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| Sadly Cyrris you were right the first time. Probably the only time BTW by The Viking Portable Library: Hume 02/02/2003, 8:35pm PST | ||||
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Cyrris wrote: No it won't. SB missed the bit where Iraq was responsible for a majority of the world's gasoline-quality shit before Bush the Elder attacked. If the US actually occupied and Marshall-Planned Iraq (which is about as likely as me living in space when I grow up...and you see how that turned out), we'd be draining them at their pre-last-war rate and OPEC be damned. Plus we'd build roads and schools and hospitals and industry and have a trading partner, which ultimately benefits primarily us, so it's very much not-altruistic over the long run (in case you're a Rand-fag, and I know you are, I'm saying setting up a postwar Marshal Plan is benign self-interest in any of our current conflicts). It would be a great investment, we could write the cost of the war off as a giant gasoline-price subsidy/economic stimulus package and the Sierra Club could keep its Arctic Alaskan Caribou Farm and name an SUV after them or something. It's just not going to happen, though. I went down this route to see if I could justify attacking Fundamentalist Islamic countries: an argument from human rights says you protect your own and everyone else's pretty much no matter what, even if they don't have the Bill of Rights or whatever it is Senators wipe their asses with these days. That morality demands we go in to all of these countries where you murder your own sister for the crime of getting raped (that's the only justification necessary, btw, things like "I don't like the way they smell" just pile on) and force democracy and freedom and egalitarianism and all your basic human rights on them, but the reality is you can't. You simply can not force someone to change thier religion, especially if that religion says they go to an even better version of Heaven for resisting you (face it, Christianity's "being one with eternal light" is pretty cool and all, but it isn't anywhere near as chubworthy as Islam's "pool party at Hef's"). I don't mean you can't do it morally, I mean it's not physically possible, therefore it's not really a valid moral argument. Pretty much every way you go at this problem you end up with the same result. Whatever reasoned and internally consistent morality you start from is going to be consistenty thwarted by the sheer insipid idiocy that is their religion, and these people live their religion in a way we really can't grok. Which is as bad as things can get (well, "nucular" annihilation could be problematic). It means there's something broken so badly that not only can we not fix it, we can't even come up with a possible solution set for it. As a moral person, I can't even resort (sink?) to the most vicious means at my disposal, Shermanesque total warfare, to protect people, because in the end, you just can't protect them from themselves. I'd support interrupting all of their electronic communications and replacing the shit with broadcasts about Amway and Scientology if I thought it would solve the basic moral problems with their way of life, but it just won't (neither will propagandizing sensible things). Until then we're stuck with the arrogance inherent in an argument from a lifeboat mentality: A threat to stability in that region is a threat to our trading partners and that's a threat to our economy, attacking now is self-interest and that's about it. Since there's no morally right way to deal with the situation, we just have to get rid of the immediate threat and hope they have sko moderate reformation in the future to prepare them to eat at the grownups' table with the rest of us. Till then, it's the US Military starring in: Cops: Baghdad: The Movie. |
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