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> > > Neither you nor Lenin nor anyone here is part of "the resistance," nor
> > > can we be. We are out of the picture. Let Iran, Syria, and the Mahdi
> > > Army solve the problem, for it is _their_ problem.
> >
> > Nothing human is alien to me, the man said.
>
> Don't be a surrealist. The international jihadists of the Al Qaeda
> tendency are alien to you, me, Lenin, all of us here, and vice versa.
> If we went to Iraq -- which we won't! -- we'd be lucky if one of them
> didn't catch us and behead us, or if slightly less demented Islamists
> than Qaeda types didn't kidnap us and demand huge ransoms for us, so
> they could go on fighting, who knows whom. We are too soft for Iraq
> -- that is clear.
if only we could be so sure. Maybe even as recently as ten years ago this would be more or less true, but the internet really has changed things. I found out to my unbelievable surprise a month or two ago that a flamewar that I was having about Darfur on the Guardian website was being followed in Sudan, by people who were actually in a position to influence real events. You really can't assume any more that you are totally without influence; it's pretty frightening. I don't know whether either Yoshie, Carroll or Doug has a material fanbase in Iran or Iraq, but (scary as this is for those of us brought up on left wing politics, and therefore on the assumption that we can basically say what we like as it has no consequences at all), it really isn't the sort of thing that you can act as if it was an absolutely zero probability event.
best dd
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