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| Iraq Crap by Zebco Fuckface 01/31/2003, 5:08pm PST | ||||
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| I think my fellow liberals are making a mistake by opposing an invasion of Iraq. I crammed the argument into two lines in the last post, but that's not going to convince anyone. Here's the history of my reasoning:
Like all good liberals, I can't stand Bush. I thought he wanted to invade Iraq for the oil, he's a goddamn idiot; Richard Perle is a complete fucking crackpot, and so on. Then I stumbled on this article, and it really made me wonder. It's what the big hitters of modern liberalism, and specifically what the more hawkish ones, think about Iraq. They give the usual well-reasoned objections, but there's an interesting subtext to it, that I hadn't given all that much thought to before: the use of war by the US & EU to stop genocide in the Balkans brought the hawkish liberal, last seen at the beginning of WWII, back from the dead. It fundamentally altered the views of lots of people whose reasoning I respect. Specifically, the following passage threw me for a loop: Quote: One chilly evening in late November, a panel discussion on Iraq was convened at New York University. The participants were liberal intellectuals, and one by one they framed reasonable arguments against a war in Iraq: inspections need time to work; the Bush doctrine has a dangerous agenda; the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East is not encouraging. The audience of 150 New Yorkers seemed persuaded. Then the last panelist spoke. He was an Iraqi dissident named Kanan Makiya, and he said, ''I'm afraid I'm going to strike a discordant note.'' He pointed out that Iraqis, who will pay the highest price in the event of an invasion, ''overwhelmingly want this war.'' He outlined a vision of postwar Iraq as a secular democracy with equal rights for all of its citizens. This vision would be new to the Arab world. ''It can be encouraged, or it can be crushed just like that. But think about what you're doing if you crush it.'' Makiya's voice rose as he came to an end. ''I rest my moral case on the following: if there's a sliver of a chance of it happening, a 5 to 10 percent chance, you have a moral obligation, I say, to do it.'' The effect was electrifying. The room, which just minutes earlier had settled into a sober and comfortable rejection of war, exploded in applause. The other panelists looked startled, and their reasonable arguments suddenly lay deflated on the table before them. Michael Walzer, who was on the panel, smiled wanly. ''It's very hard to respond,'' he said. It was hard, I thought, because Makiya had spoken the language beloved by liberal hawks. He had met their hope of avoiding a war with an even greater hope. He had given the people in the room an image of their own ideals. You know what? You can't refute that. Even if Bush really is a war-crazed maniac, and he's only after Iraq's oil, and even, god forbid, it ensures his reelection, freeing the citizens of Iraq from Saddam Hussein is a moral responsibility. Everything else is irrelevant. Of course, it's not like I'm suddenly a neoconservative; Bush is still a moron, and god knows he's trying to fuck up the case for invasion as much as possible. That doesn't change the inherent rightness of freeing Iraq from Saddam. Some more food for thought: according to Kevin Pollack, the offiical foreign policy goal on Saddam changed late in the Clinton administration. The new consensus opinion was that the use of sanctions to contain Saddam was no longer tenable, he absolutely must be removed. The really interesting thing is the identity of the person behind this shift; it's the same one who pushed the hardest on intervening in the Balkans, based strictly on moral grounds. Al Gore. There's a bit in Halberstam's book on 90s foreign policy where Gore sums it all up. I loaned the book to a friend, so I can't post the exact quote, but here's a paraphrase: My daughter was crying yesterday over a picture she saw in the paper. It's from the Balkans; it's a war photo of a girl in her 20s. She's covered in blood, missing an arm, and wasn't killed too long before the photo was taken. When she asks me why the US is letting this happen, what am I supposed to tell her? War, surprisingly, turns out to be good for something. Eww, just noticed that Hitchens is in the article. Ignore that part. |
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