The cleansing wind that is blowing the fetid stench of Ba'athism out of the Middle East has even reached the San Franicsco Chronicle's editorial page. Ruth Rosen is still as opposed to the liberation of Iraq as she ever was, but at least she admits this week to having learned something new
Now I understand what I didn't fully grasp decades ago: Every soldier is someone's child.That's impressive scholarship, Ruthie. I guess that's an example of why you're a tenured professor of history and I'm not.
Monday's Chronicle also had the latest column of Tom Plate, whom I've occasionally skewered. This time I can say without irony (seriously) that Plate's comments on China hit the target.
In general, Chinese diplomacy has been otherwise nimble, if conservative. But it has been embarrassingly clumsy on North Korea. Asked (reasonably enough) by Washington to step up the pressure on Pyongyang to drop its nuclear-weapons program, Beijing has said it lacks leverage.Kudos to Plate, who before the war was cheerfully blaming the Bush administration for everything that went wrong in both Iraq and North Korea.This hapless claim flies in the face of credulity. If China does wield scant influence, those in charge of its North Korean policy should be fired. Year after year of substantial aid and ideological comfort to the North should not yield so little in return.
If China aspires to be the most influential power in the region, it can scarcely hope to attain that with ineffective policies. Beijing urgently needs to locate some leverage before the Pentagon starts to view North Korea as another Iraq.
Unfortunately, the Chronicle's Letters to the Editor section still reads like a funeral home guest book, full of condolences over the disembowelment of the Tikriti mafia.
What terribly dangerous model of pre-emption have we offered with our nihilistic arrogance? Just what kind of world are we threatening to create in the name of peace and security?Yeah, liberation sucks, but maybe if enough people look hard enough, we might be able to find a silver lining in the closing of the torture chambers after all. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at April 15, 2003 06:23 AM
Iraqi liberation on the back of American blood is immoral. This was was supposed to be about weapons of mass destruction and changing the geopolitical landscape in order to eliminate Islamism. Apparently it was not the Bush Administrations raison de guerre. "Iraqi liberation" was. This would have been a positive secondary consequence, but was not. Therefore was the Administration lying? For we have discovered no WMD's, although it is still early days, and nonse were used by the Iraqi rabble. We also need now to see the secret evidence, for it was this that persuaded Congress so convincingly. The American people had to simply take a politician at his word. That the war is now over and considered less costly than anticipated is no reason to let anyone off teh hook. There are still over 100 families who are mourning and the cost financially is high.
It is also so vital because if this has been a war of liberation it is immoral. Why? Because it will be self-sacrifice. And why then should we trust the Bush Admninistration on Syria? Is there to be action on Iran? Or the Bush Administration's great friend Saudi Arabia who fund Arab terrorism?
So will someone please tell me why the United States now occupies Iraq? Was it self-defense or Iraqi liberation? The Administration says Iraqi liberation. And if that is the case, it is a disgrace.
Yeah, liberation really sucks. Freedom is the most vile reason to fight.
"It is also so vital because if this has been a war of liberation it is immoral. Why? Because it will be self-sacrifice". -----Huh?
Posted by: Wallace on April 15, 2003 01:43 PMExplain why the life if an Iraqi is more important than an American soldier if you believe in the evil ethic of self-sacrifice.
Explain why you would defend suicide?
Explain why the right of the self is less important than another?
Explain why you believe that self-sacrifice is moral and virtuous?
A sacrifice is exchanging something of high or higher value for a low value or the valueless.
Then go and explain to a three year old boy in Kansas why his daddy was instructed to put him second and strangers first.
Dying to defend America, is moral for an American soldier. It is his home, his kith and kin. He chose to be a soldier.
If this war was about self-defense it is moral.\
If this war was about "Iarqi liberation" it is immoral and deserves to be placed alongside Vietnam.