> With this position, it is no longer a question of 'lesser evilism' -
> indeed, by representing more competent leadership for U.S. imperialism,
> Kerry could be seen as a 'greater evil' as he will have greater success
> in garnering allied support, escalating the war, and so forth.
Au contraire, this war is a goner for whoever gets the White House. The situation is getting worse by the day, and it doesn't look as though any solution that would be favorable to the "coalition of the willing" is possible.
There won't be any allied support -- the "allies" are edging away from the U.S. as rapidly as possible. There won't be any escalation -- either Bush or Kerry will have to try to get out in some face-saving way, as the U.S. tried to extricate itself from Vietnam. Some kind of "turn-over" to an "Iraqi interim authority" will happen at the end of June, though no one knows who will be in it. It's very likely, though, that it will be less friendly to the U.S. than the present provisional council will be. The Pentagon's dream is to try to get a status of forces agreement with this still unknown "authority" that would allow them to keep bases in the country, but even that looks doubtful at this point. If they had those bases, they would have to spend all their time fighting the insurgents, just as they are now.
> This election looks more and more like 1964 every day. Remember
> "crazy"
> Goldwater?
It doesn't look anything like 1964 to me. Then, the involvement of the U.S. forces in Vietnam was just starting. Now, the involvement of the U.S. in Iraq is in the process of going down the toilet, as it did during the Nixon administration. If anything, it looks more like 1972-5, but it's not really much like that period either.
> How any leftist can vote for this warmonger and his bloody promises,
> with a clear conscience, is beyond me.
Depends on what you mean by a "leftist," I guess. Leftists who are into symbolism and want to cast a symbolic vote against the war might want to vote for Nader, but remember that each such vote makes it that more likely that Bush will be back for 4 more, which hardly looks like an anti-war vote to me. But if in fact the war is already lost for the U.S., as I believe, you can vote for anyone you want, and the actual results as far as the war is concerned will be roughly the same.
Kerry's "bloody promises" are basically whatever he thinks he needs to promise to get more votes than Bush (and of course, votes in the right states, to avoid a replay of 2000). It is even more true in this election than in previous ones that you can't take what a candidate says during a campaign very literally. Kerry has been all over the map on all kinds of issues in his career -- the Bush people are right about that -- so it's hard to say what he would actually do in office, except that it probably wouldn't be as reactionary as what Bush has been doing.
> All the favorite lies of the American ruling class: All Americans are
> united, the rebellion consists of extremists, we're on a mission to
> spread the good life..
The Big K certainly isn't doing anything to educate the public in this campaign, but I think the public is getting pretty well educated by looking at what's actually happening in Iraq.
> The guy's already lying like crazy, and he isn't even President yet.
If you're looking for a Boy/Girl Scout presidential candidate, keep looking! Politicians can't get elected without lying -- even leftists (sometimes *especially* leftists).
> "We owe it to our soldiers and Marines to use absolutely every tool we
> can muster to help them succeed in their mission without exposing them
> to unnecessary risk. That is not a partisan proposal. It is a matter of
> national honor and trust."
>
> Absolutely! Kill 'em all if necessary!
I think you're going a little off the deep end. The extreme right liked to call for "bombing 'em back to the Stone Age" during the Vietnam War, but in fact neither Johnson nor Nixon ever intended to do anything like that, and no one in the Establishment today would want to do that in Iraq. What they want to do is salvage as much as they can from the disaster they're facing today, and slaughtering Iraqis would obviously not accomplish that. It's true that Bush and Kerry are pretty close in their Iraq policies at this point, but what they're both trying to do is to find an "honorable" way to get out of the quicksand. Their idea of "honor" isn't anything like ours, to be sure (to us, or at least most of us on this list, I think, the honorable course would be to withdraw now), but it's not "kill 'em all," either.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Belinda: Ay, but you know we must return good for evil. Lady Brute: That may be a mistake in the translation.
-- Sir John Vanbrugh: The Provok’d Wife (1697), I.i.