Act Locally
By Mitch Berg
Lassie over at The Dogs on tomorrow’s local anti-war pro-dictatorship demonstrations:
12:00 PM – Books Not Bombs Youth Bloc
Gather at military recruitment station on Lake & Lyndale followed by a youth march to the…1:00 PM Mass Community Antiwar Demonstration
Gather at Hennepin and Lagoon then march to Loring Park for a rallyOn their flyer, these fine groups are in collaboration: Socialist Alternative
, Anti-War Organizing League
You’ll find indoctrinated kids becoming active. These are the anarchists – kids – who are trashing military recruitment property and harassing military exhibitors at events. I’ve attended Iraq anti-war protests for the last three years, and found many supposed “peaceniks” who are anything but. The kids have a history of throwing paint and breaking windows at recruiting stations. If you are in the area Sunday, check ’em out. Better yet, speak up for our soldiers in Iraq and those who’ve returned and remind them that the adults are in charge.
If you have the time on Sunday – what, SUNDAY? Not Saturday?
Oh. I’m so there.
Anyone want to meet up and do a counterprotest?
Maybe frequent commenter Doug can send some of his veteran friends to “bitch-slap” me. That oughtta be good!
March 16th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
Pink Monkey Bird and friends are planning a little somethin’-somethin’: pinkmonkeybird@davidbowie.com
I am bummed that I can’t attend (will be with my ailing dad). Make this ProtestWarrior alumni proud, Mitch!
March 16th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
I can be there, do we want to pre-meet?
March 16th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Make sure to demand that the administration freeze funding for the VA like your buddy Terry and my Veteran friends might just follow through with the bitch slapping.
It will be pretty fun to see liberals and peace loving conservatives coming together to speak out against a failed policy. It will be even more fun to see the handful of counter-protesters standing around trying to figure out why no one is listening to them anymore.
March 16th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Doug, you’re delusional. And threatening violence.
March 16th, 2007 at 8:24 pm
Terry said,
“Doug, you’re delusional. And threatening violence.”
Terry, you’re a drama queen. And a crappy critic.
March 16th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
Doug,
Are you, like, shorter than average?
Just curious.
March 16th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
5′ 10″ but if I stand on Terry’s entire published works I might hit 5′ 10 1/8″
March 16th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
So you are a short feller. Ever worked in a paint shop?
March 16th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
No Terry. Why? Are you a critic of the paint media as well?
Maybe you can dazzle us with your oration describing how Jackson Pollock was overrated because you can’t understand his work.
And I just googled average male height. To answer Mitch, nope, I’m not shorter than average.
March 16th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Flail away, Doug! You might hit something some day!
March 17th, 2007 at 6:37 am
5′ 10″
Ah. Go wait on your pot of gold.
March 17th, 2007 at 7:30 am
Doug proclaimed “And I just googled average male height. To answer Mitch, nope, I’m not shorter than average.”
Sure Doug, for the entire planet. Amongst the Pygmies you are a god!
March 17th, 2007 at 7:49 am
Mitch Said,
“Go wait on your pot of gold.”
WHA?!? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! ZING! You sure got Me Mitch!
That’s FUNNY because, you see, Mitch is insinuating that I am a leprechaun… AND IT”S ST. PATRICKS DAY!?!
Your wit and comedic skills are as sharp and finely tuned as Terry’s skills are as a pundit of American poetry.
March 17th, 2007 at 8:33 am
I’d be offended by that if I wasn’t two inches taller than you are.
March 17th, 2007 at 8:52 am
And I’d be hurt if I wasn’t 60 watts brighter than you.
March 17th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Who lives in Hawaii and who lives in Minnesota, oh brilliant one?
March 17th, 2007 at 11:35 am
Not everyone can live in Heaven on earth. Maybe when you get tired of paying $5.00 for a loaf of bread and $500.00 per month for an individual health insurance policy, you will move here too.
