----- Original Message ----- From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 5:19 PM Subject: Re: Helen Thomas vs. Ari Fleischer
> At 4:48 PM -0800 1/8/03, Ian Murray wrote:
> >Because Saddam and his gang of thugs were killing lots of people.
>
> Higher estimates of famine deaths in North Korea mention that 2
> million or more people died (Cf.
> <http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9808/19/nkorea.famine/>), a great
> boon if the US were planning for a military aggression for "regime
> change." And yet the US is far more gun-ho about "regime change" in
> Iraq than in North Korea -- despite the remaining Cold War rhetoric.
==================
So what? If you want to go the international law route and say human rights trump national sovereignty, to be consistent, scores of countries would need to undergo regime change and since there's no terrestrial Leviathan that does not live in a glass house capable of throwing stones at this point in history, what, in the absence of using even more violence is the solution to unwinding the standoff with NK and all the forms of tyranny on the planet today? You seem to be confusing me with someone who thinks its ok for the US to attack anybody it want, but I'm not so what's your point other than the usual leftie anti-imperialist boilerplate?
> If you asked Arab citizens and non-citizen residents in the Middle
> East, you would notice that they were even less threatened by Iraq's
> annexation of Kuwait than Arab autocrats were.
========================
Give me a plane ticket and a supply of fresh water and I'll take the damn poll myself. What sample size will convince that it's not as simple as you propose?
> We are not talking about any state. We are talking about the USA.
====================
Ah, American exceptionalism in reverse!
>
> At 4:48 PM -0800 1/8/03, Ian Murray wrote:
> >Iraq didn't need a justification for attacking Kuwait
>
> That's what Arabs should determine without the strong-arming on the
> part of the USA.
=====================
What, you want to privilege geographical proximity as trumps in the discussion of international norms for consideration of what, if any, conditions determine whether unprovoked use of aggression is possibly justifiable? The governments of Yemen, UAE, SA etc. are no more qualified to determine whether Iraq's unprovoked aggression against Kuwait was justified than they're qualified to talk about democracy. Since it's an a priori with you that the US isn't qualified, who, in this day and age would make the Olympian determination you seem to want?
>
> At 4:48 PM -0800 1/8/03, Ian Murray wrote:
> > > I doubt that they consciously manufactured the so-called Iraq
crisis
> >> in response to corporate scandals and the "global justice
movement,"
> >> as Bushies had long been planning to do something like this, even
> > > before they got into power. In any case, what's your point?
> >
> >What, they did it in their sleep?
>
> I'm simply saying that it's been a long-term plan pre-dating
> corporate scandals of the sort that you mentioned.
> --
> Yoshie
>
========================
I don't disagree with that for one second. It's another thing entirely as to whether or not they could have knocked those issues off the attention span of "the public" had 9-11 not happened. But that's water over the damn. The task for us is to show that their militarism is all of a piece with the scandals. That will take some mighty fine storytelling by lefties.
Ian