> Sure. When the US Eighth Army and Red Army converged on Berlin, they
killed
> some civilians, that was probably inevitable, but, horribly, justifiable,
> because the war was really necesasry, or the Nazis would have put out the
> lights all over the world. But I know you don't think this is a comparable
> situation.
And I know or at least hope that you don't think Nazism was the only evil pernicious enough to warrant forceful intervention of the sort that will inflict civilian casualties.
>> One major reason we should not be war is that we are
>> killing innocent civilians, and to no conceivably defensible purpose
>>I doubt that the hacks in the military are doing it for yucks, although
>>their "defensible purposes" may be exposed by argument as frauds.
> I have no doubt that some of them get their jollies from it, but I said
> nothing about that, and it would not make much difference to the moral
> quality of the act if they did.
Morality's not my point. You said that there's "no conceivably defensible purpose." Perhaps you can't conceive of it. Others can, mistakenly or not.
> Most Afghani peasants will suffer in silence, like most Palestinians. A
tiny
> minority of them--a growing minority--will be recruits to the successors
of
> bin Laden. As you well know.
I doubt bin Laden really needs more recruits, although I could be wrong.
> >Obvious to most on this list, but not myself.
>
> ???
I don't think my statement was incoherent.
> >However, your allusion to my inability to make proper inferences about
the
> >causal structure of the world is off-base. Nothing you and I say on this
> >list is likely to have much impact on the world, which is something
Carrol,
> >Dennis, and Steve have already pointed out and I'm quite cognizant of.
>
> Nothing we do matters much in itself, but is very important that we do it.
> (Dorothy Day, I believe).
Anything positive that occurs as a result of my readings and scribblings via lbo-talk is "blowback."
> >How about the starvation that occurred long before any intervention and
was
> >ameliorated in small part (we should've given much more foreign aid to
> >Afghan.) by the US?
>
> Sure. But there is a difference between shorting our general obligations
to
> help when injury is caused largely by large scale market forces outside US
> govt control, and directly causing mass misery and death by bombing and
the
> like.
I think the distinction is irrelevant. The best of both worlds would've been giving tremendous aid to the peasants of Afghanistan while taking steps to cripple their terrible government. Up until now, the US hasn't been serious about either. I still don't think anyone cares about the former.
-- Luke
> jks
>
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