You are completely and utterly morally inconsistent and are simply appealing to anti-American prejudice.
To equate sanctions and the present conflict is completely nuts. YOUR "solution" to Iraq's problems is EXACTLY the same one the backers of sanctions proposed - civil war. The difference is that sanctions are obviously far more moral and promote more moral behavior in nations other than the target nation. The proposition is that you let people solve their own problems, but do not have any political or economic relationship with societies you find morally repugnant and dangerous. I would argue that the sanctions didn't go far enough. The United States should have cut off trade with any nation that traded with Iraq. We should have made national governments choose between trading with Saddam Hussein and trading with the United States.
That's still a very punishing thing to do, but it beats the present alternative. I think there was a more moral, miltary option, but that's not the question here.
What is the question is whether it is reasonable to decry the behavior of Islamist barbarians inside Iraq. Of course it is. These are the "dogs of war" we have let slip and will have to contend with in any decent foreign policy on Iraq.
Iraq suffers from a particularly virulent strain of the God Delusion. The problem of Iraq and much of the Islamic world really is Islam and the history of Islam. Either Islam has not made the accomodations necessary to promote the transition from the barbaric feudal state to Liberal-Democratic capitalism or Capitalism simply hasn't come to the Islamic world in a transformative way. It doesn't really matter which. The problem is that Muslim nations like Iraq have more of a tendency to promote neo-feudalism and warlordism than to promote capitalism. Unless you believe that there is a way to jump from theocracy to socialism, that's a huge problem for the Muslim nations.
Of course more powerful nations have the responsibility to help countries like Iraq transform themselves into more-productive, less war-like societies. Promoting dictators and then launching insanely destructive wars to depose the dictators we install is not the way to do that, clearly. But it's no good simply to accept the seriously destabilizing, destructive, reactionary savagery of Islamism.
On 11/25/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/25/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Nov 25, 2006, at 2:38 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >
> > > But the thing is that we don't
> > > suffer from the difficulty that confronts the Iraqis, even though we
> > > are among those who have caused it.
> >
> > Almost no one likely to read your words "caused" the difficulties
> > Iraq is suffering through. As someone pointed out to me offlist
> > recently, this line of yours is pure liberal guilt.
>
> You posted earlier in the same thread:
>
> On 11/20/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Nov 20, 2006, at 10:44 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >
> > > It looks to me that it's a case of avoiding _only_ our
> > > own responsibility
> >
> > This is so ludicrous I have a hard time believing you're serious.
> > Someone suggested to me offlist yesterday that you don't write to
> > convince people anymore, just to shock. He may be right. At least Ann
> > Coulter attacks her ideological enemies, though.
> >
> > Doug
>
> It looks like the refusal to take one's share of responsibility for
> wars, sanctions, and other doings of the empire has expanded to a
> refusal to take responsibility for statements one makes as well:
> "someone" said "offlist." :->
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
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>