Paul writes: 'Hitchy nails it again. I've don't understood the leftist cry of "But the US supported Sadam and Bin Ladin", though I must have understood it back when I was a leftist and crying these words myself. It seems that since the US govt played a hand in erecting and propping these tyrants that the US govt has an obligation to admit its error and to take corrective action. When leftits issue this cry, are they calling for the US govt to support these tyrants forever?'
It's touching that you trust the man (Rumsfeld) who showed up in Saddam's office with a pair of bronze cowboy boots trying to sell him arms during a bloody war--a war in which Rumsfeld's bosses were also selling arms to the other side--to disinterestedly create "peace" and "democracy" in Iraq. When did Rumsfeld repent? When did he say, I was wrong?
Never. And in fact, it's impossible to read the public record on Abu Graib and not conclude that orders for torture came from the top. In fact, the intellectual author of the torture policy now runs the justice department. No less than when your man Hitchens' bete noir--Kissinger--ran the show, our country is dominated at the top by war criminals. I'd like to see Rumsfeld and Saddam share a dock at the Hague. There'd be much to make small talk about.
What we're witnessing in Iraq is a power struggle over natural resources. The US always planned to plunk down a permanent military base in Iraq to protect its interests in the Gulf once it streamrolled Iraq. Long before that joke of an election, the US had quietly shut down its base in Saudi Arabia, cravenly conceding one of Bin Laden's major demands. That's what the Iraq War was about--creating a government that would let it run a base in the Gulf. (Bin Laden finds the US presence in Iraq distasteful, to be sure; but letting the infidel's army run free in the heart of Mecca--Saudi Arabia--made his blood boil.) The strategy has so far failed miserably. No matter how you cut it, the occupation has been a disaster. The Iraqi government doesn't even control the roads leading to Bagdad. The Shiites merely hate the U.S.; the Sunnis despise them bitterly. The government, with the great Chalabi himself installed--flagrantly, in full light of day--as oil minister(!), has no credibility.
There may well be a philistine left that supports Saddam or apologizes for Islamic-inspired violence against civilians--although Hitchens' caricature of the anti-war movement, published elsewhere on this page, is about as subtle and accurate as one of McCarthy's sorry rants before the Senate. As I've said before, I see the battle between Bush and Saddam as a conflict between rival motorcycle gangs. One was packing guns, the other tire irons. The guys with the guns won. But now there are guys on the tire-iron side sneaking around taking potshots at the victors. The victors, too stupid to have figured what they were facing before they started the rumble, are utterly flummoxed.
I oppose the war because I think it falls right in line with an unhappy history of neo-colonial rot. I'm sick of a world and an economy geared solely toward hoarding and consuming what I consider a ruinous resource: crude oil. So I moved to a small farm and set up shop as an agitator for sustainable agriculture. (Industrial agriculture, among its many sins, is a huge consumer of fossil fuel. It takes at least 3 calories of fossil fuel to create one food calorie in the US food system--a system that's now being written into the Iraqi constitution.)
If you guys were to follow the logical end of your convictions, you'd end up running night raids in Bagdad. I hope it doesn't come to that.
1 comment:
Tom: You seem to have three main points against the US invasion of Iraq:
1) The US invaded in order to control Iraqi resources.
2) The US effort is no better than that of the displaced government, both in terms of how it has conducted its war, and in the govt that it is establishing.
3) The US war effort is losing.
I reject each of your assertions:
1) Even if motivated primarily to increase economic benefit to the US, Bush would want an independant, democratic Iraq in which private citizens owned oil companies. These sorts of nations contain the highest fractions of people who are self-sufficient consumers of iPods rather than people who need foriegn aid. As an example I offer you India, which for decades required late-night cable preachers begging for handouts on their behalf, whereas now the people there have transformed from a socialist nation one based on capitalism, so that now instead of begging for wheat, they export it to nations that still employ socialism, baathism, or other forms of dictatorships.
2) See (1) above; dictatorships of any type -- even those giving sweetheart deals to US oil companies -- are economic drains on the rest of the world. The US govt has no interested in replacing an unfriendly dictatorship with a friendly dictatorship, or rather: the US govt benefits *MORE* from a free and independant Iraq than from an Iraq ruled by a friendly dictator. I do agree with you that the Bushies made no serious effort to deter torture, and probably implimented torture, and that this is a big mistake.
3) Even if the pro-dictator, intolerant murderers prove to be unbeatable, this will offer no worthwhile argument against the attempt to beat them. At least not for me. The defeat of the US effort here will reflect more unfavorably on the charactor of the people of Iraq than on the charactor of the Bushies, in my view. I read the right-winged/libertarian economic press. Those people want a free, independant Iraq, just as much as those who want abortion bans and school prayers. It violates their DNA to have a dictatorship of any kind, pro-US or not. And by the way, "Pro-US" = Pro-Democracy, in my opinion, and "Democracy" merely means the universal principal of humans in a country ruling themselves, and doing so with the guarantee that each individual owns himself.
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