Arguments for ground war - forget it

[Brad DeLong]

>  > >I don't care what Osama & the
>>  >Taliban have done, killing innocent Afghans (which this war is doing) is
>>  >wrong.
>>
>>  But this principle gets you nowhere: Allowing the Taliban with their
>>  guns to rule over and terrorize people is also wrong. Which wrong do
>>  you try hardest to avoid, and why?
>
>Allowing the Northern Alliance to rule over and terrorize people is also
>wrong.  Replacing one set of murderers with another, what Washington is
>doing, isn't much of an improvement.  The liberation of the oppressed must
>be the work of the oppressed themselves; anything else just replaces one
>form of oppression with another....

Well, now we've moved from a principle that is of no help to one that 
is actually harmful. Any principle that leads to the conclusion that 
the Anglo-American liberation of Western Europe from the Nazis was 
pointless because it "just replaced one form of oppression by 
another" belongs in the rubbish-pile of history.

Brad DeLong