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If you don't throw in your buck 'o five, who will? |
The United States likes to style itself as "the world's police force." Specifically, Americans love to whine about how everyone else wants them to be the world's police force right up until the world cops get called to their trailer park and drag their fat, alcoholic husband off to Gitmo in his undershirt.
If you didn't want your kids burned alive by napalm and thermite, you shouldn't've made such a ruckus and disturbed the neighbours.
Unfortunately for the world, America the cop is not the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who always get their man. America, in fact, will just give up after a while. I suppose in the long run it will make them seem less inept to come right out and admit that they've quit searching for Osama Bin Laden, rather than having a string of embarrassing failures and the same end result.
In point of fact, they actually quit looking a year ago, and just didn't tell anyone until now. Maybe nobody asked. Maybe everyone figured that making him the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist and putting a $25 million price on his head was enough motivation, and they didn't need to ask. But between the Bush Administration pork budgets and the drug running, $25 million is chump change for the CIA.
Besides, who wants to crawl through blasted out caves dodging tripwires and crazy fuckers with guns when you could be fixing elections in Mexico instead? As long as you haven't done anything to piss off your boss, you could probably even stay at a nice air-conditioned hotel with a pool and HBO. That beats digging sand out of your ass crack any day. Or in fact, every day.
While I'm not usually one to blame the media, part of America's problem has to be with its role models. Instead of the implacable and duty-bound RCMP officer or even the suavely competent James Bond, America has Dirty Harry, Rosco P. Coltrane and Vic Mackey. Where Constable Benton Fraser would arrest North Korea for parole violations because it's the right thing to do, Vic would just get in their face a little to show who the big dog is and then go back to hustling the Iraqi money train.
Which is pretty much what the US is doing now. Americop isn't going to arrest (read: bomb the fuck out of) North Korea because there isn't a compelling (read: monetary) reason for them to do so. The problem with the world's cops being self-serving and corrupt is that even if they're good at their jobs -- which, let's face it, is a purely hypothetical situation at this point -- nobody's going to trust them. Without the cooperation of the citizenry, it becomes that much more difficult for them to do their job. Should they, at some point, decide to do it.
