Tsunami Relief.
JAKARTA, Indonesia (CNN) -- U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has said the United States is throwing its financial and military weight into southern Asian relief efforts not to gain favor in the Islamic world but because it's what Americans do.
Our armed forces are taking full advantage of the tsunami situation to boost PR. I fear that the only people being won over by this display of caring our Americans, and possibly a few Europeans.
Muslims who ascribe to Osama Bin Laden's worldview, whether they agree with his tactics or not, will not be swayed by a few helicopters making food drops. The terrible disconnect between the Arab view of the US military and our idea of the Arab view of the US military is growing larger with every food drop picture people see.
Since the end of the cold war, U.S. military has been omnipresent in the Middle East. After giving Saddam the green light to invade Kuwait, we started a pattern of interventionism in the Middle East that has bred hostility for a decade and a half. Our ships have been circling the seas around the Arab peninsula, our troops have been stationed in bases everywhere, and our planes have enforced no fly zones in there skies. If we think that a couple weeks of dropping grain bags and water bottles on a few unreachable areas will win many "hearts and minds," we been blinded by the "brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity."
The only "PR Goldmine" that is being mined is the one in the American court of public opinion. For all those that see our military as crusaders of justice, it only reaffirms this ridiculous assumption.
What is the signficance of 90 U.S. helicopters dropping of food to tsunami victims, when America starved many, many more by cutting off UN food aid to Afghanistan when going to war?
For an Arab: almost none.
For an American: lots of significance, because we never heard about the people who starved, as a result of our 9/11 invasion of Afghanistan.
During this surge of patriotic good-feelings about our weapons of war having a temporary alternative use, let's not forget what our military does. It fights wars. And so long as we don't have any enemy on the planet with a competitive military, it won't be doing any "defending", just attacking, and oftentimes, as we saw in the Iraq and Clinton's pharmeutical factory cruise missiling, only for the sake of imaginary reasons.
We weren't attacked on September 11, because we have freedom, democracy, and capitalism. A big part of the attack was a response to American guns being shoved the faces of Arabian Muslims for too long. Just cause the guns are now passing out candy in Iraq and water bottles in Indonesia ain't gonna change nuthin'.
Except of course for furthering our love affair with the military, which ought to be the biggest threat to us in the "war on terror".