March 17th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!!! Doug, you densely packed oblivion! After your buddies get done $5.00 per loaf will be a bargain. You will be paying $500 per month for health care that they will ration to you at their whim.
Clueless.
March 17th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Kermit blathered in a stunningly incoherent way,
“After your buddies get done $5.00 per loaf will be a bargain”
What buddies whould that be? My fishing buddies that I go to the Quetico with or my buddies that my wife and I join for occasional movie or dinner parties?
Either way, I doubt that they have any control over the price of bread.
“You will be paying $500 per month for health care that they will ration to you at their whim.”
Who is this mysterious “they” that you keep refering to Kermit? Do you see black helicopters too?
March 17th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
Well Dougie, you are the Moveon.dork on this site. Your “buddies” would be the DFL, who want to take a 2 billion dollar surplus and turn it into a reason to raise taxes. Destroy business. Make us all servants of Education Minnesota. In other words, take a thriving economy and turn it into another Jimmy Carter nightmare.
I don’t believe you are this stupid, so as Mitch aptly put it, you must be “shorter than average”. In so very many ways.
March 17th, 2007 at 7:33 pm
That $5 loaf of bread and $500/month health insurance (actually $6700/year for my wife & myself) are brought to us by a state government which has been run by the dems since 1960. There’s something called the Jones Act (and a few other syndicalist tricks), fully supported by senators Inouye and Akaka, and congressmen Abercrombie and Hirono that keeps the price of basic goods so high. That hurts the people at the bottom of the income scale more than us haole plutocrats. Gotta love the dems! If they can’t make everyone rich they’ll make as many people poor as possible! For us war profiteers, though, life is pretty good. Nothing to do but hang out in the cabana drinking blue hawaii’s. Could those bikinis get any smaller?
March 17th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Kermit said,
“Well Dougie, you are the Moveon.dork on this site.”
I volunteered to work on election stuff in 2004 and we held a prayer vigil at our house the night before the war in Iraq was started – both of which were MoveOn.org connected. The later was attended by 14 people, 6 of which had children or other family members in the service. And two were Republicans who said they were nervous about coming but wound up being among the last to leave. Oh and they gave us hugs and thanked us for opening our home to them. Something I can’t see you and your rabid band of pro-war, armchair warriors doing.
Other than that I really don’t have any connection or contact with MoveOn.
And Terry, you have to import 90% the perishable goods sold in your State. The Jones Act which protects American transportation companies adds only a small fraction to the cost of the goods which you can’t produce yourself anyway.
Even if foreign transport were used to reduce the price of shipping, you still would have to import 90% of your food.
By the way Terry, were you aware that Hawaiians are 100% dependent on tourism? Without our food and our dollars Terry, you’d be resorting to cannibalism and sucking pineapples and sugarcane through toothless pieholes and your gene pool would be shallower than a Shih Tzu’s water bowl.
March 17th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Wow.
Doug, don’t get too excited and soil your monitor.
March 17th, 2007 at 11:59 pm
“The Jones Act which protects American transportation companies adds only a small fraction to the cost of the goods which you can’t produce yourself anyway.”
Bullshit. The Jones act costs every Hawaii citizen an average of $3,000 year. The median individual income here was $36,000/year in 2004. Do you really want to argue this point with someone whose lived in HI for seventeen years?
The $3000 figure comes from the US ITC. There are labor sponsored studies that show the Jones Act actually returns a premium to Hawaii residents, but when you look at the numbers you see that they are treating the salaries earned by dockworkers & merchant seamen as though they were divided among all Hawaii residents the way the cost of shipping is. lol!
When you’ve faced empty grocery store shelves because of panic buying after the 300 or so ILWU dockworkers on Oahu have called for a strike vote then you can talk to me about how the Jones Act affects the Hawaii economy.
Your wrong on tourism as well. The military is still a huge slice of the Hawaii economy. That’s why our peacenick congressional delegation loves military appropriations and hates military deployments. Neil Abercrombie, Dan Inouye, and Dan Akaka are the best friends Pearl Harbor ever had. And probably the worst enemy of the mainland taxpayer.
