Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by owenversteeg | Hacker News Reader

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[sidenote, most people agree that the figure is 3-7 countries - depending on your definition of "currently" - not 8.]

I think the US bombing various places is a bit more nuanced than it seems at first sight. For example, our military action in Libya - which is entirely contained to one coastal town - is with the support of the Libyan government, the vast majority of the Libyan people, and the United Nations. It's an air campaign against an ISIS stronghold, and it's pretty black and white in that most people agree that it should be done.

I personally don't support our airstrikes in Pakistan, but they have definitely been effective (although at a devastating price to civilian lives that I find unacceptable.)

In some cases, the US government is an unimaginable force for evil; we've dropped chemical weapons on a civilian population as recently as 2004, in the 2nd Battle of Fallujah - one of the worse battles of modern times. In others, it's an unimaginable case for good.

For example, during the Indian Ocean tsunami, governments around the world donated billions of dollars. America promised unimaginable quantities of food, fresh water, and support. Within days, American aid began arriving - in the form of two aircraft carriers, basically floating cities. During the crisis period, American forces delivered the daily food requirements for 100,000 people every 24 hours.

In the end of March 2005 - remember, the tsunami was in December 2004 - the Indonesian and Sri Lankan governments reported that they had received precisely none of the money promised by foreign governments. They did report receiving some food; the Thai government in particular received many donations of rice from the governments of Israel and China. To demonstrate how pants-on-head stupid that was, Thailand is the world's largest exporter of rice, and that year they had their largest crop of rice in all history.

So yes, America can be horrible. But America can also be the world's largest source of good, especially when other governments can't step up to the plate.

> with the support of the Libyan government

Libya is a failed state. There is no recognized, coherent government of Libya.

> It's an air campaign against an ISIS stronghold, and it's pretty black and white in that most people agree that it should be done.

I don't think this is the case. But if it were, it would be an argument ad populum - a logical fallacy.

> So yes, America can be horrible. But America can also be the world's largest source of good, especially when other governments can't step up to the plate.

I think this is exactly right. It depends on how America chooses to use its power.

Today, it looks a lot like containment, of aggravating and funding extremist elements, of playing proxy war, of pursuing its interests behind a cloak of public relations.

The American incentive at this point of world history is to prevent, at all costs, other countries from becoming influential enough to challenge American decision making.

That's not just on the battlefield. America has been trying to block countries from lending money, from industrializing, and even from building independent news media industries. It has refused to join international institutions of law, such as the Convention on the Law of the Sea and the International Criminal Court, it has an overt first strike nuclear policy - the only of its kind in the world.

The United States faces a choice:

A.) allow other nations to grow, in a completely peaceful and benign manner, wealthy and strong enough risking that it will no longer a hegemon capable of making unilateral global decision making.

OR

B.) disrupt the growth of regions of the world, delaying the growth of competitor states, guaranteeing America maintains its 'critical leadership role' in the world.

Judging by actions rather than words, America chooses, and will continue to choose B. America is the country with the incentive to start wars.

The world should be multi-polar, and where it there is need for violence to rectify or prevent violence, it should be under international leadership with international decision making.

I don't have the best knowledge of Libyan politics. But I do know that the GNA (Sarraj loyalists) and GNC (Ghawil loyalists) are both in support of the airstrikes, and those two groups combined pretty much make up whatever you might call the "Libyan government" right now, so that's why I made the simplification.

Of course, given the current state of Libya, there aren't exactly pollsters walking around asking peoples' opinions on the Sirte strikes. But given the bipartisan support, it's pretty clear that they have good support in Libya itself. The fact that the UN supports the strikes - especially given that the UN can't even say "water is wet" without someone vetoing - says something about their international support.

I agree that America has been blocking countries from doing some pretty basic stuff. I recently traveled to Iran, and the American sanctions have shaken the country to the core.

But even things that seem obviously good are in fact horrible ideas. Every tiniest change in our laws affects the outside world in a massive way. In 1993, Tom Harkin, the junior Sentator from Iowa, introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act, which prohibited the importation of products that have been produced by child labor. Sounds simple, right? Who on earth is in favor of child labor? There were concerns about the effectiveness of the bill. Well, as it turns out, the bill was devastatingly effective. In 1993, Bangladeshi employers, in fear of losing lucrative American contracts, dismissed over 75% of child laborers in the textile industry. In 1997, UNICEF investigated what happened to these children after being laid off. They found that most children found themselves in much worse situations: crushing stones (leading to horrible particle inhalation illnesses), scavenging through trash dumps, and begging on the streets. Most of the girls ended up in prostitution.

Things aren't always as simple as they seem, especially when you're as big as America. Smaller countries, like the Netherlands, can take grand actions like banning child labor imports, or banning arms exports to Saudi Arabia, or establishing relations with countries the US is at war at (e.x. North Korea.) But the tiniest little movement by the US can completely shake the world. Think about that the next time America seems to face a clear choice between good and evil.

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