Nothing to add, your honor.[N]ot a single one of them appears to have learned the real lesson worth learning from the whole disaster: The U.S. should not -- and has no right to -- invade, bomb and occupy other nations that haven't attacked or even threatened to attack us. None of them say: "Wars that aren't directly in response to an actual or imminent attack shouldn't be commenced because doing so leads to the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of human beings for no justifiable reason." Not even the most regretful war advocate seems to have reached that conclusion.
As long as the root premises of our endless war-fighting remain firmly in place, there will be many more Iraqs, "justified" by similar or only marginally different objectives. We need to invade to remove a Bad Government, or stop a civil religious or ethnic war, or prevent mistreatment by other ruling factions of their citizens, etc. etc. -- as though we possess the ability and are blessed with sufficiently magnanimous, selfless political leaders to accomplish any of those lofty goals with military invasions of other countries.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Stop Reading This Right Now
If you don't have Glenn Greenwald on your A-list, stop reading this right now and go here. For a taste, here's Glenn on all those "Liberal Hawks" who are telling Slate what they got wrong:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
"Liberal Hawk" is an oxymoron.
More importantly, Greenwald's argument has some philosophical weaknesses. Which I guess means that "Liberal Hawk" is also not an oxymoron.
Would Greenwald have us just stand by and watch the slaughter in, say, Darfur with (here comes another oxymoron) an outraged yawn? Should the world have stood by in Kosovo? Or wherever somebody decides ought to be the next big thing in genocide?
Dare I mention those favorite buzzwords of the whack-o right _– Chamberlain, Nazi Germany, concentration camps?
The sad truth is, every generation has one or more tinpot psychopaths who decide they won't be safe until everybody's dead. Our tinpot psychopath is George Bush and the collective mentality of the group around him. Another tinpot psychopath is Osama bin Laden. Frankly, I'd like to lock them both in the same tiny cell for the rest of their lives. Stark naked.
There has to be some judgment as to where we will go to make war and where we'll say, "Okay, that place is evil, but not evil enough to sacrifice tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of lives and more national treasure than we have in the treasury."
Saner heads in Washington than the ones in the White House might have said, "Saddam Hussein is one evil SOB, but his death toll is lower than the one we'd generate going in there."
The problem with George Bush & Co. was not his militancy but his judgment. Or lack of judgment. His father knew better. With half of Saddam's army wiped out, Goerge HW Bush wisely pulled out.
George W didn't. Don't even get me started on Oedipus.
Yours very crankily,
The New York Crank
Post a Comment