The way the tourism industry works (it’s officially called the hospitality industry here) is that the folks who do the low skill work — cleaning rooms, cooking, driving tour buses, etc, are locals. The line managers and especially the middle and higher level managers come from the US mainland or Europe. Without US, European, and Japanese dollars the locals would starve. The white collar workers would simply move to another resort destination and work there.
In any case I don’t make my living off the Hawaii economy or the military economy. Hawaii is not all pineapples & “From Here to Eternity”.
March 18th, 2007 at 12:09 am
Also, Doug, you seem to have an odd idea about what a “Hawaiian” is. I’m a resident and citizen of the state of Hawaii but I’m no more ‘Hawaiian’ than someone who lives in Indiana is an Indian. According to the people who claim to speak for the Kanaka Maole, I’m a kama’aina at best, a haole colonist at worst.
March 18th, 2007 at 7:23 am
Ah Terry, what do you know? You just live there.
March 18th, 2007 at 7:58 am
Terry said,
“Also, Doug, you seem to have an odd idea about what a “Hawaiian” is.”
You’re an Hawaiian the way way I’m a Minnesotan. I moved here from Wisconsin 25 years ago. I find it interesting that you have a need to distance yourself from native Hawaiians – going so far as scolding me over the nomenclature of a word. I guess you don’t want to be mistaken for a low skilled workers. You know, the ones cleaning rooms, cooking, driving tour buses, etc,. You know – a local.
Oh and Terry? Clearly, comprehension is not your strongest skill. Read what I said… “By the way Terry, were you aware that Hawaiians are 100% dependent on tourism?”
Then you go on to say, “Without US, European, and Japanese dollars the locals would starve.”
Thanks for validating what I said.
When you’ve faced empty grocery store shelves because of panic buying after the 300 or so ILWU dockworkers on Oahu have called for a strike vote then you can talk to me about how the Jones Act affects the Hawaii economy.”
Let’s take labor out of the equation just for giggles. Let’s say that the American shipping ports come under attack. And remember Terry, it’s us Democrats that persist in demanding that the 9-11 recommendations – which include port security – get implemented.
What will happen to your grocery store shelves? How will your economy be affected? Are you going to blame the dockworkers for demanding fair pay or are you going to blame the President for not protecting the ports? What WILL you do when you don’t have labor or Clinton to blame for your problems anymore?
Regardless, this whole discussion was raised because I said you have to import 90% of your food which is the primary factor for your high food prices. And Terry, you know as well as I do that the Jones act is as much about protecting American shipping companies as it is about protecting Hawaiian dockworkers.
As for your point about the Hawaiian Military “economy”, if your friends Kermit and Mitch had any integrity, they would be all over that characterization like stink on dog shit but i’m betting they will stay mysteriously silent. Wouldn’t want the anti-war crowds strongest charge against the profit driven war on terror scrutinized too closely.
March 18th, 2007 at 8:27 am
Doug said:
“Then you go on to say, “Without US, European, and Japanese dollars the locals would starve.”
Thanks for validating what I said.”
Uh, Doug, did you read this passage?
The military is still a huge slice of the Hawaii economy. That’s why our peacenick congressional delegation loves military appropriations and hates military deployments. Neil Abercrombie, Dan Inouye, and Dan Akaka are the best friends Pearl Harbor ever had. And probably the worst enemy of the mainland taxpayer.
Last time I checked, military appropriations doesn’t count as tourism. Recall what you wrote: “By the way Terry, were you aware that Hawaiians are 100% dependent on tourism?”
There may be a huge faction of anti-war zealots among liberals, but few of them are anti-tax revenue stream, or anti-pork revenue stream; especially among the electorate. This is why a state like Colorado, who has sent the likes of Patsy Schroeder to DC, has military bases.
Liberals like money as much as anyone else. They mostly don’t admit it except to brag about how many taxes they pay.
