[lbo-talk] The very worst custodians of empire

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Mon Jun 26 07:15:18 PDT 2006


On 6/26/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> On Jun 26, 2006, at 2:01 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > Why do we pretend to care about what has, is, or will happen to
> > Iraqis, Iranians, North Koreans, Cubans, and others? If we really
> > did, we wouldn't live like this.
>
> How should we live then?

First of all, begin with admitting to the basic truth of our lives: the Iraq War is a disaster for Iraqis, but it's not yet (and may never become) a disaster for us (if it were already a disaster for us, we would be acting like we were being hit by a disaster).

On 6/26/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> On Jun 26, 2006, at 1:55 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> >> Huh? I thought it was going to be a disaster from before it started.
> >
> > For a long time after the beginning of the invasion, you kept pointing
> > to polls of Iraqis to argue that a premature US withdrawal will be a
> > disaster, too, and undesired by a majority of Iraqis, so we couldn't
> > and shouldn't call for that.
>
> For the first few months after the invasion, all evidence was that
> Iraqis didn't want an immediate pullout because we had destroyed
> their state and they feared chaos. I figured that deferring to Iraqi
> opinion was the proper thing for the western antiwar movement to do.
> You (and Carrol, as I recall) found this a violation of the catechism
> and quoted Kipling. At the same time, I quoted Christian Parenti's
> comment on returning from his first visit to Iraq: there's no way
> anything good can come of this. After a few months, circumstances
> changed radically and so did Iraqi opinion, and it was time for the
> US to leave.

Were the changes in circumstances inevitable in your opinion? If so, you can say that the Iraq War "was going to be a disaster from before it started." If they weren't, you can't, in truth.


> >> What am I going to do about it? Same thing that you are, no?
> >
> > You mean nothing?
>
> I'll follow your lead then.

I said, more than a month ago, that Iraq was a goner, that there's nothing we could do about it in the near future, and that we should focus on Iran and Palestine instead, as a near- to medium-term project (for the next ten years or so) for education.

-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>



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