I Don't Get It

Brad DeLong jbdelong at uclink.berkeley.edu
Sun Nov 18 11:57:17 PST 2001



> > Some Anglo/American leftists said, "_This_ [= 911] is an attack on
>> _us_," but it makes more sense to say that the US war on Afghanistan
>> & other nations is an attack on us, if we don't allow ourselves to
> > get browbeaten into American Patriotism.

I just don't get it. If last year (or the year before) the Iranian government, say, had decided to take out the Taliban and replace it with a less... extreme... government, everyone (or almost everyone) including me would have cheered, just as we cheered when the North Vietnamese took out Pol Pot and the rest of the Khmer Rouge. There would have been the danger of a wider war between Pakistan and Iran, yes. There would have been Hobbes's point that even a bad government is better than no government and that anarchy with roving gangs of thugs is worst of all, and so there would have been danger from that direction as well.

But the Taliban rank *way* down there on the scale of human political regimes, and the overwhelming balance of probabilities would have been that taking them out--if it could be done quickly and without huge amounts of bloodshed--would have made the world a better place.

So what has changed? Why does the fact that it is the U.S. that is doing it rather than Iran lead to different conclusions?

Brad DeLong



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