jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net wrote:
>
[clip] Doug Henwood: [clip] He [Parenti] said they'd
> > > rather destroy Iraq than let the US have it.
LM: Have you ever considered that Christian Parenti is just another western social commentator with his head up his ass?
> I'd say Christian has his head on straight and most definitely not up his
> ass.
Agreed with the last point. But having one's head on straight and being both intelligent and well-meaning do not guarantee correctness. I would tend to classify CP under that very common type since Europe began to expand over the globe: the traveller who spends a few weeks to a year or two in a strange territory and then proceeds to proclaim himself an expert on it. Such hecklers from the sidelines, proclaiming that one had to be in Vietnam to have the right to criticize, were the backbone of pro-war forces in the '60s. Columbus was perhaps the archetype for this form of wise traveller.
But that is not the real point here.
First, if one's country is occupied by a foreign army led by thugs and mass murderers, and prior to the present had been ruled by a tyrant installed by the same murderous foreign regime, then it seems more or less rational to focus on clearing the land of the tyrant. Iraq has been destroyed already, and that destruction will never be repaired until the foreign tyrant is driven out. What happens thereafter can't be any worse than the two centuries of slavery and four years of bloody civil war out of which the u.s. emerged.
And it is clearly impossible, under present conditions, for Iraqis to have the sort of "civil space" within which policy judged "rational" by the likes of Parenti might emerge. No destruction of the occupation, no rational politics in Iraq.
But worst of all, Parenti seems to be under the delusion that nuanced information on Iraq is an argument against u.s. citizens trying their best, around a slogan of Out Now, to at least hamper the power which threatens to destroy us all. Parenti ought to spend more time studying his own country and less time pontificating on Iraq. Carrol