March 18th, 2007 at 10:04 am
Doug, I’m not distancing myself from Hawaiians. Haole is a Hawaiian word, not an english word. It means foreigner. That’s what they call people from the mainland. It’s derogatory. Another term is ‘elelu kea’, meaning ‘white cockroach’. The situation is nothing like a person moving from Wisconsin to Minnesota, or even from New York to Texas. More like a person moving from NY city to central Mexico. They might eventually speak the language and even get along with the local way of doing things. They might even call themselves mexican. But the mexicans won’t.
If you moved here and went down to the beach & informed the bros that you were now a Hawaiian they would laugh at you if they were sober and pound you if they were drunk.
It’s very much an ex-pat culture for people who weren’t born here. When you wrote “Without our food and our dollars Terry, you’d be resorting to cannibalism and sucking pineapples and sugarcane through toothless pieholes and your gene pool would be shallower than a Shih Tzu’s water bowl.” I honestly didn’t get your meaning. The people you think should owe you Minnesotans for your tourist dollars are locals. I’m not local. If the sh*t really hit the fan and it became unsafe all the ex-pats would leave and the locals — the local-locals, the real Hawaiians and part- hawaiians — are working to accomplish what you describe, though they wouldn’t use your words. They would call it restoring the monarchy.
The people that would really be in a bind are the nisei and sansei. I don’t know what they’d do. Move to cali, I guess.
And yes the Jones act is as much about protecting the American shipping industry as longshoreman’s jobs. I’m not a republican, remember? Young Brothers has the monopoly on interisland shipping in Hawaii and Matson owns the West Coast to Hawaii trade. They are monopolies by government fiat. In return for their monopoly they operate on a cost+ basis.
Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: Shortly before 9/11 Dan Inouye & Trent Lott shook hands and got the federal government to guarantee a multi-hundred million dollar ship building scheme. Two passenger cruise ships were to be built in Alabama shipyards. When they were finished they would replace the ancient pair of US flagged vessels that did honeymoon cruises around Hawaii, the Liberty and the Constitution. 9/11 hit the cruise line hard and they went bankrupt, defaulted on the loan and Uncle Sam had to pay the guarantee on the loan. The unfinished hulls are either still in the shipyard or they’ve been cut up for scrap.
The point of the last paragraph of your comment escapes me entirely. It’s no secret that the feds spend, I think, about 4 billion a year on the military in Hawaii (my data may be old). That’s close to four thousand dollars for every man, woman, and child in the state. Does any sane human being think that politics would not be involved? Abercrombie was elected as a hippie, anti-war candidate in the 60’s but by God he brings the bacon back from Washington. His district is Oahu and that’s where most of the military bases are.
Before the GWOT our all-democrat congressional delegation lobbied for more military spending in Hawaii because Japan and Indonesia were at the mercy of Chinese submarines and Korean missiles. We got a star wars missile range at Barking Sands on kauai out of the Korean Missile menace. Now we got a stryker brigade, destination Iraq, training at pohakuloa training area on the island I live on. Doesn’t mean that they are not needed in Iraq, it just means that our congress people worked harder to get them in Hawaii than Boxer and Feinstein worked to get them stationed in California. No big deal, business as usual in the 50th state.
March 18th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
“if your friends Kermit and Mitch had any integrity, they would be all over that characterization…Wouldn’t want the anti-war crowds strongest charge against the profit driven war on terror scrutinized too closely.”
Doug, Doug, Doug. I know it’s really pleasant there in Munchkin Land, so it’s easy to believe that a war started by some one else and was declared on YOU to be our fault.
Facts are to Liberals as garlic is to vampires.
The military is a good thing, Doug. Good for the economy, America and Hawaii. It’s one reason Mrs. Doug isn’t wearing a burkha today, although you seem to be adjusting quite well to it.
March 18th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
Kermit, so the war in Iraq was a war declared against us now?
And you say I have trouble with facts?
And Paul, it was Terry that said,“Without US, European, and Japanese dollars the locals would starve.”
