It sounds moronic, of course, a horrible cliché. It is, however, genuinely true that children suffer horribly in war, especially in war that's gone so very badly as this one has.
« The Six Percent Doctrine | Main | Lugar on Iraq »
Think of the Children
25 Jun 2007 10:37 pm
Comments (13)
Can someone please arrest Bush, Cheney, Addington, Gonzales, Feith and Yoo? Conduct a fair trial and then proceed with the executions.
Steve,
Let me be the sensible one: life in prison.
Posted by steve duncan | June 25, 2007 11:47 PM:"Can someone please arrest Bush, Cheney, Addington, Gonzales, Feith and Yoo? Conduct a fair trial and then proceed with the executions."
Posted by Brian | June 26, 2007 12:14 AM:"Let me be the sensible one: life in prison."
Arrest them for what? Trying to defend America? Make Iraq democratic and free? Not foreseeing that Iraqis would behave in such utterly brutal and vicious ways? Who could have foreseen that Iraqis would behave like this? No one as far as I could see. The Left was obsessed with Vietnam, not Lebanon.
The real crime here is not the psychological trauma of children, as bad as that might be, but the very real killing of them. Something that those UN sanctions managed to do in heroic numbers. So why aren't you calling for the blood of the people who enforced them for eight long years? You know, the Clintons, Albright etc etc?
"Arrest them for what? Trying to defend America?"
Bin Laden called. He's wondering when you'll remember him.
"Make Iraq democratic and free?"
Long live Chalabi!
"Not foreseeing that Iraqis would behave in such utterly brutal and vicious ways?"
It would have helped knowing the difference between Sunnis and Shi'ites, but they were suspicious of anyone who did. "Going native" was a way to fall out with them. These are guys who like the book "The Arab Mind," after all, with its depictions of all Arab mothers as child molesters. One guy at the Pentagon mentioned that when Feith interviewed him, he said it was "a shame" that he knew Arabic.
"Who could have foreseen that Iraqis would behave like this?"
Molly Ivons was a political humor columnist and she still predicted this. Bush Sr. and his circle like Scowcroft partly based his doubts on this. Obama on Charlie Rose in 2002 couldn't see how we could keep the three main ethnic groups together if we invaded. The US military warned people related to our Iraq policy as far back as the 1940's that the country could splinter along these lines. As Amy Chua has pointed out, this dynamic has been repeated many times (think, for example, Nigeria). You're being intentionally stupid.
"No one as far as I could see. The Left was obsessed with Vietnam, not Lebanon."
Both have lessons. "The Left," which you capitalize for some reason, is made up of many people with different interests. Some are more aware of Middle Eastern affairs than others. What lesson did "The Right" learn from Lebanon, besides withdrawing when our soldiers got attacked by Hezbollah?
In conclusion, you are either stupid or a troll. You choose.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 7:01 AM:"Bin Laden called. He's wondering when you'll remember him."
I didn't say that they were competent. Just trying.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 7:01 AM:"It would have helped knowing the difference between Sunnis and Shi'ites, but they were suspicious of anyone who did."
Perhaps. Although anyone who suggested that Arabs might behave like this would have been called racist by the academic community and so I doubt that expertise would have helped. Robert Fisk, for instance, did not predict this.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 7:01 AM:"Molly Ivons was a political humor columnist and she still predicted this."
Actually you seem to be right. Wow. One Texan apart then.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 7:01 AM:"Obama on Charlie Rose in 2002 couldn't see how we could keep the three main ethnic groups together if we invaded."
Sure but that is not the same as saying they'd murder each others' children.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 7:01 AM:"As Amy Chua has pointed out, this dynamic has been repeated many times (think, for example, Nigeria)."
So which is the market oriented minority in Iraq? I'd think they got rid of those in the 50s.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 7:01 AM:"You're being intentionally stupid."
Actually I am not. There is a knee jerk defeatism on the Left and parts of the Right without any real clear reasoning behind it. No one knew why Iraq was going to fail but the US was sure to lose anyway. There is no real rationality behind it, but luckily Bush just makes them look smart by being less reflective.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 7:01 AM:"What lesson did "The Right" learn from Lebanon, besides withdrawing when our soldiers got attacked by Hezbollah?"
Invade another small country so no one will notice? I have no idea. Are there ideas to be learnt in the Middle East? Certainly rewarding Hezbollah by withdrawing did not work. Nor did withdraw work when Israel tried it in Lebanon. It is a tragedy that Lebanon has, essentially, been handed over to the Theocrats.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 7:01 AM:"In conclusion, you are either stupid or a troll. You choose."
Tough call.
"Although anyone who suggested that Arabs might behave like this would have been called racist by the academic community and so I doubt that expertise would have helped. Robert Fisk, for instance, did not predict this."
