Out of My Mind by Andy Rooney

Author:Andy Rooney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

APOLOGIZING FOR APOLOGIZING

He didn’t mean to do it, but President Bush has made the United States the most detested nation in the world. He displays what is seen by many countries as an arrogance that transfers to all of us.

Bush won no friends at the United Nations in 2002 and we need friends.

We are not all powerful and we ought to get used to it and stop acting as if we were. It’s no longer possible for us to impose our idea of how people ought to govern themselves in a Muslim country—or any country, for that matter. There aren’t weapons enough on earth for us to make everyone else like us.

There was a time as recently as fifty years ago when we could dominate the world with our military power and money, but those days are lost and gone. The oceans that surround us were moats that once protected us from attack, but with ballistic missiles, supersonic airplanes, chemical and biological weapons, oceans are no more than wet spots on the globe.

Our Army with all its tanks and infantry, our Air Force with all its bombers and fighter planes, our Navy with all its battleships and submarines, are no match for one terrorist with a suitcase full of anthrax or one suicidal religious fanatic with a truckload of nitroglycerine. We are shadowboxing with an enemy we can’t see or touch. Our West Point graduates are trained to fight a war there will never be.

It doesn’t matter what I think, but I think like millions of Americans, and they matter. I was opposed to going into Iraq without the approval of the United Nations. When we moved so quickly into Baghdad and seemed to get rid of Saddam Hussein, I decided I’d been wrong and apologized.

Now I want to apologize again. I want to apologize for apologizing. The people who thought we should not have attacked Iraq without the sanction of the United Nations were right. It wasn’t all President Bush’s fault. UN delegates were sitting on their hands. The French and the Germans were against it basically because we were for it and because they had economic interests in Iraq, but now we have to live with our mistake. We’re living with it and too many of our guys are dying with it.

The UN has to be a lot smarter than it ever has been to fulfill the promise of the organization. The United Nations has been a nambypamby group and that’s partly because the United States has never supported it with any enthusiasm.

It’s foolish of us not to put our wholehearted support behind the UN. There simply has to be some power in the world superior to our own—for our own sake. Iraq is the world’s problem, it isn’t our problem. There are far too many places in the world that have more problems than we can solve.

I hope we remain the strongest country in the world because we usually do what’s right. It isn’t a sure thing that we will remain as dominant as we are, however.

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