Take it up with him.
March 18th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
Again with the froward obtuseness. The war of Terror is one that was declared upon us. If you want to be specific about the front in Iraq, i would assert that the Iraq liberation act of 1998 is an important declaration, Also the hundreds of ceasefire violations by Iraq are important as well. Let me put it to you Doug, do you feel the liberation of Iraq was a bad idea? Let’s not get into hindsight (always best for asses) about the execution of the liberation. Do you feel that Iraq and Kuwait would be better off today if we had not intervened?
Or am I just another “trogeldite?”
March 18th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Again with the froward obtuseness.
Yeah, Doug? RickDFL’s going to get pissed you’re on his turf.
March 18th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Doug, the Iraqi’s tried to shoot down our planes in the no-fly zone. They tried to assassinate an ex-president. They kicked out the UN inspectors who were in Iraq to monitor their compliance with the terms of the 1991 cease fire. You do realize that the end of hostilities in 1991 was the result of a cease fire, don’t you? not a surrender, not a peace treaty.
March 18th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
“And you say I have trouble with facts?”
No, you just don’t let them interfere with your beliefs.
March 18th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
Bill said,
“The war of Terror is one that was declared upon us.”
So if we decide to go to war in Iran, It’s because of the war of terror that was declared on us?
Then how about Syria? War of terror again?
How about Egypt? Can we just go to war against them too? Saudia Arabia? France? How about… Canada? War of Terror?
Who can we NOT go to war against?
Do you really believe this crap? This war is a war of choice. Not of necessity.
And Terry, I’m not going to even bother ripping your pathetic attempt to pieces. Iraq didn’t declare war against us in 2003 or in 1991.
March 18th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
Hey Doug when did N Korea declare war on us? Wouldn’t the world have been a better place if we had just let Great Leader& his commie allies take the Republic of Korea over back in 1950?
March 19th, 2007 at 12:28 am
And Terry, I’m not going to even bother ripping your pathetic attempt to pieces. Iraq didn’t declare war against us in 2003 or in 1991.
While your knowledge of history is both deeply flawed (because I don’t think you know what you’re leaving out), I will at least note that you spelled one whole paragraph correctly.
Still, Doug, you’re wrong. Iraq had been committing constant acts of war against us over the no-fly zones for 12 years in 2003; in a practical sense, the ’91 war had not ended. There was no need for a “declaration”. It was, indeed, one of the four justifications for the war.
1991? Um, no, no war was declared against us. For that matter, North Korea never did, either. And we went after both countries, forty years apart, for the same reasons – the United Nations sanctioned a war to repel illegal aggression.
Just as they did in 2003 with Iraq.
Do you really believe this crap? This war is a war of choice. Not of necessity.
You state that as if it’s a big zing.
There were reasons for that choice. You reject those reasons (to the extent that you understand them – and as we’ve seen, that’s not a lot), but that doesn’t mean they don’t matter.
March 19th, 2007 at 6:58 am
Mitch, Mitch, Mitch… I really don’t care if I misspell a few words here and there and I doubt you care either. It’s the Mitch Berg equivalent of picking on the one kid on the playground who’s doesn’t fit in.
Now, before we let this whole declaration of war discussion get TOO far out of hand, it was Kermit that claimed that war was declared against us.
Show me where war was declared against us as Kermit claimed. Attempting to shoot down planes or formulating a plot to kill a former President is not a declaration of war. And if you recall, the plot to kill Bush Sr. resulted in two 1 million dollar cruise missiles delivered to Iraq.
If we were to follow your logic, since there was never an offical end to the Korean or the Vietnam wars, we can go to war against them anytime we see fit.
“You reject those reasons (to the extent that you understand them – and as we’ve seen, that’s not a lot)”
As I have said dozens of time here Mitch, I do understand the reasons but more importantly, I understand your reasons for holding on to them for dear life. Had three of the four reasons not been completely obliterated before the war started, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
March 19th, 2007 at 8:19 am
Mitch, Mitch, Mitch… I really don’t care if I misspell a few words here and there and I doubt you care either. It’s the Mitch Berg equivalent of picking on the one kid on the playground who’s doesn’t fit in.
