On May 29, 2007, at 12:54 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> I have no way of knowing lurkers' opinions, but for a longest time a
> majority of people on this mailing list kept saying that Washington
> couldn't and shouldn't just withdraw US troops, we must arrange for
> substitute peace-keepers first (as if anyone wanted to go in!), we
> must reconstruct Iraq first (as if we ever would!), we must support
> Sistani, et al.'s call for elections first (God only knows why anyone
> thought that was a good idea), and so on and so forth. It was the
> same way at the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice.
> Only a few unreconstructed Marxists thought that was all BS.
Someone wrote me offlist with the observation that your politics increasingly resemble those of the late 1960s SDS - "suffocatingly moralistic," obsessed with identifying sinners. Maybe this is all part of your new religious turn. But it makes for annoying and tedious reading.
>> I said from the first that opponents
>> of the war in the US should take their cue from what Iraqis want
>>
>
> Gauged by opinion polls taken under the occupation, no less, as if
> such polls had anything to do with truth.
Not exactly; I heard similar things from people who'd been to Iraq and talked to actual Iraqis, unlike you & Carrol, who seem to know everything from your vantage point in the American midwest. Those same unreliable polls tell a different story now from what they told in 2003, so are they equally unreliable today?