``..get over it. get over your implicit assumption that destruction requires destruction as you know it. get over your assumption that people are only radicalized by destruction...''
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Bush has already plunged us into this well. Nobody is arguing about jobs, schools, libraries, health care, reproductive rights, child care or anything else worth while.
In the Bush world there is only oppression, terror, war, and death. I don't see any reason to pretend otherwise.
Remember this wasn't my idea. If you recall I argued voting for Gore on the theory that the best chance for positive change was in choosing Gore to fight against, not struggling against Bush by default. I expected under Bush, all the best struggles would come to naught, while we battled just to keep the same ground. It turned out much worse right from the election, where black and minority voting rights were abridged, and then the whole popular vote tossed. That was the high point. Ever since it has been one long plummeting fall into night.
Michael Pollak writes:
``...If shock and awe works -- if everyone gives up and almost nobody dies -- it will be a tremendous thing for civilization. It will mean war is be almost obsolete. If that's true, it's a wonderful thing...''
But the price for this success will be an almost certain tyranny of the world under the most loathsome US administration in history---as the US domestic Right becomes the entrenched mantle of Empire until long past my last breath. That is not my idea of civilization, but of the dawn of a new dark age. That is what Lord Bush and his courtiers of evil promise, and I believe them. It's Star Wars alright, but the Empire wins.
I would like to believe the alternate consequences Michael outlined of a quick war with very light casualties followed by isolation of the US Empire, a series of international coalitions that rise up and carry the rest of the world on toward a better day without us---but I can't.
This invasion and war of conquest is so wrong, so outrageous, so absurd, so meaningless, so criminal that I can not believe anything painless and positive can follow from it. Saddam Hussein was irrelevant before, he will be irrelevant after.
If the US wins an antiseptic victory, the world will be under a permanent threat of US tyranny. If US faulters badly through its own hubris, ineptitude and under strong resistance by the Iraqi people, then the rest of the world wins some measure of freedom from the US threat, but at the cost of thousands or hundreds of thousands.
There is no good either way. In this stark and perhaps wrongly conceive conundrum I would choose the latter. But I have no choice. It isn't a matter of what I wish, my hopes, or my ghoulishness. It is how I conceive the choice that George Bush has forced on us, Iraq, and the rest of the world. Live under unchecked US tyranny and chaos or be massacred.
I realize that Michael is arguing that an anti-US world coalition of resistance is already forming and will, because of this war, move to isolate the US, and then move on without us. So, the logic goes, best to hope for fewer deaths, since the most important outcome is already becoming an accomplished fact.
But I disagree. What I feel is that there can not be any positive good that flows from such an atrocious and criminal conquest, carried out by such loathsome frauds as Bush and his vile government.
Just to re-state. The choice I see is live under the permanent threat of US inflicted chaos and tyranny or die. The Bush plan is to achieve that level of threat against the rest of the world, in a bloodless conquest of Iraq. If that the outcome is almost bloodless, then there will be another one and another one.
Chuck Grimes