[jacquesm]

Is there a Navy Seals action underway to rescue the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram? That's news to me, all I know is there were a few rumors.

The problem is not that navy seals could not be deployed to do good, the problem is that they are just as likely to be deployed to do harm.

Anne Frank has nothing to do with any of this, the dutch army was of no significance whatsoever (but the dutch resistance was).

As for me 'learning a little more', I think you have your mind made up about me. Your simple world with 'evil' and 'good' is not the world I live in. If only it were that simple.

[pavelrub]

> They are just as likely to be deployed to do harm.

Please name some SEAL missions you consider harmful.

[Nrsolis]

I think you're missing the point entirely.

The point of the example is to show that without good people who are willing to fight against those who would do innocents harm, those good people get hurt.

I think that if you kidnap little girls, you're evil. I think that if you set off a bomb in a hotel lobby, you're evil. I think if you crash a plane into a building and kill thousands, you're evil.

In my world, if you indiscriminately kill an innocent person to further your political goals then you are evil.

[jacquesm]

In my world, if you invade a country on a pretext and kill tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, you're out of control. Especially if in the run-up to such an invasion you squelch every possible voice of opposition or reason.

That's where the problem lies, by your own definition your country is evil (not by mine, I don't believe in the whole good/evil thing, it's just a simplification to make it easier to delude voters into thinking things are easy to understand when in fact they are not).

[vacri]

You keep on subscribing to this image of the military as valiant crusaders against the dark, yet the most significant deployment of the biggest military in the world this century was an unmitigated disaster, that had nothing to do with defense of innocents, and that left the people of the target country far worse off than they were originally.

The problem is this: by continually glorifying the military the way you do, making them out to be crusader heroes, you fool young, impressionable people. So instead of decrying things like the invasion of Iraq, they sign up in droves, because they've been tricked by the rhetoric into thinking it's somehow about defending their country.

The point is, if the US military was really about fighting your definition of evil, it would be far more involved in Africa. Its mission is "keep the US safe and further its interests", which is fine, but it's not the "fight evil" mission that you say it is. If the US military really was about fighting evil (which is an oversimplistic term), it would have staged a coup when GW Bush declared war on Iraq, a war in which hundreds of thousands of people have died, in a country that was no threat to the US.