(no subject)

[Brad DeLong]

>This morning I sat in a small school in Brooklyn the staff of which 
>had suffered five times the entire casualties of the bombing of that 
>factory, casualties from New Yorkers who have the origins from all 
>over the world, from the Caribbean to Africa to Europe. One small 
>school in one small part of Brooklyn. Multiply that by thousands, 
>and you begin to have some idea of the scope of what has been 
>visited upon the people of this city.
>
>But Chomsky and his apologist here, Estabrook, find this to be a 
>small matter next to a missile raid by the US on a factory that 
>killed one Sudanese. Not even that, but, Estabrook tells us, it is 
>racist to challenge his extraordinary moral calculations where the 
>death of thousands upon thousands is less than the death of one.
>
>You have not a clue what racism is, Estabrook. Your sick, myopic 
>system of moral calculation manages to evade the fact that the 
>attack on the factory in Sudan was in response to the bombings of 
>embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed hundreds of innocent 
>Africans as well as Americans.

That's not fair, Leo. The accusation is that it was not making poison 
gas--that somebody lied in the process of accumulating the evidence 
that suggested it was. The accusation is that the U.S. casually 
knocked out 2/3 the pharmaceutical manufacturing capacity of Sudan, 
with bad consequences thereafter for Sudan's public health.

And as best as I have been able to figure out, the accusation is probably true.

Brad DeLong

P.S.: Of course, the issue ducked is that of intentionality: the WTC 
bombers did not intend to reduce the U.S.'s capacity to manufacture 
weapons of mass destruction and unfortunately managed to hit the WTC 
by accident. The intention in the Sudan bombing was to to do 
something that would make the world a safer place and avoid killing 
civilians. I don't know how much intentionality counts, but it counts 
for something...