ravi wrote:
>
>
> Doug,
>
> you used to be uneasy about knee-jerk anti-USism (the argument above is
> an extension of that emotion, unless you are an out and out pacifist,
> which I do not believe you are)!
This can't be argued in one post, but probably well over half of my posts over the last 6 years have constituted an extensive argument that u.s. use of military force must _always_ be opposed, and that there cannot be, in principle, any reason to ground that position in detailed analysis of the particular application in question.
I will add one point. All arguments (as far as I can see) against "knee-jerk anti-USism" offer in support instances in which the u.s. did _not_ act.
I predict that this will continue to be the case. There will never be provided any instance in which u.s. action* proved to be other than destructive. And so all defences of u.s. military action will continue to be based on descriptions of what _might_ have been the case had the u.s. acted in such and such a situation.
And perhaps this is the occasion to repeat one of my arguments against using the term "fascist" to describe the u.s. That term immediately evokes horror tales about internal events in Hitler's Germany. And it thus obscures the fact that u.s. foreign and military policy for the last 60 years has been consistently no better than, and often worse than, Hitler's foreign policy.
It will be hard to do, perhaps impossible, but there will never be a strong left in the united states until somehow a substantial proportion of the u.s. population (at least 25%) comes to see clearly that the u.s. state is a totally destructive state, that like Hitler's state it must be destroyed.
And as a beginning on that, at the very least current leftists can stop dreaming up instances in which u.s. military action might, just possibly, if we rather than the actual government were to carry it out, be not too bad, perhaps a little bit good.
Carrol
*I didn't want to clutter by syntax by always specifying that it was u.s. foreign policy and military action that is at issue when I speak of "u.s. action" in this context.