Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
>
> Look, Carrol. We have a very serious crime, mass murder, in fact. Doing
> nothing about is not an option. I do not support war, but there is a fairly
> well-established protolocal for a criminal investigation. You gather
> evidence, identify suspects with probable cause, find 'em, and bust 'em. In
> this case there is the added problem that they are (apparently) under the
> protection of a hostile nation. By "apparently," I meand if it's OBL.
I don't necessarily disagree with any of this, but what I don't understand is why so many people are so confident that they know what Bin Laden (or someone) intended, what the people in D.C. intend, and what exactly or even roughly is going to be happening in the next few months. And within that context I _really_ don't understand why people outside the Administration believe that what they think makes any difference to what is going to happen.
What we as leftists think and do can make only one kind of difference: it will affect how we relate to potential elements of a mass movement some months down the road.
In my own case I have some sense, developed both from experience and from extensive reading and talking and listening over the last 35 years of how one goes about the day to day details of bringing groups of people into relationship with each other. I have a sense of the senselessness of arguments as a way of reaching people. (You need the arguments in reserve, because _after_ you have convinced people that you are right, _then_ they are going to want to know the arguments for what is now their position, which they will have arrived at on quite other grounds than argments and reasons.)
And I have one fairly certain bit of knowledge about the future: whatever military, diplomatic, or economic action the U.S. takes is going to seriously fuck up people somewhere. What I don't know, and what I think no one knows yet, is whether they are going to get away with whatever it is they are aiming at. They got away with it in the Gulf War and Panama and Nicaragua and Chile and Yugoslavia. If they get away with it this time, then so be it. But I am going to guide my actions by the premise that they are not going to get away with it. If I'm wrong, it makes no difference one way or the other. If I'm right, then we'll see.
The
> Guardian and Le Monde think there's pretty decent evidence; it's summarized
> in the current edition of the Guardian Weekly. A lot of it had to do with
> chasing the money. Assume it's him and his lot. The Taliban was, at least
> before we started bombing, at least hypothetically open to listening to the
> evidence.
Probably. I'm working, as indicated above, on the premise that he is going to get away with it -- that is, that he is going to win even if the U.S. succeeds in killing him or whatever. I want to lay the basis for talking to people in that kind of context. Again, if it doesn't develop, so what. That's the way the cookie crumbles as they used to say, and we go back to the old drawing board. If it does work out that way, then we must be prepared to have a movement on our hands.
If we had laid it out, and I can understand not laying all of it
> out in public, if it would endanger confidental informants, and they had
> still said Boo!, we'd be ina stronger position morally and legally. We
> should still insist on its being laid out, along with stopping the war. The
> war complicates things; we might have been able to buy cooperation, as
> indeed we probably could have paid Saddam Hussein to leave Kuwait if we had
> wanted to. But we should demand extradition to the International Court of
> Justice, or even here--we sure as hell have jurisdiction. If the T won't
> cooperate, we can try to have them isolated, bring various pressure to bear,
> etc. We could see if some potentially legitimate Afghani alternative
> government would request a UN force of Rangers to find him. There's loads of
> stuff that could be done without killing anyone or disrupting too many
> lives. jks
Justin, you put a lot more emphasis on getting the bad guys than I ever have, and here it's not my marxism operating but almost a family tradition. All of my family are very happy that the police are fairly certain that they know who murdered my sister-in-law -- particularly one niece who was all too acutely aware of the statistics on who the killer is apt to be; none of us, including my brother and my nieces, are awfully concerned with the fact that there will never be any basis for arresting him. He probably won't kill anyone else, and putting him in jail would not bring Lois back. Vengeance is good on the spot, but after about five minutes it's a bore.
In any case, it is only with the political implications (and by politics I mean the building of mass movements) that I am concerned. And I think it's the next 6 months to two years that count, not the present, or what people are thinking in the present.
However desirable justice may be -- it's not going to happen. Arguing about what would be the just solution is to drift off into never-never land.
Carrol