Doesn’t fit in? With the expungement to my archives of all of PB/Mikey/Jbaueer/Donkeyman’s posts, you are the most prolific commenter here!
No, it’s the Mitch Berg equivalent of “sticking a needle in an overinflated balloon”.
Show me where war was declared against us as Kermit claimed. Attempting to shoot down planes or formulating a plot to kill a former President is not a declaration of war.
When Nation A commits an act of war on Nation B, then Nation B doesn’t need to “declare” anything.
We were in a state of war with Iraq – due to the UN resolution setting up the No Fly Zones. Iraq’s missile firings were an act of war; declarations were superfluous.
If we were to follow your logic, since there was never an offical end to the Korean or the Vietnam wars, we can go to war against them anytime we see fit.
It’s not my logic. We are technically at war with the DPRK right now (it wouldn’t be feasible). The Treaty of Paris actually legally ended the Vietnam War.
As I have said dozens of time here Mitch, I do understand the reasons but more importantly, I understand your reasons for holding on to them for dear life. Had three of the four reasons not been completely obliterated before the war started, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
They were not completely obliterated. They were not handled well by the administration (my personal beef), but that’s not “obliteration”, that’s “flub”.
Bad, dumb flub, and a bone I have to pick with Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell and, finally, Bush.
But that’s not what you were talking about.
March 19th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Do you feel the liberation of Iraq was a bad idea? Let’s not get into hindsight (always best for asses) about the execution of the liberation. Do you feel that Iraq and Kuwait would be better off today if we had not intervened?
From my recollection – at least as publicly stated at the time, the first gulf war had nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with one country invading (Iraq) another country (Kuwait). Yes, I am aware that the no-fly zone, twice weekly bombing runs (that was the figure around 2000 or so and the reason I didn’t vote for Gore), and the brutal sanctions (Madame Albright’s statement that we understood that 500k kids had likely died due to sanctions and that it was hard but we thought the benefits were worth the cost also made me vote against anything related to Clinton) had a lot to do to create the environment that existed in 2003, but unless I’ve missed something of significance (certainly possible), Kuwait’s well being doesn’t significantly figure into the second Gulf War.
As far as ignoring hindsight and ignoring the justifications that were made, reasons that were given for the war, evidence, etc., and just looking at whether Iraq would be better off today had we not intervened.
Today? Absolutely.
Just looking at the body counts and what remains of the infrastructure (which, granted, wasn’t looking nearly as good in ’03 as it looked in ’90), looking at the recruitment potential for multiple terrorist organizations and the fact that the people of Iraq seem to be serving as their “training targets”, I think that today, the people of Iraq are worse off than they were in 2003 which was worse off than they were in 1990. This is not saying that I would have wished to be a citizen under Saddam (or worse, anywhere near his sons) but the evil he visited on his people was less harsh than the evil they currently suffer.
However, I would expect you to bring up (and rightly so) that the issue isn’t how the Iraqi people are today, its how they are when this all done.
I wasn’t completely forthright in my reasons for not going to the demonstrations on Sunday – I did have other things to do but while I vigorously attended the “Don’t go in” demonstrations, I have not been attending the “pull out now” demonstrations since the war began.
The reason is this : If we pull out today – as it is, right now, I can’t imagine that we won’t see what will amount to an ethnic cleansing. I think if we pull out right now, it will turn into a nightmare of tenfold magnitude. I believe that if it were not for our actions, we would not be looking at _as_ dire of a situation for the Iraqi people and because of this (and the things I learned in Boy Scouts and Hippy camp – leave a place better when you leave than when you arrived), I think that IF we can do ANYTHING to give the Iraqi people whatever it is they need to avoid such a future, we are – at this point, due to our actions in the region – beholden to do so.
