[lbo-talk] dev'ts in world economy and foreign ownership

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 5/29/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> 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?

I'm not interested in the opinion of "someone who wrote you off the
list."  As for "people who'd been to Iraq and talked to actual
Iraqis," why couldn't they see what Chirac, and even Sarkozy, could
foresee _before_ the US invasion of Iraq began?  Some people see only
what they want to see and talk to only those who tell them what they
want to hear, just like the Bush White House.  There's nothing
"irrational" about it -- it's human nature.
-- 
Yoshie