Ever hear of Thomas Hobbes? This is what anarchy does in ethnically divided societies. You believe in a caricature of "The Left." Right-wingers in this country are just sheltered and tend to really not know much about the outside world.
"Sure but that is not the same as saying they'd murder each others' children."
It's pretty fucking close.
"So which is the market oriented minority in Iraq? I'd think they got rid of those in the 50s."
The Sunnis via the Ba'ath Party controlled just about everything in Iraq under Saddam. Remember, Saddam talked about how his system was one of Arab Socialism. The government, meaning the party-state, controlled much of the commanding heights of the economy. The Sunnis make up about 20% of the country. Chua has said that Iraq is a demonstration of how her theory is valid.
"There is a knee jerk defeatism on the Left and parts of the Right without any real clear reasoning behind it. No one knew why Iraq was going to fail but the US was sure to lose anyway. There is no real rationality behind it, but luckily Bush just makes them look smart by being less reflective."
You're just transferring your frustrations onto others. Anyone with any understanding of anarchy who wasn't walking around wearing rose-tinted glasses - meaning no one supporting Bush - could have easily seen this coming to pass. I know plenty of people who didn't see how the country would be held together, including myself. That's what comes with understanding the history of 20th-century de-colonization and the rise of ethnic and religious nationalism. Being naive about how the world works is useful in American electoral politics, but it leads to bad policy. If "The Left" was so defeatist, it would have been strongly against Afghanistan from the get-go. Instead, "The Left" has been critical of Bush for letting bin Laden escape at Tora Bora and for our stupid self-defeating poppy policy, neither of which would take place with someone more competent in charge. You're simply demonstrating how the Weimar-era "stabbed in the back" myth can be used in other democracies as well. Are you preparing for your own Beer Hall Putsch?
Also, just because not every single person on "The Left" is an expert on the outside world doesn't mean the outside world changes how it acts. Even if "The Left" were even bigger supporters of Bush than "The Right," that would not change how the world beyond America's borders works. You're practically at the point you're scolding "The Left" for how gravity causes apples to fall down, not up. Hell, I've been in diners in poor areas of Baltimore where the waiters and cooks show they understand this rather well, yet somehow rich right-wing pundits in this country with expensive educations still buy into weird combinations of macho overcompensation, Trotskyism and naive idealism about how the world works. Spending time in poor urban areas without a wad of cash and a cell phone would be a good learning experience for a lot of idiots in this country who don't know how the world works. No wonder Bush broke down and yelled "I know how the world works!" during the debate.
"Nor did withdraw work when Israel tried it in Lebanon. It is a tragedy that Lebanon has, essentially, been handed over to the Theocrats."
If you look at a website run by the Israeli military that MY posted here last summer, you'll see the number of Hezbollah rocket attacks against Israel before the war have been rather small and ineffective, in part because they use crappy old Soviet rockets. Compare that to the death rate of Israelis during the time they occupied southern Lebanon (never mind the damage the occupation did to Israel's military strength and discipline, international standing and own sense of morality). Also, there is a big difference between Shi'ite-dominated Southern Lebanon where Hezbollah has set up a de facto state and the rest of Lebanon, which is populated by a mixture of Sunnis, Druze, Maronites and Greek Orthodox Christian Arabs. Their parties tend to be secular and to the extent that any of them are anti-liberal, the most famous are the legacies of banned Christian Arab nationalist groups from the 1970's inspired by Mussolini. You really don't know much about the outside world, do you? No wonder you keep on having to blame "The Left" for your own moral and intellectual failings.
"Although anyone who suggested that Arabs might behave like this would have been called racist by the academic community and so I doubt that expertise would have helped. Robert Fisk, for instance, did not predict this."
Also, fear of being called racist haven't stopped people like Coulter, O'Reilly, Peretz, Malkin, Derbyshire, Hannity, Robert Kaplan and others from saying and writing the things they have. If right-wing pundits were really so afraid of being called racist, they would never say racist things. Instead, when they do and they get attacked, they become martyrs to their followers and usually keep their jobs (and as many right-wingers loved pointing out, Imus was not exactly a prototype right-winger). So because one writer for a British publication didn't predict this doesn't mean someone with a better understanding of the world , or just Iraq in particular, could not?
HeiGou: "Who could have foreseen that Iraqis would behave like this? No one as far as I could see."
Please leave, and come back when you can recall the history which you just lived through.
The State Department put together a planning document, which predicted these problems. The administration discarded it. The War College predicted these problems; the administration blew them off.
"The Left was obsessed with Vietnam, not Lebanon.
"
Huh? Methinks that you're Freudian projecting again. The *right* is still pissed off about Vietnam.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:14 AM:"Ever hear of Thomas Hobbes? This is what anarchy does in ethnically divided societies. You believe in a caricature of "The Left." Right-wingers in this country are just sheltered and tend to really not know much about the outside world."
