greyhaze: if you can stand by and say that ending the suffering of Kurds and other dissenting ethic and religious groups in Iraq by force is wrong, and the same time if happened in Australia, or Belgium, or Austria you'd actually feel more inclined to aid forcefully, then yes, that is a racist or at least discriminatory ideal.
Immediate and decisive force is palatable to the world when the oppressed are Judeo-Christian, but not when they are of other races and religions. The holocaust seems to have taught us half a lesson. We had better apply that awful example to *all* peoples, or history will remember us as accomplices to it. The *hint* of ethnic cleansing should bring an immediate, un-opposable, forceful response. Instead, the world haggles over aid packages until the bodies are buried and it is time for a more glitzy war crimes tribunal.
Don't get me wrong, I don't tow the US line a vast majority of the time. I think these dictators were pampered during the cold war as pawns in a big chess match. Whether that was necessary or not is debatable, but the cold war is over, and now there is *no* excuse to tolerate it. I think the leadership in Pakistan is as bad or worse than Hussein, and I don't like my country dealing with them. I feel that what Israel is doing to Palestinians is wrong as well... with a capital *dubya*. I'm not crazy about my country supporting them any more than I am about France supporting Saddam ( which they do, with money, arms, and votes in the UN ). On the other hand the Palestinians are also ruled by a dictator, who is ruled himself by terrorists... No easy side to take there.
The cold war mess is going to be cleaned up, and I am afraid that lazy, racist nations will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the fray.
**
As for the internet, was a DoD mandate that formed the agency that ordered and funded the research. You might as well call the Eiffel Tower the "Workmen-who-built-the-Eiffel-Tower-Tower".