The Huffington Post has a post by Randall Robinson author of The Debt – What America Owes to Blacks
The question never posed by Americans, perhaps not even to themselves, is the question that obsesses the most resilient of the world’s cultural, political, and economic victims – Do we Americans see ourselves as we are seen by the eyes of the world?
My fear is that the Iraq war, which American leaders tragically misunderstood from the very beginning, may mark the opening of a horrific chapter in human history with painful implications for the entire planet.
Terrorism, put simply, is war, privatized. It is vastly more mobile, and easier to mount and prosecute successfully, than state-mounted war.
We must face the fact that our country has done hurtful things in the world that the vast majority of Americans know little to nothing about. The victims remember, however, even if we cannot.
We are now entering, I fear, Einstein’s doomsday nightmare.
In the beginning, only America had nuclear weapons. Then, Britain. Now North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Soon, if not already, (according to the writer Arundhati Roy), Israel, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, South Korea, Cuba, Nepal, Germany, Bhutan, Mexico, Denmark, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Singapore, Burma, Uzbekistan. Even Afghanistan, and then, sooner or later, and probably sooner, much sooner, private religious, ethnic, and racial armies, where all wounds are fresh and well-remembered.
A little humility and a measure of foresight might have spared us all the monstrous forthcoming grief.
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