Nevertheless, here's my take on it: Saddam was just another dictator. Small fish. The US had no trouble with their diplomatic relations to him until he was shoehorned into invading Kuwait.
what do you mean 'shoehorned'? Saddam claimed kuwait for decades and finally decided to act on it. He didnt believe (because of his own faulty intelligence) that the US or anyone else would ultimately intervene. and he was locked in an ongoing war-to-the-death with iran at the time.
The US had no trouble either sponsoring the same muslim fighters that they now fight, back when they had someone else to send them against.
this is true. Doesnt mean we have no values; It does mean we can be very shortsighted from time to time and we pay the price if we dont learn from our mistakes. As depicted pretty well in that movie (what was it called? charlie?) our mistake in afghanistan was not following thru with real support for democratic education once the soviets were defeated. It was an enormous mistake and a real missed opportunity. We're great at intervention, we're really bad at follow-through.
That "War on terror" is a bogus concept is, I think, fairly established.
its not a 'bogus concept'. Terrorism is all too real. The issue is how best to tackle it, and its on that score that bush fell flat on his face taking most of america with him.
I think TV's big role in the modern world is to reaffirm a reality to the individual that he might otherwise find ridiculous.
no, tv's role is to make a profit for its parent company. it does that job the best that it can. When media corporations get too big they dont let diversity thrive, and thats when the dissemination of information -- so vital to a healthy democracy -- suffers. Its not rocket science. The problem isnt corporations as such, its monopolies and oligopolies as such. (And the lack of originality or creativity or courage, things today's media desperately needs and cant seem to afford.)