The big question is that IF. Can we do anything?
And here’s where I wish both sides of this political issue would show a bit more humility. I don’t know. Neither do most of you – neither the ones on the right nor the ones on the left.
I do “know” that the people on the right have one thing right, if we walk out now, we ensure the worst possible outcome – complete and outright sectarian war possibly escalating into a regional conflict and allowing the current fertile environment for growing/recruiting militant fundamentalists/terrorists to continue for the foreseeable future.
However, I realize that its possible that the people of the left have their point as well – we may well be acting as a lid on a pressure cooker as well as throwing more logs into the fire. By our actions, we could very easily create an explosion that is far bigger and far more widespread than the current one would be.
The only possible “solution” is to somehow by our presence create a situation where the tensions can defuse – a pressure release valve if you will. The concept of the “surge” (although it would work better if it were far, far larger) is intended to do that. Get enough people on the ground that those who are bold enough to continue with the outright slaughter get stopped or killed. Create a breathing space where its not just blow after blow after blow – mindless reactions to mindless reactions.
We could discuss this aspect of it quite a bit, but the answer to the question whether or not the people of Iraq will eventually be better or worse off had we not intervened will be based on what happens in the future.
Right now, my confidence is quite low. I think they’re going to end off worse. However, I also recognize that the ONLY possibly way for them not to end up worse is for someone to break up the fight long enough for cooler heads to prevail.
Given the current perception of America in much of the middle east, it would be nice if someone else would be willing and able to take the role of peacemaker but at this point, no one has stood up.
We can’t go back. To stop here would ensure disaster. To go forward will mean greater disaster or finding the light at the end of the tunnel. What ethical choices do we have?
You have no idea how much I hate to say this – I hate the cost, I hate the sense of personal responsibility every time I hear of another atrocity in this war, I hate the knowledge that we’re going to have thousands of psychologically injured veterans returning not to mention the physical injuries – but I think that while we need to change course a bit (we need to proceed with clear honor – no more fucking torture, as “neutral” as possible, no more unethical contractors, and enough troops that the soldiers have enough support that they aren’t as likely to make mistakes that cost us in lives, reputation and progress), we need to give Petraeus a chance while simultaneously devoting ourselves to a massive amount of diplomatic effort – try and get more countries to try and help stabilize Iraq long enough and well enough that calmer heads can prevail, try and find those calmer heads again, try and give them reason to trust that we will do our utmost to keep those heads from being cut off and that we (and hopefully by then, more neutral appearing allies) will help them find a future that is “fair” to them.
The left may be correct. Maybe we will just end up making things worse. Maybe the best thing we can do is get completely out of the middle east, let it implode on itself and then let it reform itself into a more “natural state” than can exist after nearly a century of heavy western intervention and control. Maybe the grand tally of suffering and unhappiness of all the peoples impacted would be less.
But, I just can’t quite shake the feeling of “we made this mess, we should clean it up”. So, I’ve had to delete my emails from MoveOn, TrueMajority, and the Anti-war Committee when they ask me to write my congresspeople and participate in their demonstrations.
I would rather so many things were different – that we’d never given chemical weapons to Iraq in the first place, that we had told them to leave Kuwait alone when they floated that balloon, that if they invaded anyway, treated them in a different manner in the aftermath, that we hadn’t invaded them in 2003, that if we had invaded them, we’d done so with enough force and enough international assistance that we could have “won” and done a proper reconstruction, that we hadn’t fucking tortured anyone and if we were going to, that it hadn’t been anyone who was fucking innocent! But as angry and sad that I am that we did the things we did, this is how things are and we can only start from here. No matter how “liberal” or “progressive” I am, I can’t just blame Bush and Bush and Clinton and Reagan for this. I am an American. They did it in my name. I did it.
If I thought it would be a better outcome if we pulled out now, I would have rescheduled my plans and I would be at every demonstration I could get to. I don’t.
May I be forgiven for not having a clearer vision of what I need to do.