> I just don't buy any of this national sovereignty crap whether in the US
> "states rights" tradition or the conservative neo-realist or left
> "self-determination" versions. There are good arguments that war is a bad
> method of solving conflict but that is based on the immorality of killing
> innocents, not on some fetishization of geographic lines on the ground that
> are all the legacy of past colonialism and murderous wars. Why I should
> respect the lines of yesterday's imperialism is beyond me.
Ok. I accept this. However, I can't quite believe that you do. If imperialist demarcation is unacceptable, why should we think that the US national army and its national government has the right to create new lines? And why has the US spent the last fifty years undermining every effort by Arabs to erase those lines? Why does the US support the project of demarcation par excellence that is Israel? And, more importantly, why do you accept the demarcation that is the US? The conclusion of your thought, if drawn, is that the United States government is illegitimate (or do you think the Iroquois just sort of vanished?), and must be destroyed, to be replaced with something else, though we don't know what.
So... would you support a coalition of say, China, Brazil and South Africa taking over and erasing the demarcation that is the US, wiping out the Republican party, summarily executing the leadership of the country, destroying most of its infrastructure, then restructuring the economy to its benefit? There would be at least some vague redistributive justice in that. So why not? I doubt your objection would be based on how messy it would all be; most sane people would object to it in principle. But since you seemingly reject that principle in the case of scumbag countries like Iraq, why aren't you calling for the elimination of the US? How many countries has the US invaded, how many people has it killed - it must dwarf Saddam Hussein's tally. WMDs? You betcha. Evil laws? Yep. Uses chemical weapons on its own people? Ask the Oakland protesters. Threat to its neighbours? Have a look at your backyard. I wager you that for any argument you produce for replacing SH using the US national government as instrument, I can reproduce, with added credibility, as an argument for replacing the US national government using my coalition of bums and beggars. The differentia specifica, of course, is raw military power - most emphatically not the requirements of political development or humanitarianism. You people need regime change as much as anyone else; only your regime has instruments to impose it which others, who might have even better claims to wiping out the USG, lack. This is the basis of your discourse, and it is the reason why such otherwise progressive anti-nationalist rhetoric sounds utterly hollow to the rest of the world: not because the rest of the world is particularly nationalist, but because the recourse to state force is, in a sense, the very heart of the nationalist device.
Thiago Oppermann.