I love my country dearly. But, after years in the Middle East, after watching and listening to the devolution of post-9/11 American politics from afar, seeing the real-life affects of American foreign policy on the region day to day, it is rather like the love one would feel for a sibling with Tourette's Syndrome. America just keeps on farting and bellowing at the picnic table of the world community, and for all my love, my stomach turns and I wince.

That's how I feel when I see the bunk the American people have accepted from their leaders over the so-called War on Terror, the relentless fear-mongering and manipulation. As when Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accuses Iran of sending Republican Guard in to help the Iraqi insurgency, George W. Bush warns of the return of the Bogey-Caliphate, upon hearing that around forty percent of my fellow Americans still think there was a collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

And that's the best kind of love I can muster after the recent Dubai Ports World incident, a ridiculous spasm of gratuitous racism. Frightening, when politicians and 'experts' were seen on TV suggesting that the United Arab Emirates supported the 9/11 hijackers, questioning the friendship of America's most loyal of Middle Eastern allies, calling Dubai a 'country', and worst of all, fibbing bigtime that port monitoring would at any point be in other than the hands of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard. It was pure, rank, inexcusable fear-mongering; the American people bought it willingly, and they bought it wholesale.

The world is a big, busy place and we don't have time in our individual lives to learn about all places and peoples near and far. But we deserve leaders and media who put the world into some kind of reasonable perspective, rather than serving up a cynical fun-house pseudo-world like the one so many Americans inhabit today.