On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Russell Chapman wrote:Well, if you did it would truly be an amazing document because the above articulates much of what I have been thinking but have been unable to express coherently.
Either we support his removal, or we support his continuing reign - we can't just say "Oh, if only there was another way"
The third possibility is that one thinks Saddam doesn't deserve to be planet Earth's - or even the USA's - priority number one. It's arguable that, say, the world AIDS epidemic is a far more immediate threat in humanitarian terms than Saddam and a more grave threat to long-term global stability than either Ba'athism or Islamic radicalism.
Or it's arguable - or perhaps I should say, it's a plausible object of fear - that the "New American Century" of global US hegemony that starts with the remaking of Iraq, and which may hearken a blossoming of freedom in the Middle East, must eventually become the kind of corrupt and corrupting state of affairs that would accelerate the concentration of world power into an increasingly small number of those American hands that can afford it; until inevitably the amount of power held so dwarfs the number of institutional and democratic checks in place that America becomes something that would make the Roman emperors blush. Thus one might resist unilateral war on the grounds of a sort of technicality, for example: Saddam is as guilty as sin but if containment can keep him as relatively weak as he is now, then perpetuating that state of affairs is the lesser evil when compared with giving *any* nation - which means that nation's defacto ruling class - the combination of power and precedent that a unilateral war implies in this context. (America will always find reasons to need a little more power; the people who most influence its policies will never be persuaded it's in their interests to give up a little power; the rationales for preemptive war, once baptized in blood, will be ever expanded and never contracted; the US's track record over the last 50 years cannot be taken as a good indicator of what will happen in the next 100 or 200 because the old checks on American power no longer exist; and so on.)
(This latter is not so much an argument rooted in present circumstances as
a it is an expression of fear rooted in pessimism about the endurance of
high principles and good intentions: over the long run and given
sufficient power, America's moral center will not hold, things will fall
apart, and history will show that the rough beast slouching towards
Bethlehem turned out to be the US Army. America has a pretty good track record so far, but unchecked power does not.)
I advance these arguments not for their own sake but as examples to point
out the false dichotomy inherent in the assertion that any view about Iraq
can or ought to be simply boiled down to being pro- or anti-Saddam. If one looks around the world and thinks that in moral terms the money we're about to spend ousting Saddam could be much better spent elsewhere, and if that makes one against this particular war, does that make one pro-Saddam? If that's the case, then shouldn't being in favor of the war mark one as being pro-AIDS, pro-Famine, pro-whatever bad thing that money isn't being spent to correct at this moment? It doesn't quite make sense; it suggests that the weighing of priorities is intrinsically immoral rather than regrettable but necesary.
My feeling is that outside the nastiness of some of the ANSWER leadership and some other fringe factions, most war protestors believe that by embracing the concepts about American hegemony and preemptive warfare which a success in Iraq would be used to vindicate, America is starting to take a long dangerous turn similar to the sort the Romans took when they decided that an emperor might be more efficient than a senate. Whether one buys the argument or not, one should at least recognize that it does not in any way contain an attempt to defend Saddam on any ethical grounds whatsoever. It's the recognition that a behemoth gone astray is more dangerous than the most vicious of hyenas.
I think there's also a sense that maybe the money we're about to spend, if we're going to spend it anyway, might be better spent in other ways.
Plus I think there's a general spiteful resentment and belief that if Bush
succeeds in Iraq, he and his party will have an almost unassailable
position from which to carry out their most conservative policies at home
as well, and American protestors have what they feel to be their own personal interests at stake in addition to any theories they may have about the well-being of the world. I'm not sure if this crosses the line from enlightened self-interest into hypocrisy or not.
Me, I'm still ambivalent about the whole thing. Friedman had an editorial in the NY Times the other day that I found compelling - he said he feels drawn to the daring and vision of the Bush plan for the Middle East, and thus tends to favor the war, but he also thinks that the Bush team might be the worst people to implement such a plan in all its gory details. I just can't help but feel that our laser focus on Iraq must be accompanied by a dangerous lack of peripheral vision and depth perception. I wish I could articulate it better.
I have no sympathy for Sadaam or his ilk, but the BushCo reaction to 9/11 has really made our country more like his, and this fills me with sorrow and makes me extremely apprehensive about the future. I feel like I'm getting a little taste of what it is like to live under an authoritarian government, and I don't like it a bit.
By the way, whatever you are doing now Marvin, it's wasted if you aren't employing the eloquence you often showcase on the list. I wish I could write half as well. I wish many of those writing for a living could write half as well.
Doug
I want a wild, wicked wind to blow all night, Mariah en la mesa, bellowing against a sunrise that slips slyly into morning sliding its silver tongue into the storms throat and sucks its . . . breath . . . away!
From West Texas Sandstorm by Connie Williams
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