Why Do People Hate the USA

Actually, since I know him, I know that juju wasn't accusing me of ad hominem attacks. He was accusing me of being a great target for them, because it's easy to attack me and not my logic, many times because my vocabulary includes words that are objectionable to others. So don't be upset with juju - he was smiling affectionately as he wrote that.

Incidentally, my usage of profanities has dropped markedly in the last six months. However, simply because I use them by habit, they tend to come out now and then, mostly unintentionally.

Back to the only thing that could be considered "profane" in this discussion (if I recall correctly - I'm not going to go re-read everything to see if I accidentally tossed "fuck" in there), "sand nigger" was used as a quote (though without quotation marks) to represent the attitude of a fair number of Americans. I'm not saying this is a majority, but it is a significant minority. I thought I was making it clear by refering to Afghanistan as "Afghanamastan", but I suppose I could have done better. Unfortunately, the issue was skewed - my usage of the term overshadowed the real issue, which is the dehumanization of our enemies. We have a tendency to look at those we are fighting as less than human. Think about how amazing it is to be a person - the thoughts you have, the feelings, your family - and then think that the people we're killing over in Afghanistan are indeed <b>people</b>. It's easy to go "Well duh, we're not fighting camels over there, of course we're fighting people." But really consider it as you see the pictures of a dead guy laying in the street in Kabul. That was a man, a life... ended. His family will grieve.

Now, he might have been a bad man. He maybe even deserved what he got. But he was still a human being, and I think that we need to recognize this fact and take it into account before we act.

Should we be fighting the war in Afghanistan? Yes, I think we should. I think we need to take strong efforts to dismantle the al Qaeda infrastructure and neutralize the leaders. But there's an attitude that we should be launching nukes all over south Asia to "take 'em all out." This attitude achieves wide appeal only when the masses look at the enemy as unhuman. And that's something we need to fight.