At 06:02 PM 9/4/01 -0400, you wrote:
>Rightist flags and faces got droopy real quick - the innocents were
> >shit-faced, speechless that anyone on 'muricun soil could call for
> >the victory of the enemy! Now, that's how you shut up a
> >rightwinger. Leftist apologists are another matter ;-)
> >
> >The American-style leftists were conspicuous in their silence, alas.
> >Still dazzled by those Stars 'n Stripes, I suppose.
You give the generally provincial, confused lot of American leftists too much credit.
But I have snagged myself a flag waver - Haven't you forgotten one small detail? That in the first war, Iraq was backed to the hilt by the very same Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Western Europe and United States? That was because Iraq was engaged in the noble cause of gassing the citizens of the other bogeyman du jour, Iran, as well as the Iraqi Kurds, then seen as nothing but a threat to NATO member Turkey. The Kurdish gassing occurred while Baghdad was Washingtons' friend, meaning Mr DeLong would have paid it no mind, since the US media would not have been anxious to play it up. Correct me if I am wrong: you were up in arms about the Kurdish gassings back in 1988 or whereabouts, were you?
"Outrider to a dictator". Yeah, and Slovodan Milosevic is my hero, too. By that same logic, every opponent of the US intervention into Indochina who called for complete US withdrawal, knowing that this would amount to a US military defeat - and how could anybody with half a brain conclude otherwise? - was really an "outrider" for the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. Likewise, one would have to be an "outrider" of Joe Stalin - a tyrant whose deeds leave Hussein in the shade - to support the military victory of the Soviet Union over an imperialist (lest we forget) Nazi Germany.
In retrospect, you _did_ support the military victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany, right? Remember, the Stalin regime was responsible for the deaths of more people than the Nazis, and in the liberal calculus, was just as "diabolical" - if not more so, since Stalin met with greater success - then Hitler.
Take my advice: You will only lose at your own bloody, body-counting liberal moralizing gambit, for the imperial power that you are an open, admitted "outrider" for, has been the cause of more war and death than Saddam Hussein could ever dream of. And we have yet to see the other half of its bloody story, the part that describes its inevitable decline, fall and collapse in a process that will cause the true liberal moral sensibility to shudder when it happens. Imperial cynicism is bottomless: yesterday and today it uses Iraqis, Vietnamese, Albanians, Israelis - when spent, it will throw them away.
And you carelessly overlook my distinction of "military" from "political". In the present historical period, one should _always_, in _every instance_, stand for the _military_ victory of any nation under attack from imperialism. Wars are fought by the citizens of a nation-state, however much they may have been started by the _politics_ of dictators or elected presidents. Otherwise, war would be impossible. When the US, et al, militarily engaged with Iraq, it engaged in the slaughter of the Iraqi people, not Saddam Hussein - as it has turned out, in a merciless, targeted, slaughter of Iraqis both in and out of uniform, that continues as we write. In this context - the context of imperialist (and emphatically not inter-imperialist) war - it is quite possible to stand for the military victory of the nation-state which is the victim of imperialist military assault, while _at the same time_ standing for the overthrow of the political regime of that same nation-state - in this case, the Hussein regime. Which, for the record, I've always stood for. The difference is, I see that as a right of the Iraqi people, not some imperial interloper, who in any case has been quite conspicuous in precisely _not_ overthrowing the dictator.
The military, the political, the regime, the nation-state: these are all obviously very different things, hardly a matter of nuanced hair-splitting. But liberal moralizing does cloud the brain, which is probably the point.
Eh, but this sort of rhetorical posturing atop selected news clippings is such a bore. I'd much rather hear the general explanation that harmonizes the global rule of the Stars 'n Stripes and secure imperial borders with the free flow of global capital.
-Brad Mayer
>Or perhaps thinking that the As-Sabah are kinder, gentler rulers than
>the Al-Tikriti, and that a world in which the first rather than the
>second rule Kuwait is a better place? Perhaps thinking that they had
>signed up to change the world, not to be outriders for a dictator who
>has started two wars?
>Brad DeLong