Listening to Vladimir Putin regarding the alleged American provocation of the Georgia conflict, I cannot help but question if there is some truth to his accusations. I, as most Americans do, want to believe that our involvement in world affairs reflects the United States government’s best intentions for our security and prosperity. To think that White House insiders would spark off an international conflict which deteriorates our already rocky relations with Russia, as a sort of twisted premature ‘October surprise’ that helps the Republican election campaign, is sadly enough not so unbelievable.

My lack of faith in our government is increasingly inconsistent with the admirable and yet naive bipartisan belief that the American government’s best interests are always the American people. Even at the worst of times, when administrations like George W. Bush’s have lost all legitimacy, most Americans would refuse to admit that their government would turn on them for personal or political gain. This is not the case in much of the rest of the world, where distrust in one’s government is the result of deep-cutting memories of war, conflicts that most Americans are fortunate to have never experienced, a denial of political freedoms, outright fascism, and/or endemic corruption.

Take the September 11th conspiracy theories for instance. I who have lost all traces of respect for the Bush Administration well before 2001 would have no part in the conspiracies that the terrorist attacks were partially orchestrated by government insiders. Non-Americans were the first to believe that the conspiracies provide us with the frank answers to the questions we all had unanswered. The conspiracies were established as truth by my Argentine, Polish, and South African friends, well before any of my American peers would even consider the painful inconsistencies of 9/11. Movies like Loose Change left my American friends and I perplexed, speechless, and empty: could our government be held responsible for the death of 3,000? Will we ever know the truth?

When one starts to question if their own government could turn on them in a tragedy like 9/11, it’s hard to refute the validity of claims like Putin’s regarding the Georgia conflict. Perhaps my generation is the first American generation to question the genuineness, and to profoundly suffer the consequences of, a government that has exhaustively overstepped its boundaries.