Nathan Newman <nathan at newman.org> writes:
>As John Mage suggests, this response looks rather evasive.
>One can condemn the Soviets for having invaded, and then
>making a muddle of it but the question that I asked was whether
>or not you think that Afghanistan would have been off, if the
>Soviets had been successful in their invasion. That question
>you not answered.
I don't think it's evasive-- asking "having half-destroyed a country, wouldn't it have been better for them to have completed the job, even though that was impossible" seems a silly sort of hypothetical. The Soviets didn't really have the capacity to be "successful" so what does the question mean?
Impossible hypotheticals are not particularly useful strategic questions.
>I think that several points can be made here. First of all to oppose
>the US war in Afghanistan is at least by implication to support or at
>least
>countenance the defeat of the US by anti-imperial forces.
Only if you believe that US is "imperial forces" which most antiwar folks don't-- they just think their government is involved in a stupid war. And voluntary withdrawal based on a moral choice to end a war is not defeat, it;s enlightenment.
Vietnam was defeat-- we couldn't win.
>As I recall during the Vietnam War, lots of people from nearly
>all points of the political spectrum oppsed that war using
>antiwar rhetoric, not unlike the rhetoric that Nathan quotes
>from the WWP and IAC. And most of these people were
>by no means absolute pacifists either. Did that make
>them all hypocrites?
To the extent that they disguised their politics, yes. They were also stupid and unsuccessful. The Vietnam antiwar movement was largely a failure-- the war did not end for years after political consensus saw the war as a failure and it was not ended in time to prevent economic destruction of Vietnam and total destruction of Cambodia.
So the Vietnam antiwar movement is not my model for any kind of movement to emulate.
>Now I take it that you vehemently disagree with
>the WWP's choices, but does that make them hypocrites
>because these choices differ from yours (I take it that you
are also not a pacifist either).
It is not the choices, it is the disguised politics using front groups. That is the hypocrisy.
If the were honest about their politics, they would not attract many people to their rallies, so they hide them in front groups.
That is what is wrong with the IAC and lies pollute any movement.
-- Nathan Newman