Doug called for a nice war: "What is needed is some kind of seriously international action to capture the guilty - following upon a serious worldwide investigation - and to rebuild Afghanistan. That would require some sort of force; it's not like you could parachute the NYPD into Kabul to serve some arrest warrants. But whatever force that's applied should be multilateral and tightly focused" (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050110/000760.html>). There can't be a nice war of the sort that Doug thought we should call for. Unless you recognize that, you will be doing the same thing the next time something similar happens. Some people never learn anything from history.
>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.
Seriously, stop lying. What I said was "I've been mugged by a black man, but I'm against the "war on crimes," racial profiling, etc." (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2001/2001-October/022512.html>). I'm not talking about a hypothetical either, as you can see from the mood of the sentence.
>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.
You can't invade a foreign nation just because you want to police that nation yourself, rather than asking its government to do it for you.
Seriously, how are soldiers -- be they American, German, French, or whoever -- expected to know who are "guilty" and who are "innocent" in Afghanistan? They had no clue when they began their invasion, and they still don't. You and Doug don't have a clue either.
>At that time, it wasn't at all clear that the US probably could have
>negotiated a more peaceful entree into Afghanistan.
It would have been better if Washington had avoided getting any "entree" into Afghanistan at all. Why get an "entree" there? What's the bloody point?
uvj at vsnl.com uvj at vsnl.com, Wed Jan 12 18:05:24 PST 2005:
>1. Even a multilateral force or the UN led one would be seen as an
>instrument of US imperialism and condemned for imposing its will on
>Afghans ruled by Taliban.
>
>2. Taliban government was recognised by only three governments,
>Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and United Arab Emirates. No other country
>recognised it as the official Afghan government. Afghanistan was
>represented in the UN by the Rabbani government in exile. How does
>the UN or any multilateral entity can deal with the Taliban
>government in Kabul without an armed invasion?
It appears that the Indian government, whatever it thought about the Taliban and the Ba'ath Party, has wisely avoided getting involved in the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>