100
User voted No.
2 votes
Nov 7, 2015

No, because national guilt is not a sensible way of thinking.

Yes, what the US has done in the Middle East has often been horrifically immoral, racist, religiously motivated, etc. But individual soldiers and individual actions have done a lot of good.

Yes, if the US really wanted to help the Middle East we could do a lot to accomplish that goal: Stop backing the Turks in Kurdish genocide as we have, stop backing dictators, stop propping up regimes like the Saud, stop giving Israel immense military aid. Even inaction would be a good place to begin.

And yes, the average US citizen is responsible to some degree for what has been done. We can talk about limited information, corporate media, the limits of American democracy, and the power of non-transparent and brutal organizations like the CIA all we want, but the fact is that the average American still could do a lot to make it very difficult for these immoral actions to continue. We could have a foreign policy based on peace rather than war, hope rather than fear, cooperation rather than violence.

But the whole country is not tainted irrevocably by the actions that only benefited some and were only pushed through by some.

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