"It's The Job Of Thinking People Not To Be On The Side Of The Executioners" - Camus
There's hubbub floating around about the rightness or wrongness of being against the fascist invasion and occupation of Iraq before it even happened. I suppose there's a lot of teeth gnashing and soul searching going on right now as the rats desert the sinking ship. I don't know where this started or why but Kevin Drum asks this at the Washington Monthly:
"If anti-war liberals were right about the war from the start, how come they don't get more respect? Here's the nickel version of the answer from liberal hawks: It's because they don't deserve it. Sure, the war has gone badly, but not for the reasons the doves warned of."
Drum goes on to lambaste the dirty filthy hippies for being against preemptive war which he assumes to be the overriding objection back then.
From Jane Galt on the subject, after some mea culpa:
"However.
This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky? In some way, they got it just as wrong as I did: nothing that they predicted came to pass."
As if being against killing people for no reason forces you to make exact predictions as to what precisely will go wrong with that line of work.
I'll state the reasons why I opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq. It took me all of two or three hours on the morning of 9/11 to know that terrible day was brought to us courtesy of Bush and company, and that they were lying through their fucking teeth. When the propaganda blitz started in on Iraq in September of 2002 I saw the same crew out there fucking lying again. I didn't care about their shitty preemptive war arguments - they were too stupid to bother with. Anyone with a thinking brain and a modem could see from the start that all their reasons were stupid lies and a lot of people were going to die. And I didn't need to cross the Ts and dot the Is about how their venture was going to be disastrous. Nothing that the venal, immoral, criminal scumbags say should be believed. Every putrid scheme of theirs is destructive and self serving. Every one.
That's why I opposed Operation Kill The Ragheads And Steal The Oil. There wasn't any "debate" about the invasion anyway - just insane herd stupidity and moral blankness and a sense of inevitability.
"If anti-war liberals were right about the war from the start, how come they don't get more respect? Here's the nickel version of the answer from liberal hawks: It's because they don't deserve it. Sure, the war has gone badly, but not for the reasons the doves warned of."
Drum goes on to lambaste the dirty filthy hippies for being against preemptive war which he assumes to be the overriding objection back then.
From Jane Galt on the subject, after some mea culpa:
"However.
This has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did. If you get the right result, with the wrong mechanism, do you get credit for being right, or being lucky? In some way, they got it just as wrong as I did: nothing that they predicted came to pass."
As if being against killing people for no reason forces you to make exact predictions as to what precisely will go wrong with that line of work.
I'll state the reasons why I opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq. It took me all of two or three hours on the morning of 9/11 to know that terrible day was brought to us courtesy of Bush and company, and that they were lying through their fucking teeth. When the propaganda blitz started in on Iraq in September of 2002 I saw the same crew out there fucking lying again. I didn't care about their shitty preemptive war arguments - they were too stupid to bother with. Anyone with a thinking brain and a modem could see from the start that all their reasons were stupid lies and a lot of people were going to die. And I didn't need to cross the Ts and dot the Is about how their venture was going to be disastrous. Nothing that the venal, immoral, criminal scumbags say should be believed. Every putrid scheme of theirs is destructive and self serving. Every one.
That's why I opposed Operation Kill The Ragheads And Steal The Oil. There wasn't any "debate" about the invasion anyway - just insane herd stupidity and moral blankness and a sense of inevitability.
posted by nolocontendere at 11:59 PM
2 Comments:
Just to immodestly pat myself and other writers over at Liberaltopia on the back for a moment, we were against his Iraq War from the get-go for many of the reasons that turned out to be true.
A rudimentary knowledge of Iraq's history predicted the uprising of the Shia and Sunni factions against one another; the 'shock and awe' campaign that killed innocent Iraqis was another sure sign things wouldn't go well, along with the Bush tendency, apparent even back in 2002 and 2003, to make a hash of all he touched.
I recall seeing Powell make his fraudulent presentation to the UN; as he showed cartoons of mobile bio-weapons trailers, I knew he was full of crap -- if any such things existed, he could have easily presented satellite photos of the rigs. That and the BS unauthenticated phone calls supposedly between high-ranking Iarq soldiers discussing WMD; it had the smell of cheap theatrics, as did waving around a vial of white powder that was supposedly anthrax. 'No, he's not a doctor, but he plays one on TV.'
It was all just too much stagey hokum to be believed and many on the left saw through it at the time.
You bet. It hit me hard in the leadup to the slaughter just as it's hard today - how can otherwise rational people who wouldn't step out in front of a bus give any credence to those obvious frauds?
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