I'm not shocked if some people think that the fact that this war was preplanned has a non-imperialistic explanation.
I begin worrying when there's all this evidence that the US didn't want to touch ObL before S11 and everybody believes that it's serious about getting him now.
I worry more when all this evidence is lying around in bombed-out Qaida safehouses and journalists are free to take souvenirs.
I wonder what everybody is thinking when thousands of Qaeda fighters are loaded on Pakistani transports and whisked away under the noses of US AWACSes.
But what really gets me are these endless discussions, informed by the thoroughly orchestrated US media, about whether it's right or wrong to massacre the Afghans because they harbored the evil ones.
I realize many of you guys have to communicate with the brainwashed multitudes and are trying to whittle down your thinking accordingly, but I'm hoping this has limits. As a member of the rest of the world, where the credibility of declared US intentions and principles is at an all-time low, I think it's your acceptance of the official rationalization of this war that needs to be discussed before the war itself.
I'm not even asking whether a country that churns out terrorists on an industrial scale has any business even mildly criticizing other peoples' terrorists (although some people may think "there's no proof we churned out terrorists last week, so we're clean, and BTW they're called freedom fighters, OK?").
I don't want to know why the US doesn't even pretend to open an inquiry into why so many civilians are cluster-bombed or the Jazeera office is craterized; hell, even Israel goes through the motions.
I just want to know what makes so many intelligent, educated people buy into the official excuse for invading Afghanistan, and restrict their entire discourse to the terms of the official - and constantly shifting - definition of Enduring Freedom? It's like the US could not possibly have any other primary motive than getting Qaeda, and it's insane to even suggest otherwise.
This is the nth rehash of the planetary superhero against the comic-book baddie show - US vs Khomeini, US vs Gaddafi, US vs Saddam - that we've been entitled to since US vs Evil Empire went out of fashion. When is somebody besides Chomsky going to start seeing a pattern here?
I really wonder if this myopic discussion is going to replicate itself when it's time to bomb Iraq?
Hakki
|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Michael Perelman
|| I am skeptical about anything that I read now. If they are using
|| leaderless resistence, ObL may not have known about the
|| details; if he did
|| the Taliban may not have known.
||
|| I just don't know. Even if a few Taliban leaders knew, ....
||
|| I just hope that you and I don't get bombed for the crap that our
|| government pulls.
||
|| On Wed, Nov 28, 2001 at 09:29:51PM -0800, Bradford DeLong wrote:
|| >
|| > <sarcasm>
|| > That's right. The Taliban were simply peacefully giving sanctuary to
|| > Osama bin Laden, a peaceful fellow Muslim who has been much put upon
|| > by nasty imperialists.
|| > </sarcasm>
|| >
|| > I cannot believe that you believe that the Taliban did not know what
|| > Al-Qaeda was, and what kinds of operations Al-Qaeda was planning.
|| >
||
|| --