----- Original Message ----- From: "Dwayne Monroe" <idoru345 at yahoo.com>
"Your theoretical - designed, I think, to get us to consider the general terribleness of war, even if warranted, and inspire us to ease up somewhat on criticisms of our fighting men and women - is flawed and bears almost no relation to the facts on the ground: both in origin and unfolding."
It's designed to redirect people's attention where it belongs. The war in Iraq isn't unjustified because the US armed services are fighting brutally--some rather great level of brutality is a given in war, and I've seen nothing to suggest that what US forces are doing in Fallujah is somehow beyond the pale of acceptable tactics. It's unjustified because _any_ fighting is unjustified once you've reached the point where there's no victory left to win worth winning. The Soviets reached that point rather quickly in Afghanistan. So did the US several months ago--even if (unlike nearly all if not all list members) you don't question the morality of attacking in the first place.
-- Luke
In order for your hypothetical to apply the United States would have to intervening in Iraq to quell an insurgency perhaps at the request of our Baghdad ally who, to carry the fantasy further, weren't Ba'athist despots but also good democratic socialists beset by counter-revo forces.
But of course, as even my peg legged grand mama knows, (and you know this too) the insurgency is the result of American action - following Washington's invasion as a four alarm fire follows the arsonist's ignited gasoline bomb - so American efforts to eradicate the insurgency are illegitimate. No, more than illegitimate, that's an inadequate word, American efforts complete the moebius strip, the endless feedback loop of action and reaction.
Yes, war is ugly. Illegitimate war even more so. But war that you've created - from thin air, conjured like a demon from the netherworld in some folk tale is the very worst of all.
For this is truly what's been done - there was no insurgency, no waves of kidnapped and beheaded foreigners, no car bombings, no mosques wrecked by 500 pound bombs, no worsening rates of malnutrition, no tens and tens of thousands dead, no showers of uranium tipped metal raining down upon towns, no hospitals seized by boys who should be hanging out at the local mall instead of dying and killing before the put-upon Americans, only there to help and making the best of a bad situation, came to play.
Shakespeare's text, in the mouth of Henry V before the gates of besieged Harfleur comes to mind:
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up, And the flesh’d soldier, rough and hard of heart, In liberty of bloody hand shall range With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants. What is it then to me, if impious war, Array’d in flames like to the prince of fiends, Do, with his smirch’d complexion, all fell feats Enlink’d to waste and desolation? What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause?
I can't set a fire and then rush to the scene to put it out, claiming, as I choose who, among the trapped, can be saved and who must be sacrificed, that I'm only doing what's necessary.
We (or our masters) are the cause Luke and all streams of terribleness born from this horrible thing, from our ceaseless hammerings at other people's doors, runs like a backward moving river to Rome.
.d.
___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk