Category: Politics

How many of these pictures did you see on Fox or CNN?.

Was it worth it?

I have been trying to imagine what an embarrassment this whole thing would be for the administration if the bulk of Iraqis did not welcome their new freedom (even if it has been expressed primarily as chaos up till now). What would we have? ~1,700 dead innocents, no weapons of mass destruction, broken trust worldwide, and a $20 billion bill (+ $2 billion / month ongoing)…. Does the administration appreciate just how lucky it is they had the liberation card to play at the last minute? Without it, this would be the most unmitigated of disasters, on all fronts. With it, they are apparently emboldened.

Check out megnut’s Iraq War Justification flowchart.

Chris points out that 8x more Americans are killed by something called Septicemia every year than have been killed by terrorists since 1972, and rightly wonders why we are at war. Hmmm…

The narrative of this war is one of bullies vs. liberators. The scene is complex. No complex thing can be cast in terms of black and white. That’s what the right does so well — sees everything as good and evil, black and white. That’s why the airwaves are filled with conservative commentators. They can pound their fists and act like the world is unambiguous. The trap the left is falling into is seeing things in black and white. Don’t buy it.

The outcome of the war may be on the whole good for Iraqis and good for the world, even though it has been waged for all the wrong reasons. Even though profit is involved. It’s a classic question of whether the ends justify the means. Liberation is a good outcome even if it’s hypocritical (because lots of other peoples need liberation too) and even if it’s being used as a convenient excuse (liberation was never a reason for invasion until it was convenient).

*If such measurements can be performed — please don’t ask me how many innocent lives are worth Saddam’s deposition, because I don’t know — is 10 too many? 1,000? 1,000,000?

With all the Al-Jazeera bashing, it’s worth remembering that Iraqis think Al-Jazeera is biased toward the U.S..

Saddam and George in the halcyon days of yore, as college buds yukking it up.

Very powerful 1998 letter to the UN by former Attorney General Ramsey Clarke, demanding that the US never again attack Iraq. Quoted:

U.S. contempt for U.N. authority is shown by its defiance of the recent General Assembly vote of 157 nations versus 2 nations protesting the U.S. criminal blockade of Cuba, its refusal to pay dues to the U.N. year after year and its selective defiance, …

and

U.S. arms expenditures are approximately 25 times the gross national product of Iraq. The U.S. has in its stockpiles more nuclear bombs, chemical and biological weapons, more aircraft, rockets and delivery systems in number and sophistication than the rest of the world combined.

My mother seemed always to remember whenever talk of US’ international responsibility came up: “We don’t even pay our UN dues,” she would say. But according to a Sept. 2001 article at Global Policy, we did start ponying up right after 9/11, i.e. as soon as we realized we might need to be on good terms with the UN after all. Which is itself a reminder of how quickly we turned the post 9/11 atmosphere of international sympathy into one of global frustration and contempt.

We had a good thing going there. Trashed it.

Another thought that’s been rolling around lately, and this one kind of leans the other way. As Clarke says in the letter, a million and a half deaths had been caused by sanctions on Iraq as of ’98. But sanctions are supposedly the diplomatic, non-violent way to exert international pressure. As the administration says, 12 years of diplomacy hasn’t worked, which is why we ostensibly turn to war (by the way, this is also the key difference between Iraq and North Korea – we’ve done 12 years of “diplomatic” work with Iraq, while the blow-up with North Korea has just come on the radar). Anyway, it seems likely to me that war will result in significantly fewer than 1.5 million civilian casualties. If so, this would give the administration the ability to claim that war can result in fewer civilian deaths than diplomacy. Which is, of course, totally inside out and totally messed up.

I feel so conflicted about everything.

I no longer carry the fullest conviction that this is an unjust war. People left a lot of very good comments in a post from a few days ago, Shifting Sands. Especially a pointer from mrgrape to a Salon piece titled See No Evil, about the paradox of the left’s opposition to this war. Salon is a bastion of the left, but is asking some very difficult mirror-gazing questions here.

As one watches protest marches, antiwar advertising and local arts events, one has to wonder whether the left has really weighed the moral issues posed by the horrors of Saddam’s regime — weighed life by life the repression of the 24 million Iraqis who live in a ruthless police state, not to mention the thousands or tens of thousands who have been imprisoned without trial, tortured, exiled or killed. It sometimes seems that the left is so averse to war, especially war waged by America, that it is prepared to turn a blind eye to even the most ghastly realities. Perhaps it is because the left no longer sees these realities that its antiwar arguments tend to justify continuation of the status quo.

Worth the read. Worth subscribing even, though Salon is allegedly on its last financial breath.

We attended the first two SF protests against invasion in the months leading up to war. But once war began, it became difficult to see what protesting could possibly accomplish. And the more it became apparent how Iraqi citizens were generally joyous at the prospect of liberation from Saddam, the harder it was to feel unequivocally opposed to this war. My question now is, do protesters really believe that Iraqis and the world as a whole would be better off if we just pulled out, brought our soldiers home, and left everything as it is? If you can’t answer yes to that question, then why are you still protesting?

Domestic anti-war sentiment is lessening as the war progresses. According to a radio report I caught today, polls showed around 67% support for military action in Iraq two days ago. But by this afternoon, that figure had risen to 77%. So 10% of people feel better about invasion now that it’s begun. There are a lot of reasons for this I can see — U.S. forces seem to be doing a good job of keeping civilian injuries very low, and we’re hearing more about Iraqis dancing in the streets to celebrate their liberation from Saddam. Here’s the bit (UPI) that really made me sit up:

A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip “had shocked me back to reality.” Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera “told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn’t start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam’s bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head.”

The liberation angle was not part of the discussion for most of the months leading up to war. Bush talked about WMD and disarmament, terrorism, etc. He only started playing the liberation card late in the game. And when it did come up, the left would respond that Iraqis had not requested U.S. or U.N. assistance in dealing with Saddam. But now that it’s clear that Iraqis welcome U.S. soldiers, the right gets to take credit for liberation, while the left has to deal with the fact that we’ve been actively resisting efforts to take out a brutal dictator, even if for good reasons.

It was during the 2nd SF protest that I first began to ask myself just how brutal a dictator Saddam would have to be for me (and others on the left) to become convinced that this might be a just war after all. Have your sentiments about this war changed since it began?

44% of Americans believe “that most or some of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi.” And no wonder, after the snow job our flaccid, compliant, conservative media has done on the American critical faculty. Looks like Salon is setting itself up as a counterweight to the waves of propaganda and quasi-reporting heading our way. They’ve already slipped a reporter into Iraqi Kurdistan on a raft in the dead of night. Salon should be a good resource to watch as the coming weeks unfold.