Both of you deserve kudos for your writing.
Even on VACATION, I don't have time to write all this :)
Lenny
----- Original Message -----
From: mayhem <meurtre_at_earthlink.net>
To: <OliveStarlightOrchestra_at_yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2003 12:58 AM
Subject: Re: [OliveStarlightOrchestra] Fought over ideology
> That was excellent, David.
>
> Naturally, I have a few thoughts.
>
> > 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.
>
> It's worth noting here that the U.S. policy of regime change in Iraq
> goes back to 1998 and the Clinton Administration. Did any of you express
> any reservations about it then?
>
> > 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.
>
> No one ever said it was anything other than a fringe benefit. But
> if I were living in Iraq I'd be pretty happy about it. We had other
> reasons as far as international law is concerned, but it's lovely
> to make this kind of a difference in people's lives. If one counts
> the victims in Saddam's two wars, he's killed over a million people.
> And he has two sons who show every signs of continuing his legacy of
> murder and torture. As fringe benefits go, liberating these people
> was a damn good one.
>
> > 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).
>
> I don't support going in and starting a bloodbath (North Korea), or a
> nuclear confrontation (China). Or using military force when diplomacy
> might work better (Syria). Color me hypocritical, if it's hypocritical
> to use common sense in working out which strategy to use with which
> dictator.
>
> And Saddam never abandoned his nuclear program; I truly do think he
> was attempting to refine plutonium right up to the end.
>
> Also--this guy has already started two wars, and is a master of
> miscalculation.
> He's not a predictable guy. It isn't like the North Koreans, who like
> to talk tough, but don't do much: his aggressiveness is proven.
>
> >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.
>
> After the first Gulf War, Saddam was allowed to stay in power, with
> certain conditions, set by the international community. The U.N.
> formalized these with a series of resolutions, which Iraq systematically
> violated. Meeting these conditions was a precondition to ending the war;
> therefore, the fact that they were not met means that the first Gulf
> War never really ended (hostilities continued over the no-fly zone for
> 12 years).
>
> The damage to U.N. prestige was self-inflicted. Unfortunately, the two
> missions we'd all like the U.N. to succeed in are those at which it is
> most laughably inept: promoting human rights, and ensuring security of
> the global community. I'm hoping reforms may come about in these areas,
> but I'm not holding my breath. If reforms occur, I'll be glad the U.S.
> helped to bring them about: I'd love it if the U.N. did some soul-
> searching.
>
> > We certainly could
> > not use flaunting of the UN's rules as justification for war without
> > showing ourselves to be major hypocrites.
>
> Why not? Because we didn't go to them and say "Mother may I go enforce
> your resolutions for you"? Or: "Mother, may I go defend myself against
> a threat"? We are not required to do that.
>
> The "we needed the U.N.'s blessing" argument always knocks me out, partly
> because it always comes from Democrats who had no problems with Clinton's
> war in Kosovo--for which he didn't seek U.N. approval.
>
> Nor did France ask for U.N. approval before it went into the Ivory Coast.
> Where was the outrage then?
>
> What--the U.N.'s blessing is only required if there's a chance the
military
> action might do some actual good? This "ya gotta ask first" rule appears
> to have been invented in 2002. By Democrats to whom it had never before
> occurred.
>
> > 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.
>
> There is a difference in scale between a state that pays off the families
> of suicide bombers and one that has a camp in which terrorists can
practice
> hijacking U.S. planes. Slight difference of scale. Their support for A.Q.
> may not have been as dramatic as the Taliban's, but it didn't help their
> case.
>
> > 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.
>
> Yes, David. That's it: we thought Saddam was going to invade. Florida
> was bracing for a landing on its beaches. (Come on, now. Buck up.
> You can do better than that.)
>
> >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.
>
> Yes. An egotistical megalomaniac managed, for just over a decade (of his
> 30 years in power) to confine himself to occasional attacks on the Kurds.
> Cold comfort.
>
> The argument--and it's tangential to the case for war, but, hey: you
> brought it up--is that, appearances to the contrary, dictatorships
> are intrinsically destabilizing, particularly as practiced in the
> Middle East. The Arab countries (plus Iran) continue to oppress
> their people to varying degrees, and present the U.S. and Israel
> to them as scapegoats. The situation is untenable, and a breeding
> ground for terrorism large and small.
>
> >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
>
> Yes. It did. That "reasonable assumption" is the basis for this war,
> in a nutshell. That was the risk. That's what we were being protected
> against. Only the chance of having hundreds of thousands of Americans
> (or other Westerners, but we're the preferred target) wiped out in one
> day. Other than that petty concern, though . . .
>
> >engaging in a preemptive war,
>
> That is, resuming hostilities in a war that never really ended.
>
> >killing
>
> Many fewer people died this way than if Saddam had stayed in power for
> another decade.
>
> >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),
>
> I like the fact that the civilian casualties were so low, you're now
> having to talk about the stress of living through a war as "terrorism."
> This was targeted bombing, here: we're not talking about living in
> London during WWII.
>
> And I'd rather live with the sound of bombs going off than have my tongue
> cut out, or be fed to a plastic shredder. Maybe that's me.
>
> >alienating most of the
> > world's populace,
>
> Many of whom, oddly enough, gave material support to this venture. (It's
> been said before, but a coalition of 45 nations is almost at the level
> of the support the allies had in WWII, which was around 52, as I recall.)
>
> >and putting a fragile region into further political
> > chaos?
>
> Or finally stabilizing this fragile region, and giving its people their
> first taste of real democracy. (This was, of course, my biggest misgiving
> in the time I was making up my mind where I stood. The "it will
destabilize
> the Middle East" arguments seemed so good. But the "it will bring
democracy
> to the region" people sounded reasonable as well. I'll admit I wavered on
> this one for a long time. It's clear where I finally came down. And
history
> will tell us.)
>
> > 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.
>
> I really like that first one--the "Republicans are so greedy that they're
> willing to sacrifice American lives to make money." It's always so
charming.
> After all, with the way the Prez and Vice Prez have to scrape by, I can
see
> why wealth would be so seductive that they'd abandon all morality to make
> a few bucks . . . oh, wait. That doesn't work.
>
> At least you threw in "political and strategic" concerns. Which I damned
> well
> hope these guys are taking into consideration: that's why we're paying
them.
> I *want* them to be thinking in "political and strategic" terms.
>
> > 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.
>
> Funny. How come we were considered so stubborn for *not* holding
> "unilateral"
> talks with North Korea? Our attempts to be "multilateral" there brought
> us all kinds of criticism.
>
> Do what you need to in order to survive. And then let history judge. It
> was so when the Israelis bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981--which
> the Reagan administration condemned--and it's so now, for us.
>
> We put up with all kinds of stuff we don't approve of in terms of one
> sovereign
> nation occupying another. If I had a magic wand, I'd get the Chinese out
of
> Tibet in a minute. We "abide" a lot. But we can only do what we can. We
> cannot
> cure every ill--only a few.
>
> >Yet we did it because we
> > could. And that's why we need to be held to a higher moral standard --
> > because we can.
>
> That's why we did it how we did it. Never before has the "invading" army
> been so assiduous in avoiding civilian casualties. And rarely have the
> "defenders" shown so little regard for the lives of their own people. The
> way this war was conducted, as much as anything, shows our motives. We
> increased the risk to our own troops by conducting this the way we did.
> I can't claim the coalition behaved perfectly, but I do feel it met the
> "higher moral standard" standard.
>
> Your partner in unemployment,
>
> J
>
>
> >
> > --- 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.
> >
> >
> >
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Received on 2003-04-23 14:30:32