Very well said, David!
I have heard some discussion about whether historians will judge this
war in Iraq as "just" or "unjust"...
My guess is that in a few years as historians will be debating, the
rest of the world will no longer care. There will be some other
problem somewhere, some other war, and some other dictatorship.
People bring up Kosovo (1997), and what the US did there. But this was
not the first time we did this. Consider Panama (1990): The US invaded
that country to arrest its leader, Noriega. At that time, there was an
enormous world reaction, and as the US installed a new government, a
lot of neighboring nations said they would not recognize the "New Panama".
But eventually they did, and Noriega sits in a Florida jail somewhere.
Who cares now about Panama or Kosovo?
So, in five years, who will care about Iraq? Does it really matter
whether this war was justified or not?
John
--- In OliveStarlightOrchestra_at_yahoogroups.com, "dne44" <dne_at_d...> wrote:
> Of course the war was fought over ideology: we believed that Saddam
> should not be in power. He believed that he should. Voil`a! an
> ideological war.
>
> That fact is that the reasoning for the war breaks down for any of
> the stated reasons. Pulled together they resemble sufficient cause,
> but looked at individually, they hold no or little water. Let's look,
> shall we?
>
> Moral reasons/Liberating Iraq: Saddam is an evil man and horribly
> cruel to his people. We have a moral imperative to liberate his
> oppressed people! This is one of the big crowd-pleasers, but we
> clearly have no intentions of pursuing this course of action in any
> of the tens of other countries where abuses as bad or worse than
> Saddam's (Myanmar, Sierra Leone, etc.) are occurring. So at best,
> the "liberation" of the Iraqis is a fringe benefit and not part of
> any sustained ideological campaign to help oppressed peoples.
>
> Weapons of mass destruction: Saddam has WMD and he has used them in
> the past, on his own people! We must go in and disarm him before he
> strikes again. Well, again there is no consistency. Other belligerent
> countries have WMD and have shown a penchant to use them or threaten
> to, but we're not lining up to invade China, North Korea, Syria,
> Pakistan, etc. Clearly, WMD are not enough to justify an invasion on
> their own (btw, personally, if there were evidence that Hussein was
> anywhere close to nuclear I would support much more aggressive
> measures than I would otherwise, but everything I've seen or heard on
> the nuclear front is extremely tenuous at best). But perhaps you are
> thinking that Iraq is diffrent. They signed a treaty with the UN that
> they would not develop WMD! That brings us to:
>
> We must enforce the UN-based treaty that Hussein signed at the end of
> Gulf War I! Otherwise, any state will feel it can make a mockery of
> the UN, no one will listen or obey! Well, here I think the UN should
> have stepped up to the plate more aggressively, but they didn't.
> Still, by stepping in the way we did, we did as much or more damage
> to the UN's relevance than they did to themselves. We certainly could
> not use flaunting of the UN's rules as justification for war without
> showing ourselves to be major hypocrites.
>
> But wait! Iraq was harboring and supporting terrorists, including Al-
> Qaeda! We're justified to go in! Firstly, the evidence here has been
> thin at best, but even allowing for it to be true, there are many
> other states that support or tolerate terrorists/terrorism within
> their borders (Pakistan, Indonesia, Ireland, Iran, Saudi Arabia,
> Somalia, Syria, etc.) -- are we going in to them next? Are we going
> to establish a single standard and abide by it? Until we do, it
> certainly cannot stand as a moral justification for war, and on
> strategic grounds, our primary concern with Iraq was never that they
> were in league with Al-Qaeda.
>
> Which brings us to the threat Hussein posed. We went to war in self
> defense and Hussein was an imminent threat. Or at least an imminent
> threat to the region. Well, the self-defense notion is laughable --
> we as a country could not be threatened by a weakened 3rd world
> nation. As far as the region goes, Hussein has behaved himself for 13
> years and shown no military ambitions, and his military complex (as
> we have now seen) was a shadow of what it was in '91 and we know what
> we did to it then. Sure, he's been giving money to Palestinian
> terrorists, but find an Arab government that doesn't have any
> complicity there. The only threat to America is that he might have or
> develop WMD, sell them to terrorists, who then might use them on us.
> But does this possibility -- a reasonable assumption, but far from
> proven -- justify engaging in a preemptive war, killing and
> terrorizing Iraqi citizens (because I promise you that living in a
> city with bombers and missiles flying overhead for 45 days is being
> terrorized -- imagine living through that), alienating most of the
> world's populace, and putting a fragile region into further political
> chaos?
>
> So let's drop the pretentions of this being a moral war. The
> accumulation of all these factors is being used to justify a war we
> began for economic, political and strategic reasons, reasons which
> have not been made nearly as clear to us because they're much less
> pretty, and we like to think we're the good guys.
>
> Take a second and picture almost any other country doing what we just
> did for the reasons we gave (India into Pakistan, Israel into Syria,
> Russia into Kazakhstan, etc.). We would be outraged, or at least
> would do everything in our power to stop it. We would not abide
> another country taking unilateral action. Yet we did it because we
> could. And that's why we need to be held to a higher moral standard --
> because we can.
>
>
> - David
>
>
>
> --- In OliveStarlightOrchestra_at_yahoogroups.com, "7visions"
> <7visions_at_p...> wrote:
> > For the record, I do have a big problem with the lack of open and
> > competitive bidding for the rebuilding of Iraq. There is no change
> in my
> > position since before I became a vicious reactionary hawk.
> >
> > But more and more I feel that this war was fought over ideology and
> not just
> > oil and a few rich shareholders.... and I hate to quote trickle
> down, but
> > these contracts will help a lot of workers here ( not to mention in
> Iraq)
> > who did not grow up with the benefit to enjoy the fruits of being
> Westside
> > Intellectuals.
Received on 2003-04-23 11:37:05
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0
: 2020-02-04 07:16:16 UTC