scot hacker's foobar blog

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?