Oh for heaven's sake Dennis, I've sent dozens of posts to other lists on the outrage of the white phosphorus being used against Fallujah civilians and included gruesome jpegs of the effects akin to anything seen in Ramparts in the 60's about napalm. send a few dozen e-mails to reporters and editors of mainstream newspapers too trying to goad them into covering this story.
I've already explained to Doug offlist my position on US and Western military intervention, thank you Dennis and Farmalant with his predictable jibe about Social Imperialist State Dept. Socialism.
The imperialists have their material and geo-political interests, of coarse, jeesh. Which when pushed into action by outraged publics viewing Sarajevo being shelled or masses of Kosovars fleeing, go after former client regimes like Milosevic or Hussein's, they try to hide with liberal humanitarian rhetoric and invent stories about babies stolen from incubators. So what else is new?
What I find so utterly amazing though from folks motivated by our brand of humanitarianism, is any explicit or implicit accounting for the crimes of the regimes and movements that find themselves, after appeasement or outright support (Cf. A Problem From Hell: America In The Age of Genocide by Powers that your wife read Dennis), the target of military action by NATO. The continual refrain of the radical and liberal left since the 70's has been, correctly, that US foreign policy supported brutal, anti-popular, anti-democratic regimes that crushed labor, for reasons of corporate profitability and cold war realpolitique. So, when the US for a mixture of good, bad, indifferent and evil motives, drops supporting regimes like the Iraqi and Syrian Ba'athists, killers of thousands of communists and trade unionists, why do we see in the ranks of the "anti-imperialist" left, such abject apologia and denial? Why do folks like Nathan, Chuck and I get such sheeit over objecting to a PEACE movement allowing ANSWER/WWP to exert the amt. of leverage it does? Dennis, you've called a leader of ANSWER a, "fascist, " a bit over the top and inaccurate when Stalinist is more appropriate. Max, you've said it doesn't matter that ANSWER has the role it does, who cares? Well, as Nathan and Mike this morning pointed out, the anti-war movement, has had very little effect in changing mass opinion vs. this ghastly war. And a large part of the reason is that the marginal numbers that have marched in anti-war demos like me, are almost utterly isolated (except for groups like Military Families Speak Out) from the broad masses of the US public. The poll numbers have gone South for Dubya on the war, due more to local TV news coverage of the funerals for GI's and the almost daily suicide bombings taking such a toll there. Liberals in the media and Congress, trashed here, have had much more to do with exposing Dubya's lies which brought this war on, than anything in Counterpunch or other cranky rags on the far left.
On 11/19/05, Dennis Perrin <dperrin at comcast.net> wrote:
> James Heartfield:
>
> > I think the point is that Marko considers anything less than outright
> > attack as appeasement. This is the smear implicit in Marko's
> > argumentation. If you do not endorse his programme of action, then you are
> > by definition on the other side. That is the kind of demand for obedience
> > that puts Marko outside of the ordinary rules of debate, it seems to me.
>
> Beyond that, I'm curious if Marko and MPug believe that Western military
> action against former friends/allies has anything to do with moral
> conscience, as if the US suddenly saw the "progressive" light (putting aside
> the fact that states -- esp imperial states -- do not possess "morals," but
> interests) in the Balkans and the Middle East. It sure seems like they do.
> But if they don't, then it appears they're applauding imperial violence so
> long as it can kinda fit into a "humanitarian" construct. If that's the
> case, then they're not backing and encouraging a real institutional shift in
> power relations, but squinting their eyes and pretending that bombing Iraqi
> civilians with white phosphorus and Mark-77 fuel bombs is comparable to
> marching for civil rights in Alabama in 1963.
>
> Dennis
>
>
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-- Michael Pugliese