Hobbes lived in an ethnically divided society did he? I agree Hobbes is looking damn prescient about now, but I doubt that anyone who cited him as a credible source pre-Iraq would have been taken seriously. It is interesting to watch which people adopt the Pinochet defense that a dictator is needed to keep law and order and prevent things from getting worse. In the past that used to be an argument on the Far Right.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:14 AM:"The Sunnis via the Ba'ath Party controlled just about everything in Iraq under Saddam."
I don't recall Chua talking about how Jews run amok and murder goy shoppers in market places with suicide bombs.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:14 AM:"You're just transferring your frustrations onto others."
It must make you so happy to think so. Let us look at the predictions for Afghanistan. Almost everyone was saying that it would be the Four Horsemen all over but it has not turned out that way. Who predicted what has happened? It may make you more comfortable to think of this as projection but it isn't.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:14 AM:"Anyone with any understanding of anarchy who wasn't walking around wearing rose-tinted glasses - meaning no one supporting Bush - could have easily seen this coming to pass."
It is odd that so few did then. Lots of people were saying that the Americans would be resented and even killed, no one much said that in fact they would largely ignore the Americans and kill each other.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:14 AM:"That's what comes with understanding the history of 20th-century de-colonization and the rise of ethnic and religious nationalism."
Sorry but that is disingenuous at best or at least flat out wrong. Very few countries split after de-colonization. I can think of two off hand. The whole process was defended in terms of those artificial products of colonialism - the nations we have today. There was some ethnic fighting but it has not been as great as Iraq and it has been almost entirely unsuccessful. It is not a model for Iraq at all. Nor has ethnic Third World nationalism succeeded much against Third World governments. Biafra for instance.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:14 AM:"If "The Left" was so defeatist, it would have been strongly against Afghanistan from the get-go. Instead, "The Left" has been critical of Bush for letting bin Laden escape at Tora Bora and for our stupid self-defeating poppy policy, neither of which would take place with someone more competent in charge."
Well Afghanistan was so soon after 9-11 it would have been hard for the Left to admit opposition but still, opposition there was. There is more now. The "escape" from Tora Bora is proof. No one knows what happened or really has a clue why but they are damn sure Bush, personally, is to blame. What stupid poppy policy? Doing nothing?
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:14 AM:"You're simply demonstrating how the Weimar-era "stabbed in the back" myth can be used in other democracies as well."
Sometimes it is not a myth.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:14 AM:"Even if "The Left" were even bigger supporters of Bush than "The Right," that would not change how the world beyond America's borders works."
Perhaps although I think there is good evidence that Bin Laden tailors his message for the Left.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:14 AM:"If you look at a website run by the Israeli military that MY posted here last summer, you'll see the number of Hezbollah rocket attacks against Israel before the war have been rather small and ineffective, in part because they use crappy old Soviet rockets."
You mean Palestinian rockets because there was no Hezbollah worth mentioning before 1982?
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:14 AM:"Also, there is a big difference between Shi'ite-dominated Southern Lebanon where Hezbollah has set up a de facto state and the rest of Lebanon, which is populated by a mixture of Sunnis, Druze, Maronites and Greek Orthodox Christian Arabs."
Well obviously - although the south is also mixed with large Christian communities. The problem is that Hezbollah also controls large parts of southern Beirut and is trying to bring the government down.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:14 AM:"the most famous are the legacies of banned Christian Arab nationalist groups from the 1970's inspired by Mussolini."
I assume you mean the Falange. Interesting to know it was banned.
Not, of course, that a word you say here is relevant to anything I said. I must be too subtle.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:21 AM:"Also, fear of being called racist haven't stopped people like Coulter, O'Reilly, Peretz, Malkin, Derbyshire, Hannity, Robert Kaplan and others from saying and writing the things they have."
What do you mean fear? They are called racists all the time. Well most of them. These people were also wrong, but their wrongness consisted of thinking the Iraqis would welcome democracy and freedom.
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:21 AM:"If right-wing pundits were really so afraid of being called racist, they would never say racist things."
Who mentioned the Right?
Posted by Reality Man | June 26, 2007 8:21 AM:"So because one writer for a British publication didn't predict this doesn't mean someone with a better understanding of the world , or just Iraq in particular, could not?"
Fisk is hardly one writer. He is the doyen of Middle Eastern journalism. Do you know anyone else with any expertise in the area who came close? I am impressed by the one Texan. I agree anyone *could* have, but damn few did.
Posted by Barry | June 26, 2007 11:50 AM:"The State Department put together a planning document, which predicted these problems. The administration discarded it. The War College predicted these problems; the administration blew them off."
Sorry but could you please quote the part of the document that said Sunni suicide bombers would strike at Shia schools or the Shrine at Samara?
