Quote: (08-28-2013 06:45 PM)CactusCat589 Wrote:
And that you contributed to the War on Iraq in even a small way - I'm actually not sure how to react. I've never personally interacted with anyone in that company. The idea that they are STILL among the American people alone is disturbing on an existential level. And that they don't even have the grace to slink away, and continue to propagandize even *more* wars with the same lie, is even more so.
To paraphrase the late, great Christopher Hitchens:
There is an assumption that it is only those of us who supported the democratic revolution in Iraq who have the explaining to do.
If you actually examine the record of the so-called "anti-war" movement and imagine what would have happened had their council been listened to over the last several decades, we would have a world in which the following would be the case:
1. Saddam Hussein would be the owner and occupier of Kuwait. He would have succeeded in the annexation, not merely the invasion, but the abolition of an Arab and Muslim country that was a member state of the Arab League and of the United Nations.
2. Slobodan Milosevich would have made Bosnia a part of greater Serbia. Kosovo would have been ethnically-cleansed and also annexed.
3. The Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda would still be their guests.
4. Saddam Hussein and his crime family would still be privately holding ownership over a terrorized people in a country that has been best described by Kanan Makiya as a "concentration camp above ground and a mass grave underneath it".
4. Gaddafi would have been able to commit wholesale genocide against the city of Bengazi as he promised, in his own voice on the radio, to do here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyaPnMnpCAA#t=02m56s (at 2:56, I don't think the link will work on the forum).
These are all consequences of anti-war politics. What I have just stated is what would have happened.
Now, if I had this record - I would be EXTREMELY MODEST. I would not be demanding explanations from those of us who said it is about time we stop the continual capitulation to dictatorship, to racism, to aggression and to totalitarian ideology. That we will not allow to be repeated in Iraq, the failures in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Afghanistan, in Sudan, and elsewhere.
We take pride in having taken that position and we take pride in our Iraqi and Kurdish friends who conducted the struggle beforehand on our behalf.
..........
Don't get me wrong: If we had heeded your advice and stayed out of Iraq there would have never been democratic elections, no constitution stipulating a federalism that helps to minimize the differences between the various sects and ethnicities which in the past has only been solved by dictatorship, partition, or civil war. No, we would still be living with an Orwellian nightmare state in which a genocidal dictator exercised complete and utter control over the people, threatened their neighbors, and continuously flouted international laws, treaties, and norms.
Live with that if you can.
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Although the concept of the chickenhawk community trying to reclaim the term, like feminists reclaiming the epiphets Jezebel and slut, is amusing in an abstract kind of way.
I'm as much a chicken-hawk as you are a tacit-genocideer.
We don't necessarily want war, we just recognize it's inevitability. Confrontation with totalitarianism is always inevitable and it will be until it is eradicated.