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we is winning the war on terror - or - terror gets more "desperate"...,
2004-01-15 16:25:08
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"We should never occupy countries to extract their natural resources."...,
2004-01-21 15:17:31
crackheads and apricots:
The context - and the relevant significance of - this bizzaro conversation was summed up neatly today: "The dilemma of 'humane internationalists' resembles that of every marginal political tendency. You have a position that makes some kind of sense, if applied consistently. But you don't have the political power to make that happen. Meanwhile, those who do have political power employ you and your remedy selectively for their own nefarious purposes. You can either marginalize yourself by withholding support, or you can trying to grab onto a piece of the policy in force and hope to propagate your own, more comprehensive and sincerely-held message."
Why bizzaro? Consider this choice bit from Paul Berman:
"The war was brought on, in my view, by the mass totalitarian movement of the Muslim world—the totalitarian movement that, in its radical Islamist and Baathist wings, had fostered a cult of indiscriminate killing and suicide. ... The goal is to cause people all over the Muslim world to abandon the cult of mass death and suicide."
One can only take that goal seriously if one believes that people all over the Muslim world have adopted a cult of mass death and suicide - a substanceless claim - and defend the war on Iraq under the assumption that driving record numbers into said cult(s) is an effective way to make them abandon said cult(s), nevermind treating the Ba'ath as a "wing" of the same "movement" as radical fundementalist Islamicism simply surpasses anything that could be remotely recognized as approaching a reasoned interpretation of the facts. Bizarro logic. Some money, peanuts really, given to the parents of martyrs in the occupied territories, after their houses had been bulldozed over by the IDF, is as much or more so humanitarian relief than it is support for terrorism.
That and we're still funding dictators and tyrants all over the globe, and we won't be ending that support anytime soon. In that context "liberal war" isn't a feasibility.
:: posted by buermann @ 2004-01-16 15:25:25 CST |
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