I suppose t's "copy, paste, copy paste..." refers to the activities of t's brain chemicals recycling all the stories hitherto published in order to make liberals welcome the recolonization of Yugoslavia and accept the deaths of Serbs, Roma, anti-KLA Albanians, etc. with equanimity.
Elena wrote:
>Hi, Ted Untranslatable So Wonder-ful Tonite
>>> Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 1999 *****
>>
>>one wonders why they even bother.
>>
>Does one (wonder)? Really-really-really? Or just enjoying the (yeah,
>enlightening, oh intricate...) mind-game?
It's a postmodern cover for Todd Gitlin, Bernard Kouchner (see Russell Grinker's post), Dissentoids, et al:
***** The End of the Absolute No
The American left's reflexive opposition U.S. military intervention broke down over Kosovo. A veteran activist says it's about time.
by Todd Gitlin Mother Jones (September/October 1999)
...Myself, I marched and spoke against the war, despite the U.N. approval; despite the fact that Saddam Hussein was the nearest thing to a fascist in the contemporary world; despite the unlikelihood that sanctions, the form of coercion that most on the left preferred to war, would succeed in dislodging Saddam from Kuwait. On balance, however justified the end it was supposed to serve, the war seemed unwise, a disproportionately brutal means.
Still, it was already clear that positions were becoming matters of degree, not absolutes. One friend and I, after a long back-and-forth, decided that we were six inches apart, I coming out against the war and he in favor of it--perhaps a matter of temperament, in the end. Had I known then what I learned five years later, knowledge would have in my case trumped temperament cleanly. For in 1995, I heard the unimpeachable U.N. Special Commission chief Rolf Ekeus report that during his missions in Iraq he had confirmed some of the U.N.'s most fearful projections: When the Gulf War began, Saddam had 25 missile warheads loaded with anthrax, intended for a surprise attack, and was a few months short of having a usable nuclear missile. His compunctions about using such weapons were nil, of course. Sanctions, in hindsight, wouldn't have worked, Ekeus thought, and so the war had been a just war after all. Another blow against my own automatic No.
By that time, I had already relinquished it on another issue: the fate of ex-Yugoslavia. In fact, the anti-interventionist consensus on the left visibly and irrevocably cracked over the Serb assault on multi-ethnic Bosnia in the early 1990s. At a birthday party in early 1993, I sat with a half-dozen friends with whom I had shared a hundred positions for what already seemed like a hundred years, and encountered views ranging from "Bomb Now!" to "None of Our Business!" Apart from the intensity of our interest, we who had once been fiercely opposed to the mainstream were probably not so different from a tableful of Americans picked at random....
<http://www.mojones.com/mother_jones/SO99/gitlin.html> *****
I must correct Gitlin; he is to the right of most Americans on Iraq and Yugoslavia....
Yoshie