INJUN COUNTRY

Netanyahu is in town and the the President and all the heavy hitters in both parties are pledging their allegiance to Israel in our seemingly unavoidable slide to war with Iran.  Netanyahu has stated that Israel must be "Master of her own fate (SIC)."  She also insists on being the mistress of Iran's fate as well.  Hillary Clinton chimes in that Iran's real or imagined nuclear program is "Unacceptable."  And yet we are keenly aware of our own sovereignty.  So how can we speak as though the sovereignty of other states simply doesn't exist?  Leaving Israel aside for the moment, when did we see other nations as less real than ourselves in this way?

I think it stems from our long history as a frontier people.  We were surrounded by spaces and peoples both alien and mysteriously lacking in what we knew as civilization.  Spanish Florida was the sparsely populated domain of hostile indians and equally hostile runaway slaves.  We annexed it in order to end hostilities and meddling by Britain.  To our North and West were the hostile British with their Indian allies lurking in a vast forested no man's land.  Further Southwest there was Spain and later Mexico and  another wasteland patrolled by savages not even notionally under the supervision of civilization.  Our whalers and merchantmen sailed through a Pacific speckled with cannibals and hermit kingdoms.  From 1836 to the present our border with the failed state of Mexico has been the scene of smuggling, cross border thievery and all manner of irregular activity.  And given it genetics, it really is injun country.  

We americans have often had to sort out situations involving sketchy jurisdictions with even more dubious claims to civilization.  As a nation influenced by Locke, we found ourselves confronting his state of nature over and over.  Perhaps this is why we fall so easily into the trap of assuming that all right thinking people understand our desire to pound disreputable little states into the ground.  We all know that they're not real countries right? But there is a price to pay for this kind of thinking.  We delude ourselves into thinking that by cobbling together coalitions within the kelptocrates club, otherwise known as the UN, we have a sort of universal legitimacy, and that this bogus procedure won't someday be used against us.  

We are a nation in decline, doomed to be just one among the powers of this earth.  Having laid the stick about, there will be many long memories of our ignorant aggressions.  By the time this comes to pass, Israel, if it still exists, will be the parasitic client of some other power.  And the coalitions will be formed against our interests, not hers.  It is well to remember this as we venture into Injun country once again, serving interests other than our own.