You know the Left is really coming around when...

[Homerpalooza]

Originally posted by tweedyburd:
My main point stands that there is plenty of evidence in the quotes that suggests Europe isn't as reluctant as the mainstream press here would have you believe. If they were, they wouldn't be saying anything remotely close to what Spain, Denmark, Norway, etc have said. Neither would Saudia Arabia be allowing us to use their air bases. And though my original statement that they were completely 'supportive' may have been a little too early, it's only a matter of time. Consider it a segue into the inevitable.

Possibly. Or, these leaders were paying lip service to American reporters. Plus, the residents of the countries we've mentioned, in general, do not possess favorable attitudes of Americans. Whether justified or not, we don't make good impressions on them. And we're asking them to help us in war?

Maybe your predictions will prove correct. Hopefully they are based on more than a single slanted news story peppered with ambiguous phrases. But whatever, this issue's been beaten to death, and it's pretty obvious that I'm tired (Reading always was my worst subject in school).

[DeviousJ]

Half of this is pointless. For every article decrying anti-domestic sentiment as a way of distracting people from Iraq, you'll find another explaining how Iraq is being used to draw attention away from domestic matters. The fog of war is way more prevalent than the fog of peace - I think people are just surprised how much anti-war sentiment is springing up everywhere. Even in the UK, probably America's biggest ringer, there is so much conflict over the issue that Cabinet members are threatening to resign if the US is joined in war. A sure way to gain support for a movement is to convince people that everyone else is doing it. But it just isn't that clear cut.

There is way too much hypocrisy involved here for people to take any of the reasons for action seriously.

[tweedyburd]

Originally posted by DeviousJ:
For every article decrying anti-domestic sentiment as a way of distracting people from Iraq, you'll find another explaining how Iraq is being used to draw attention away from domestic matters. The fog of war is way more prevalent than the fog of peace

Actually, if you could find an equal ratio of the first in comparison to the latter, I'd love to see it. We're getting next to nothing like the above article in the op-ed's of the most prominent news sources (i.e. Times, Washington Post.) And since basically no one here reads what they don't want to hear on this issue in their own time, I thought the article would bring a different perspective. Clearly, it has.

Also, I'd say that if you see a more prevailing 'fog of war' than you misunderstood the article. The only real 'fog' the author talks about is that which is created by those who simply want to distract rather than deal with reality. There is no 'fog' of war, because the reality is that Saddam has to go, for reasons that are becoming more and more obvious. For all the peace crowd have to blow air at, they have rarely ever dealt directly with a reality of continuing to let Saddam operate as he has in the past, and as he continues to bring in uranium (he's not exactly making aluminum foil). That's fog, in the context we're talking about. There is definitely a fog in the relativst culture that is championed by the 'peace' crowd.

[opel]

Christopher Hitchens is a very interesting, but not at all unique case. He's the gold mine for any pro-war or 'conservative' individual or institution. To them, he's a "converted leftarian," a leftist who has 'seen the light' and bulletted back to the ground of realism. Bravo to Hitchens, they say, welcome to our world, the real world.

And so Hitchens, that celebrity with pretensions of sophistication, reacts and attacks his former comrades and followers, his former views and stands. In return? A comfortable spot on the couch, a nice glass of wine, and a TV Guide to the next CNN war or prime-time Bush. He'll find his new couch most rewarding, one figures, as he sits next to those wonderful plutocrats and autocrats who just love to lavish their money and influence on the new converts.

That's fine and well for you, Mr. Hitchens, but the next time a roof falls on your skull, or a cluster bomb splits your child to pieces, or your body outline is incinerated into a shelter wall, come back and tell us, those who you once stood with and now attack, tell us how it was. The next time you have no control over when your body will be smashed to the ground, or you watch your local businesses and neighbors weeded out in favor of the golden arches, or your brothers and mother and friends are "disappeared," their existence annulled, write us back and tell us how it was.

Because when we talk about Vietnam and the Balfour Declaration and Nicaragua, we're not bringing back "demons" from our archives. We're not diverting from the discussion. We're not trying to delegitimize the topic. We're providing an understanding, a tree from which the leaves and branches can be reasonably analyzed. We're setting that foundation that many don't want to set or just ignore entirely. To analyze and form conclusions about ideas and actions on a given matter, you've got to understand it first and work from a framework based on facts. That's elementary to the rational.

So when we ask if Washington should be bombed "pre-emptively" because it has (absolutely and unequivocally known as fact, unlike the "probably"s and "maybe"s thrown about when talking about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction), because it has not only a weapons of mass destruction arsenal, but the largest ever assembled, and furthermore has even formulated a "first-strike plan" with them, and even more, has adamantly denied any U.N. weapons inspectors inside the country, when we ask if Washington should be bombed for this, we're not diverting. We're suggesting, through basic logic and fact, an understanding of how the world works. We're not just crying hypocrisy from the hilltops and ivory towers, we're showing you, and asking you to your face, what right you have to even be discussing this. And when this is understood, and we then ask why Washington (and London, and Paris, and Berlin, etc.), why you were you so supportive of Saddam when he was infinitely more dangerous than he is now, when he was gassing Kurds and Iranians and slaughtering an entire culture in the north of his country and torturing and raping the rest, and now using that to condemn the monster, we're not dredging up past misdeeds or rhetoric; we're asking you why and how something like this, so illogical and so contradictory, could even take place.

And when this is understood, we ask you why Andy Card (White House Chief-of-Staff) has just recently said, when asked why the Iraq topic wasn't brought up sooner, he said, "From a marketing point of view, you don't release new products in August.", how he could say that and Bush can talk about freedom and liberty and sleeping at night in peace at the same time. And how Albright could say that "the price is worth it" when told that 500,000 Iraqi children had died because of the sanctions (this in 1998, that number being much larger now).

Why did Lyndon Johnson lie about the Gulf of Tonkin? Why did Teddy Roosevelt use the Panamanians and Blacks as slave- and forced-labor to build a canal and how did he obtain it ("I took it," in his own words, actually)? Why are prisons being privatized? Why has the CIA backed coups in Chile and Iran, etc.? Why did the CIA help kill Zairean leader Francois Lamumba? These aren't abstract questions; these aren't diversionary tactics. If you want to talk about the real world, then here it is. This is what happens in the "real world," the world you created and the world you admire and protect from criticism so slyly and cunningly, from behind your wine glasses, the world you got a horrific whiff off last September. This real world is poverty and flames and rape and unspeakable pain and misery and mass slaughter and, above all, the rule of force. Might is right. This is that "real world" that you scoffingly tell us to take our heads from the clouds and contemplate. Believe it or not, we've been talking about the real world from the beginning, not some utopia you like to think we're yelping about. Take a look at your suit and tie and slickly combed-back hair and take a nice, hard look at peasants' decapitated heads in El Salvador, or the mountains of Kurdish bodies in Turkey, or the deformed and malnutrioned children in that Iraq to which you so love to pontificate and admonish, take a look at that before you tell us about the real world.

This real world of ours.

Some people like to understand it and form conclusions, and others just like to bomb it. Thank you, Mr. Hitchens, for making clear on which side you now rest.

[sleeper]

*roaring applause*

and thats just the tip of the iceberg. one day it'll all change. im not sure how, but one day.

[Elvis The Fat Years]

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