Your paean to America does seem to have overlooked a few matters, Mr. Hutton.
Inspiration for just what, exactly, Mr. Hutton?
Inspiration for the most wars started and governments overthrown in the last half century?
Inspiration for ignoring every genuine genocide of the Twentieth Century? Indeed, for not only ignoring the three in our lifetimes – Indonesia, Cambodia, and Rwanda – but for using its immense power against so many weak peoples to satisfy its own economic and policy goals?
Inspiration for leaving three million dead in Vietnam ands a sea of land mines and horrid Agent Orange?
Inspiration for watching thousands of prisoners in Afghanistan driven off into the desert in vans to be suffocated?
Inspiration for running a secret International Torture Gulag?
Inspiration for setting aside the Geneva Accords?
Inspiration for shooting a fifteen-year old boy twice in the back in Afghanistan and then throwing him into Guantanamo to be tortured for almost six years, and falsely accusing him of ridiculous undefined crimes?
Inspiration for the highest murder rate of all advanced countries?
Inspiration for the highest proportion of its own citizens in prison of all countries on earth?
Inspiration for a ghastly annual expenditure on the military, an expenditure equal to that of the rest of the globe's nations combined?
Inspiration as a country out of step on almost every important international issue from global warming to birth control?
Inspiration for the use of hideous weapons like cluster bombs and white phosphorus in Iraq, and in the not-so-distant past, napalm?
Inspiration as the only country to ever actually use nuclear weapons? Twice, on civilians?
Inspiration for ignoring the rest of the world on so very many important international institutions, including the International War Crimes Court, the Treaty Banning Land Mines, efforts to ban cluster bombs, Kyoto, and many others including the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty?
Yes, America’s economy is strong despite set-backs, but then America took the hog’s share of choice lands in its relentless march of conquest across a continent. Had those places been as populated as Europe, it would be impossible to distinguish America’s record against everyone from the Spanish to the Hawaiians from Germany’s efforts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
And it peopled those lands with skilled migrants lured from all over the world who were desperate for some land and often, ironically, with people seeking to avoid military service and wars in other places like Europe.
