>Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>I wonder. Somehow I had always taken it for granted that subscribers to
>>this list would have general knowledge of "our own vast stockpile" of
>>horror, but maybe many don't. That would be one explanation of the
>>perverse tendency to see u.s. intervention abroad as possibly positive.
>
>Who said anything about U.S. intervention as positive? The closest
>anyone came to that argument was saying that having destroyed the
>Iraqi state, pulling out now with no successor force in mind could
>result in total disaster - a position that seems to be shared by
>most Iraqis. Of course, you probably know what Iraqis should think
>better than they do themselves.
Since when have the majority of Baghdad residents, as surveyed by a Gallop poll directed by Richard Burkholder, become the majority of Iraqis?
Also, the question is not whether Iraqis want a "successor force" to the USuk coalition; rather, it is whether Iraqis want foreign governments to provide such forces:
***** Poll: What Iraqis Think About the Occupation By James Zogby, AlterNet October 21, 2003 . . .
* When asked whom they preferred to "provide security and restore order in their country, only 6.5 percent said the United States, while 27 percent said the U.S. and the UN together, 14.5 percent preferred only the UN, and the largest group, 45 percent, said they would prefer the "Iraqi military" to do the job alone.
<http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17021> *****
Cf. Zogby International Survey of Iraq, August 2003: <http://www.taemag.com/docLib/20030905_IraqpollFrequencies.pdf> & <http://www.taemag.com/docLib/20030909_iraqpollcrosstabs.pdf>.
> >That would also cast a somewhat different light on Chomsky's piling up
>>of facts.
>
>Don't forget about the active desire not to know. Piling up facts
>can't break through such defenses.
It's not so much "the active desire not to know" as the paucity of social institutions on the left serving as archives of popular memories of struggles (in which Chomsky's facts, among other things, may be stored) that makes for the discourse of perpetually renewed "innocence" in the USA.
Memories disappear, without social institutions to create and recreate them. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>