by James Glaser
August 20, 2003

Every day around the globe America is making friends and enemies. In Iraq and Afghanistan we have made lots of enemies, while in Liberia we are making friends. The difference is that in Liberia the people were begging us to come help them while in the other two, we attacked.

In so many places we have our troops occupying portions of foreign countries. In some like Germany, Japan, and South Korea we have been there over fifty years. Most of the population of those countries have never seen their nation without American troops there. Today many of the young people don't understand what we are doing there and this new generation is learning to hate us as foreign occupiers of their country.

Then there are the nations that we attack, bomb, and kill innocent civilians in. These are nations like the Congo, Laos, Dominican Republic, Cambodia, Lebanon, Libya, Panama, Grenada, Haiti, and yes, Iraq and Afghanistan. In each of these an American President felt we had the right to attack, but with each of these "Little Wars" we build up hate for our nation.

Killing someone's child, parent, brother, sister, or a best friend brings a lifetime of hate for our government and we have killed millions around the world. We killed a million civilians in Vietnam alone!

The oceans were always there to protect us from all the hate that has been building for our nation over the last fifty years, but now with International Terrorism there is a way for some of those that hate us to get back at us.

These people can't directly come over here and shoot an American, but they can give money to terrorists. They can give sanctuary to terrorists for training camps and planning facilities. Most of all they can give their children to become terrorists.

After World War 2, the United States was a hero to the world. We helped everyone and everyone liked us. Then the Cold War came and we started taking sides. In every country we tried to stop communism in, we made enemies. Since that World War in the 1940s we have had over 60 little wars that we know of. Sixty wars even little ones makes a lot of people hate us.

We are powerful there is no doubt about that, but all the hate that has been building up over the years for our wars is catching up with us. It doesn't matter if we were in the right in these wars, because in every war we kill innocent people and their loved ones learn to hate us. That is what happens in every war.

People in Kuwait hate Iraq's government for attacking their country and killing their people. There are still people in England that hate the Germans. People in Ireland still hate the British and there are many American Veterans that hate either the Germans, the Japs, Koreans, or the Vietnamese. It all depends in which war you were in.

Well we have had the most wars of any country in the last two generations, so it stands to reason that we have the most hate built up for us. More Wars equals more hate and we will have to pay the price some day.

Three thousand Americans killed in that terrorist attack of September 11th, 2001, was just horrible, but was really nothing when you compare it to the amount of innocent people we have killed in our wars. Think about all the hate that attack brought out here in America and you will get some idea of how much hate we have coming toward us, for all of our killings.

In just the past few months we have killed way more that three thousand innocent people in Iraq. It does not matter to those people's loved ones that we were not targeting them, but in all honesty, we were targeting those innocent civilians. Any time you attack a city of five million people like Baghdad, you know going in, you are going to kill innocent people.

Our killing of civilians in all of our wars was just as predictable as the civilians killed by flying an airliner into a huge office tower by those terrorists. Tactics were different, horror and destruction the same.

Terrorists kill and they are hated, we kill and we are hated. As the Vietnamese used to say, "Same Same."

POST SCRIPT DEATHS IN IRAQ

An American Soldier was killed in Baghdad Monday.

Mazan Dana, a Reuters cameraman, was shot dead by American troops that thought his camera was a Rocket Propelled Grenade.