I had some heated responses to my blasting of Tony Blair on here and in Facebook. Here's a selection:
Great stuff! Funny as hell. At least as funny as Neville Chamberlain, when he said, "How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing!”
Or how about this one? “It has always seemed to me that in dealing with foreign countries we do not give ourselves a chance of success unless we try to understand their mentality, which is not always the same as our own, . . "
An ya gotta love this one: “We should seek by all means in our power to avoid war, by analyzing possible causes, by trying to remove them, by discussion in a spirit of collaboration and good will. I cannot believe that such a program would be rejected by the people of this country, even if it does mean the establishment of personal contact with the dictators.”
Every war that was worth fighting and which should have been fought for humanity's sake will find the same headlines and news reports of liberals saying we shouldn't be doing this; we're going to lose; how many people will have to die for nothing; blah, blah, blah. And they are ALWAYS wrong. But they feel so good being weak and pruporting to care about everyone, when what they really care about is their power and idealogy.
Eliz again:
I think the quotes he wrote up there are entirely reasonable. I pointed out to him that England talked to Northern Ireland and resolved a terrible situation without having a full-scale war.
I also don't think you can fight your way out of problems -- they all require diplomacy.
I also note that the US is going to start talking to the Taleban -- a sign of the failure of war as a solution there.
4 comments:
I don't understand what's funny about those quotes.
Is the commentor saying that we shouldn't try to understand other nations' points of view?
Or that we shouldn't try to avoid war?
Because those are the positions converse to those expressed in the quotations.
And particularly telling was "Every was that was worth fighting and which should have been fought for humanity's sake..." And what about the overwhelming majority which were not worth fighting? Most wars have been fought mainly in the interests of those who sent the peasants and workers to die.
I'm not the greatest middle-eastern expert by any means, but it's wholly inaccurate to say that we know nothing about Iraq or Iraqis - maybe it's reall just an admission of that individuals ignorance.
All war is a manifestation of political failure.
That is not to say there are no necessary or just wars, but to engage in violent conflict tips the balance away from shared humanitarian concerns towards the dominance of the victors and the continued subjugation of the losers.
All war is corrupting to humanity because it results in the deaths of our fellow beings.
I slightly disagree with Mel's emphasis on the self-interest argument because that can be adjudged according to who the aggressor is in any circumstance - which depends on who makes the first strike. In the Iraqi conflict this is confused by the series of wars unleashed by Saddam, so obviously it was always going to be much more contentious.
Blair is at the heart of this. As he said it came down to a choice, but I'd argue his personal biases mitigated against an honest, fair and creative policy. The problem for the rest of us is to admit we are not immune from similar biases and therefore to work to open up the decision-making process so that unbalanced destructive forces aren't unleashed.
Of course, the question here is if the right wing Americans are getting the same feeds we are. Are they being told the results of the Chilcott inquiry, day after day, where we're told that the 45 minutes claim was indeed a lie, that war was decided between the two leaders in the first half of 2002 without either of the population's consent, and that the legal advisors to our government told the government again and again that war was not legal, only performing a volte-face at the eleventh hour?
And since indeed the 45 minute claim was such a total lie, they can't even fall back on the old "they might have had WMD and we had to go in there and rid them of it before they blew us up" because time has shown that they had no more reason for suspecting they had these weapons than Tony Blair's grandma had them.
So we went to war because the country was a threat to us, a danger. We couldn't take the risk. So why not go to war in the countries that actually had suicide bombers come and attack us? Why did we not go to war in Saudi Arabia? Or Yemen, Oman, Pakistan, Iran, any of these places? Places that have actually come out and told us that they have WMD, they're going to keep them and they don't care what we think?
What did this war achieve? Are you really going to sit there and tell me that if we didn't invade Iraq, the world would now be a post-war apocalypse? That there would be suicide bombings as a matter of fact? (Btw, take a look at how many suicide bombings in the name of jihad there were before and after 9/11 and tell me we succeeded)
Why was this allowed to happen? Why are there hundreds of thousands of people dead? Why do people in Iraq still live in fear of their lives? Why did we get rid of Saddam Hussein when there are so many worse places out there?
You see Iran and their protests. They don't need us to get rid of their oppressive government. They're going to do it themselves by the looks of things. No one interfered in Europe when we had dictators (and kings as de facto dictators) and we seem to be alright. Who appointed us the international policemen?
One last thing before I go, as I seem to have written a small essay: which is the only country to have actually dropped the bomb? Other countries have more to fear from us than we do from them.
Katie, I'd be very surprised if there are more than a handful of people in the US who have even heard of the Chilcott Enquiry, much less care about it.
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