Category: Politics

Andrew Sullivan has just posted a lengthy email from a correspondent about the US invasion of Iraq. Kudos to Sully for posting it, because, as he says, “I disagree with much of it. But I disagree with it less than I did a year ago.” Money quote:

I could have supported intervention in Iraq. Saddam was a monster. But not Bush’s intervention. If his Dad, and Powell, had put together a true global coalition, with a real commitment to pay the high price in money, manpower and years necessary to free Iraq, secure the peace and rebuild the country, yes, I could have supported it. But I knew GWB and his team would never accomplish those ends, because those ends were not his ends. His ends, and his means, speak for themselves. All the rest is lies.

Many of us who opposed the invasion undoubtedly conflated two emotions: our strongly-held feelings about Bush in general, and a rejection of the rush to war. Bush certainly evoked powerful negative feelings, based on his illegitimacy, his lack of vision and intelligence, and the way his puppet-masters cynically exploited divisive social issues to cover up the looting of the country for their fellow plutocrats. But that didn’t mean that we were wrong when we came to the conclusion that Bush was not acting in good faith about going to war. Nor does it necessarily mean that we were against war under all circumstances. I myself am no pacifist: I supported the first Gulf War, and – reluctantly and controversially – the Falklands campaign. But this wasn’t about “war in general”, or even whether Saddam was a monster or not: it was about this war, at this time, conducted by these people, in these circumstances, for these ostensible reasons.
I think that where people like Andrew Sullivan and the former editor of the Economist get it wrong is that they frame the question as “in principle”: Are you in principle in favour of overthrowing Saddam? Such questions are always presented as simple dichotomies — yes/no, black/white, good/bad — and are assumed to be logically prior to the “how” questions, the in practice. But this is simply a way of allowing the ends to justify the means: you commit yourself to a course of action, and must hold to it however badly it turns out. Why not, instead, judge each fully articulated proposal for action (and inaction) on its own merits, with a full assessment of the consequences? (Yeah, utilitarianism – why not?) Reject the seduction of the false dichotomy, reserve the right to vote “none of the above” and demand that the principals go back to the drawing board and try again. Because it seems to me that only a neocon bigot could have accepted that the course of action proposed by Bush was the best possible, that it clearly addressed the standards for the moral and legal conduct of war established by the US at the Nuremberg Trials and subsequently by the UN, that there was a clear and present danger that could not have waited months or years until Afghanistan had been secured and Osama captured.
“Agreement in principle.” It’s the way the card-sharp sucks in the mark; once you agree to play, you can’t back out even if you see that the game is rigged. And then you salve your bruised pride by comforting yourself that the original choice was justified, instead of recognizing that, just possibly, there was no “in practice” available to justify the “in principle”.

When I read stories like this, I wonder what weird, alien country I’m living in.

“I just killed a kid,” Charles Martin told the emergency services operator. “I shot him with a goddamn 410 shotgun twice.” He had gunned down Larry Mugrage, his neighbours’ 15-year-old son. The teenager’s crime: walking across Mr Martin’s lawn on his way home. Mr Martin opened fire from his house and then, according to the police, walked up to the wounded boy and pulled the trigger again at close range, killing him.

[I’m turning off comments, because I don’t want the chore of moderating all the rants from the RKBA nuts who try to justify their culture of death.]

A piece in Capitol Hill Blue begins as follows:

On an unspecified day last week an employee of a federal agency that cannot be revealed delivered a document that cannot be identified to a company that cannot be named seeking information that cannot be discussed.

And the depressing thing is, it‘s true. Or I think it is. But since all of the facts are secret, we’ll never know. And that’s the whole point.

HuffPo has just posted a piece by John Zogby about a new poll of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. So do they know why they’re fighting in Iraq?

The wide-ranging poll also shows that 58% of those serving in country say the U.S. mission in Iraq is clear in their minds, while 42% said it is either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no understanding of it at all, or are unsure.

OK, so what’s the mission?

Nearly nine of every 10 – 85% – said the U.S. mission is “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” while 77% said they believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.”

So how do you tell someone that s/he’s fighting for a lie?
Mind you, they don’t want to stay. When do the troops themselves think that they should be withdrawn?

• 29% “immediately”
• 22% “in the next 6 months”
• 21% “between 6 and 12 months”
• 23% “as long as they are needed”

That seems pretty clear.

Here’s an interesting perspective from the BBC’s John Simpson:

Looking back on the events of the past year, it is clear that the three different popular votes which were held in Iraq, two elections and one referendum, played a big part in whipping up the violence.
People who had tended to regard themselves primarily as Iraqis were suddenly forced to focus on the fact that they belonged to a particular group: Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, Christian or whatever.
The act of voting was as divisive as it was empowering, and the fact that it happened three times in 11 months added to the intensity of the problem.

Let’s see: the British police can’t catch members of al-Qaida, so instead they decide to harrass actors who play al-Qaida suspects in a British movie. Now that’s really clever.

Remember this picture from my tour of Hyderabad last year?
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The tower is front of us is the Charminar, in the heart of the old walled city. Just a few hours ago, according to The Times of India:

The city had another Friday convulsion as rioting erupted in the Old City over the Denmark cartoon controversy, with Islamic protesters burning and damaging vehicles and stoning shops in the area around Charminar.
This time, the walled city teetered on the edge of a communal riot as the rioters lobbed stones at shops at Gulzar Houz

Of course most of the property that was destroyed will have belonged to Muslims…

Andrew Sullivan reports that the planned Gay Pride march in Moscow has been cancelled after threats from the Russian Muslim community:

Earlier this week Chief Mufti Talgat Tadzhuddin warned that Russia’s Muslims would stage violent protests if the march went ahead. “If they come out on to the streets anyway they should be flogged. Any normal person would do that – Muslims and Orthodox Christians alike” … The cleric said the Koran taught that homosexuals should be killed because their lifestyle spells the extinction of the human race and said that gays had no human rights.

If this represents mainstream Muslim thinking, then a “clash of civilizations” is inevitable. If not, it is the responsibility of moderate Muslims to take back their faith from the extremists. I really don’t see any alternative. But the most depressing thing about this choice is that the Chief Mufti claims to speak for the Russian Muslim community as a whole. He, like Sistani, is supposed to be a moderate.
UPDATE: In today’s L.A.Times, Mansoor Ijaz tries to have it both ways: to argue that on the one hand the extremists do not represent Islam, while asserting that there is no such thing as a “moderate Muslim”:

You either believe in the oneness of God or you don’t. You either believe in the teachings of his prophet or you don’t. You either learn those teachings and apply them to the circumstances of life in the country you have chosen to live in, or you shouldn’t live there.

But this is simply disingenuous: it assumes that there is only one possible interpretation of those “teachings”, and that there is only one way to “apply them to the circumstances of life”. Admit that neither is true, and his entire thesis falls apart.

From a comment on Doug’s Rant, a link to an excerpt from “They Thought They Were Free”, Milton Mayer’s history of Germany from 1933 to 1945. Key paragraph:

What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

Sobering stuff.

If you didn’t catch last night’s Daily Show piece on Cheney’s hunting incident, check it out when it comes up on the streaming video page. Salon’s transcript doesn’t do it justice:

Jon, in a post-9-11 world, the American people expect their leaders to be decisive. To not have shot his friend in the face would have sent a message to the quail that America is weak.

UPDATE: Comedy Central seems to be swamped – as an alternative, CrooksAndLiars has a postage-stamp sized video available.