<<The principle is the crucial piece. "Mess with one of mine and you'll pay.">>
Professor, I don't disagree with the principle. But there are certain underlying assumptions here that are not always found in the real world. The primary assumption is that the person messed with is innocently going about his or her own business and is then attacked for no good reason.
Unfortunately in the real world, there are plenty of Americans out to do real harm to the inhabitants of the rest of the world. They get "messed with" as representatives of an evil empire and a cycle of violence ensues - - retaliation by the Americans and counter-retaliation from their Third World victims. The domestic MSM reports these events in a curious way that sensationalizes the violence of the Third World payback while ignoring the provocations that came before. Thus America always appears as the innocent victim and its attacks on the Third World are presented as justified revenge.
Part of the problem is that the harm done by America is not overt violence and is not visible. It consists of support given to dictators who follow pro-Amrican policy, specifically economic policy which effectively commits the Third World to disastrous "bargains" with Western lenders, burdening the people with ongoing debt for generations into the future for relatively useless "infrastructure" which even if built does not address popular needs but instead functions as a sinkhole of capital, which comes from multinational lenders (the World Bank is an excellent example) and flows into the pockets of crooked local and multinational "contractors." The political harm done by the Americans is their ideological support of right-wing dictators who can crush local labour movements, democracy movements opposed to the economic rape that I just described, and anyone else who threatens the dictatorship and the status quo.
These events, boring in their details, necessarily conducted in secrecy, do not find their way to the front page as easily as a "terrorist" explosion, which of course leads to the skewed view that most Americans have of the world - - they get to see in endless gory detail the results of the Third World's rage, at the same time being sheltered from the minutiae and incomplete details of the causes of that rage. The same interests that profit from the U.S. exploitation of the Third World also fund both political parties, so very little of the underlying causes ever gets discussed in public debate and the corporate MSM devotes endless hours to ridiculous panel discussions of "why they hate us" and "where are the moderates?" with little if any attention being paid to the realities of the situation.
The millions of Third World people killed as a direct result of American policy rarely make the front pages, and when they do, "the executioner's face is always well hidden," (Bob Dylan's words) meaning that the deaths of millions of Africans from AIDS, or thousands of Arabs in the West Bank or millions of Iranians and Iraqis in the Iran-Iraq war rarely if ever trace the causes back to their inside-the-Beltway origins. As control of the MSM concentrates into fewer and fewer corporations, the opportunity for alternative analyses of these events to reach a mass audience steadily shrinks, although of course there is no lack of opportunity for a small and lively alternative publishing network to put such views before a relatively tiny audience of academics, hippies, non-conformists and intellectuals whose total combined votes and ability to influence the course of action of the two "official" parties is minimal to negligible. A perfect example BTW of the principle known as "repressive tolerance."
