff that US swagger is ’counterproductive’, alienating ’moderate Arab opinion’, but Washington proposes a different approach: show them whos boss.”

Matthew Parris, The Times

”The United States occupied Western Europe and imposed the longest interval of peace there in the last 600 years, and let the nations there know that the US wouldn’t tolerate any more fighting between them. For fifty years, Germany and the UK and France and Italy have been allies with each other, because the US said so. For most of that interval the US had more than a million men in Western Europe, with the stated purpose of keeping the USSR out, and the unspoken purpose of keeping the Western Europeans from fighting each other [...] The Twentieth Century is a tapestry of European failure and American success. If there’s any arrogance here, it’s the one held in the capitols of Europe where they still think of the US as some sort of rambunctious teenager who is strong but stupid and needs to be led by older and wiser heads. Experience proves otherwise. We’ve made our mistakes, but we haven’t set off two world wars. That honor goes to our good friends in the UK, Germany and France, who don’t seem to understand why the US isn’t eager to follow their advice.”

Steven DenBeste