Steve
Stephen Philion Lecturer/PhD Candidate Department of Sociology 2424 Maile Way Social Sciences Bldg. # 247 Honolulu, HI 96822
On Fri, 15 Oct 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
Todd Gitlin...>
> ***** 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
>
>
>