Exceptional And Unexceptional America - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views
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we can ask, as Lincoln did, for God's blessing. But seeking God's blessing is not the same as being God's country - with all the hubristic aggression that can lead to.
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Why, after all, did America need a Second Founding under Lincoln - almost a century after it was born? Which other advanced country remained so devoted to slavery until the late nineteenth century? Which other one subsequently replaced slavery with a form of grinding apartheid for another century? Besides, much of the thought that gave us the American constitution can be traced back to European thinkers, whether in Locke or Montesquieu or the Enlightenment in general. Seeing America as the sole pioneer of human freedom is to erase Britain's unique history, without which America would not exist. It is to erase the revolutionary ideas of the French republics. It's historically false.
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this kind of power had its usual effect, and the establishment of a massive global military machine, as Eisenhower so presciently noted, created the risk of a permanent warfare sustained by domestic interests. Throw into the mix a bevy of intellectuals busy constructing rationales for a uni-polar world - on the neocon right and the neoliberal left - and we slowly became, at best, the indispensable nation and at worst, a benign imperial bully.
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America's exceptional freedom and exceptional wealth did not exempt it from unexceptional human nature or the unexceptional laws of history. To believe anything else is to engage in nationalist idolatry. In retrospect, Vietnam was a form of madness brought on by paranoia. In Iraq, America actually presided over 100,000 civilian deaths as it failed to perform even minimal due diligence in invading and occupying another country
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Obama had a chance to turn this around. He did end the active torture of prisoners of war. He promised to end the war in Iraq, to close Gitmo and to reframe America's relationship to the world. But he refused to bring the torturers of the last administration to justice, thereby effectively withdrawing from the Geneva Conventions. We remain in Iraq, we have much more aggressive war in Afghanistan, and Gitmo is still open. The kind of humiliations we once inflicted on prisoners of war are now inflicted on American citizens in custody, as in the case of Bradley Manning. And with all this still on our plate, Obama has just - unilaterally - committed America to an intervention in a third civil war in a third Muslim country, with the grave risk of our taking responsibility for another effort at nation-building abroad, when nation-fixing at home was the reason he was elected.