The exercise of American power

'For the Arab world, this has been a shameful, humiliating event that underlines its total surrender to western diktat. The execution was carried out under the auspices of a foreign occupying power, and with a clear western message: we give ourselves the right to invade a sovereign Arab state and remove its leader because he offends us; we think you Arabs are incapable of sorting out your own affairs in accordance with our interests, so we will do it for you.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1981174,00.html

Precisely so. The use of naked power, so familiar to people in the middle east, is only fun when it is you wielding it. For the hundreds of years that Europe lived in the shadow of Muslim invaders from North Africa and from Turkey, it was we who feared the exercise of that military power. Now the shoe is on the other foot, we should apologise? We should stop because its humiliating? Humiliation is the feeling men feel when they are not the ones exercising power. It doesn't mean, of course that humiliated people are good people. Or that, given the chance they wouldn't use and abuse power over you. They almost certainly would. But they ARE weak. For many many centuries, Muslims were strong, and persuaded themselves that that was a permanent situation. Now that power has gone from them, they just can't get the old certainties out of their minds.

If the arabs in Palestine had been stronger than the Jews, they would have beaten them and thrown them into the sea. But they weren't, and so they couldn't. Thats called 'History as it actually happened, not as our Myths say it SHOULD happen'. Saddam trod on America's toes, and now he's dead. Ditto the Taleban. Ditto most of the clever people at the top of Al Qaeda. Ditto Ahmadinejad and the chinless wonder in Damascus if they keep going the way they're going.

You just can't argue around power and muscle. All the Guardian columnists trussed to all the Daily Kos contributors strapped to all the Chavez/Castro/Mao/Stalin wannabe's just can't argue around America's power. And when America decides its values and interests require you to die, you almost certainly will.

Wriggling on the hook is wasted effort.