Posted by Barry | June 26, 2007 11:50 AM Methinks that you're Freudian projecting again. The *right* is still pissed off about Vietnam."
If it makes you feel better I am happy to admit the Right is as well - although they seem to have thought that they put most of that behind them. The irony is that perhaps the Right did not think about Vietnam enough. It still does not change the fact that Vietnam-style defeatism is the defining characteristic of the War's opponents.
Perhaps the real error is to imagine that the US invaded Iraq to spread Democracy and Freedom. Politicians do lie, you know.
I know it has been four years, which in the West might as well be a billion years, where it's a quiet miracle if people can remember what happened last week (the influence of TV, I think, not for nothing called the 'idiot-box'), but the original pretext for the war was WMD.
So what are we to believe? That Bush wanted to spread democracy all along, but had to frighten the cowardly American people in following his 'noble vision' with bogey-men? Then after the invasion, U.S. 'officials' only allowed elections when threated by Sistani with a Shiite insurrection on top of the Sunni rebellion already underway. So even Bush had to be given a scare before he would follow the 'noble vision' himself.
Anyway, elections do not constitute democracy all by themselves. For democracy to be real, elections have to be an instrument of change--they must empower people, and not merely allow them to ratify decisions already made by a tiny clique of 'leaders'. The 'democracy' America has brought to Iraq is not real in that sense (neither, I suppose, is democracy in the US).
You see, the problem with actual democracy is that this form of government comes under intense pressure to place the needs of the local population over the needs of foreign consumers and corporations. So it is not generally in the interests of the US to spread democracy, and in fact it has very seldom done so. Instead, it simply attaches the label 'democracy' to what anyone else would call 'dictatorship'. For example, the commitment to 'democratic principle' in the Philipine dictator Markos that Bush I admired so much.
So 'WMD' and now 'democracy' have proven to be phantoms--what hasn't?
Well, the UN inspectors had searched Iraq, and found no evidence of WMD capability, which meant that sanctions were about to be lifted. U.S. corporations faced an unfavorable investment climate: they were going to have to compete in a 'free market' for the rights to develop and profit from Iraq's immense oil reserves, with the very real possibilty of being shut out entirely, or having to settle for thin profit margins. Why on earth would they tolerate this nightmare scenario when the world's mightiest military was available to force a more favorable outcome? Now they have a situation in which they are guaranteed 75% of the profits, if only the Iraqi puppet government will pass their oil law!
The problem, and it turned out to be a minor one, was to secure the cooperation of the 'great' American people in the noble enterprise. An actual, existing WMD capablity would have been a problem, creating an unacceptable risk of high U.S. casualties. The ideal situation, and the one that really occured, was for Iraq to be pathetically weak, and therefore an easy target of attack, but for Americans to believe that it posed a threat to their very existence, so that they would cheer for the necessary violence. Personally, I did not definitively conclude that Iraq as a nation was utterly defenseless until it became clear that the U.S. would in fact attack it.
Unfortunately for American ambitions, the Iraqi people are not in fact fawning with admiration for their 'liberators'. They want them out, sooner rather than later, and out of sheer desperation, are challenging the world's most powerful military, killing and maiming significant numbers of God's chosen people. War is loved in America when it entails killing defenseless people at a safe distance with high-tech weapons; but when Americans can be killed as well, no end in sight...
At that point, Americans naturally begin to wonder if the Iraqi people are worthy of America's generosity after all. Perhaps one cannot, in the end, improve such a base and corrupt people by force. They are not ready, and the time has come to admit that and leave. Or so the American people say...
Unfortunately, there is still that 125 billion barrels (7.25 trillion dollars worth at least) and so the Corporate rulers must be strong where the people are weak. Fortunately for the rulers, they can nullify elections by the simple expedient of removing from consideration for office any individual who raises the possibility that aggressive war might be...well, innately wrong. Unfortunately for the rulers, people can vote against the war by not volunteering to fight, which right-wing or left-wing, they seem to be doing. On this score at least, 'left' and 'right' in America are indistinguishable.
Comments closed July 09, 2007.
| 
Heads in the Sand
First off it should be mentioned that there is no shortage of Iraqis more than happy to kill parents in front of the kids. Plenty willing to kill the kids too. In early 04 I think it was one of the first big car bombers drove right under a gasoline tanker truck parked next to a school bus. It's pretty hard to top that. If there was any one moment when I knew my prediction that Iraq was going to be the worst place on earth, that was it.
We tend only kill the kids from afar, like last weeks bombing of some terrorist hideout. In ten years we can look forward to the kids born of radiation, let loose by our bombing of Iranian enrichment sites.
Sure war is hell, it's a hell of a racket too. It's a damn shame the politics didn't work out for Bush on this one.
Posted by rapier | June 25, 2007 11:06 PM