[lbo-talk] Does Al Qaeda Exist?

snit snat snitilicious at tampabay.rr.com
Wed Jan 12 18:15:17 PST 2005


At 06:29 PM 1/12/2005, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>>Michael Dawson MDawson at pdx.edu
>>Wed Jan 12 14:49:59 PST 2005
><snip>
>>This is scurrilous and self-aggrandizing as usual. Doug advocates a real
>>solution to this problem, which may or may not have required an
>>international invasion of Afghanistan. We'll never know, because things
>>obviously never happened in the proper internationalist, police-first way
>>Doug favored, in combination with change in U.S. policies.
>>What was your proposal? Do nothing?
>
>Doug didn't advocate a "police-first" way.

Yes he did. What he seemed to object to, in his typical Doug way as he traversed the Scylla and Charybdis of two extremes, was this:

1. Your and IIRC Carroll's position that it would be best not to call any police at all. You illustrated this by claiming that where you mugged (or perhaps _when_ you were mugged), you would refuse (refused) to call the cops.

2. The supporters of the "police first" way who wanted to elide the likelihood that even a police-first, internationalist approach would likely entail lots of violence and death of innocents. At that time, it wasn't at all clear that the US probably could have negotiated a more peaceful entree into Afghanistan. In the face of resistance, it was difficult to see how we could send in special forces for a "clean" "precise" hunt in the hills of Afghanistan.

In no case should questioning your position or the posture of superiority taken by the police firsters indicate that he advocated soemthing other than a police-first response.

Perhaps you can dredge up a precise quote where Doug indicates what he _did_ support.


> He advocated an invasion by a military force. Spain didn't invade
> Morocco, nor did the United Nations, in response to the terrorist attack
> in Madrid. What did the Spanish government do instead? They looked for
> suspects and arrested them. That's as good as it gets under
> capitalism. Saves a lot of lives and money. This point is worth
> emphasizing, as there is no guarantee that a big terrorist attack on
> American soil won't happen again in the near future. The next time, no
> self-respecting leftist should advocate any invasion of another nation in
> response to a terrorist attack.
>--
>Yoshie
>
>* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
>* "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and
><http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>
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