[mburbank]

Au contraire! I think having a constant awareness of the depths of human depravity is the best recipe for avoiding it. I think humility makes for wiser council than arrogance. Of course, there might be something in between. I just haven't seen it on anything resembling a national scale. Any national scale.

As I've said before, I think the US of A is, in the main, morally superior to the vast majority of the Arab world. It's an opinion and until someone comes up with a morality scale that works as well as the priodic table for predicting results, it's just an opinion, but there it is. Moral viewpoints aren't meaningless. They are just very sticky, easily abused and should not be confused with unified field theory.

My argument is: When historically, the morally superior party charges against the morally inferior (relatively speaking) Yelling "WE BE TEAM SUPERMAN, YOU ALL BE ORCS, OGRES and GOBALINS!" the results are frequently catastrophic and almost always coupled with corruption, brutality, eventually blowback and always the entrenchment of the belief that while all animals are equal, the side I'm on has halos and your side is naked and covere in pig crap.

Might there perhaps be another way to proceeed, one that acknowledges that evil is perpetrated by humans who no matter how evil still have inallianable rights, That we have been known to make mistakes about who's evil and who just happens to not like us as much as we do, that we should watch for evil in our own ranks even as we fight it in others and that generally speaking a Rah rah we are the champions style foreign policy makes enemies as rapidly as it defeats them. I won't say it never works. It worked well in WWII, but I think that had an enormous amount to do with how rapidly we dropped the Rah rah once the fight was over, somthing nobody did at te end of WWI .