>On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Zak McGregor wrote:
>
>> Likewise, any other people who fit the terms as defined earlier with
>> sufficient evidence supporting the case against them should be offered
>> up for trial. Should the first step have been fairly and equally carried
>> out that this list would include Sharon, Albright, Clinton, Bush and
>> Busher, Kissinger, and other westerners.
>
>You couldn't stop there. You'd have to round up every Second World thug,
>every Third World dictator, every authoritarian general, every corrupt
>police chief on the planet. This is the Enlightenment vision of universal
>justice, of Schiller's World Court; the problem is, injustice is always
>particular. In a sense, the notion of an abstract universal is the
>postmodern version of invoking the deity's name, and asking, why do the
>Heavens not darken -- legitimate as protest, but not as a guide to policy.
>The question is, how is injustice to be concretely resisted?
More practically, who is going to bell the cat? Who is going to bring American war criminals (current & former presidents, congresspersons, generals, etc.) to justice?
> > many more innocent civilians. This means accepting that any action taken
>> other than accepting the Taliban's offer to hand over bin Laden is
>> unacceptable and murderous, period.
>
>It's not that simple. Doing nothing at all is also tantamount to mass
>murder -- not just in the sense of letting Afghanistan's agony go on,
>or in the sense that additional attacks by al-Qaeda are a sure bet, but
>in the sense that global capitalism will continue to grind away,
>destroying inconceivable amounts of human and ecological life, and
>blighting countless others. No reasonably focused military action can come
>close to matching neoliberalism's body count.
>
>I'm still waiting to hear viable alternatives to Operation Blue Helmet.
No one has explained what "focused military action" actually means (e.g., which troops, how many troops, what weaponry, how many civilian deaths, etc.). Also, no one has explained what makes the proponents of "focused military action" in Afghanistan think it can decrease the dangers of additional attacks by the loose transnational network of Al Qaeda & like outfits, let alone decreasing "neoliberalism's body count."
-- Yoshie
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