[lbo-talk] Re: Review of Hitchens and Ali

Thomas Seay entheogens at yahoo.com
Sun Dec 7 11:18:26 PST 2003


--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
>But for the armed and unarmed Iraqi resistance (and
> resistance can be
> very subtle), the US government could have quickly
> privatized Iraqi
> industries, installed a puppet neoliberal regime,
> left several US
> military bases in Iraq, and, flush with a sense of
> victory, moved onto exciting new ventures (though
not necessarily
> militarily):

Of course, we all support resistance to the US occupation, but does that mean we should support ANY party engaged in that resistance? Certainly if the US continues to occupy Iraq that will be miserable for the Iraqi people; if fundamentalist muslims take over that country, is that good for the Iraqi people? Of course this latter is a question for the Iraqi people to decide, however, I am afraid in the current scenario that it will not be decided democratically and that the quotation from the "Little Red Book" will rule the day: "Political power grows from the barrel of a gun."

But your posititon adds one more parallel between the Neo-con/left boilerplate view. The former thinks the US should stay the course in order to distract the terrorists from striking other locations; the latter holds that we should support any resistance force just because it bogs the US down. It is OBJECTIVELY progressive, as the tired old thinking goes.

What gets forgotten in either of these views is the Iraqi people....their desires and hopes are not served by either the US occupation or Islamic fanatics. Both want to impose themselves on the Iraqi people.

-Thomas

===== <<You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals So let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel>>

Bloodhound Gang, "The Bad Touch"

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