Gee, Dennis, as mea culpas go, that's one of the most maxima I've seen. But I think you're being too tough on yourself and should take off the hair shirt. As you note: "... even though I contrasted my endorsement of the Afghanistan war with extreme skepticism about the coming invasion of Iraq, I personally wrestled with the latter issue for months, and seriously considered endorsing that as well. Once you've openly, enthusiastically supported a U.S.-led war, the next one comes easily, at least in theory. Hitchens made that transition from Serbia to Afghanistan to Iraq; and while I opposed Clinton's bombing of Serbia, Hitchens was softening me up to join him in promoting the Iraq war."
But the point is, you *did* oppose the Iraq War -- the mother of all criminal acts by the US.
I will confess that when I was a wee wanker, back in '64 when I was 14, I thought the Vietnam War was a necessary action. I remember finding deep wisdom and contemporary relevance in Churchill's 1938 warning about the proposed partition of Czechoslovakia: "The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small State to the wolves is a fatal delusion." But seeing the Vietnam War progress was the most soul-scorching experience of my life. Ever since, I have never seen a war or proposed war I didn't detest. I hold the door open to the notion that there might be such a thing as a just war -- since I don't want to be clobbered over the head as, say, someone who would have been an accessory to the Holocaust -- but for all practical purposes I'm a pacifist. In my lifetime I have seen no US military action -- Vietnam, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, you name it -- that has benefited humanity one iota.
There is an email I posted to the lbo-list, just nine days before the US/UK invaded Iraq, that I still think of as a worthy statement of principle. More than anything else I have posted to the list, this is the one email I would most like to be remembered for:
------------------------------------------------------------------- The US has lost the war From: Carl Remick Sent:Tue 3/11/03 1:34 AM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
Whatever happens in a military sense in Iraq, the US has already lost the war that really matters, the struggle for domination of world opinion. France and Russia stand ready to deliver their vetoes; Kofi Annan has denounced the US for undermining the UN charter -- never have I seen such censure of the US.
Having already lost the war, the only question now is whether the US goes ahead and kills innocent Iraqis for no reason at all. On the TV news tonight, I saw, up close and in person, a middle-class Iraqi family -- mom, dad, two daughters ... nice, ordinary, decent people -- making final preparations for being attacked. The father seemed proud of his orderly food stores. He was also proud of the preparations he had made to safeguard the daughter who's a diabetic (if bombing knocks out the power, he plans to keep her insulin chilled by suspending it in a neighborhood well).
This family may be slaughtered in a US/UK attack in a matter of days. It was heartbreaking to see them. I felt embarrassed and ashamed to peek into their personal lives this way. In no time, the US/UK armed forces may rain high explosive on these people, this loving family, and turn 'em into hamburger. So much ground meat, just to serve the whim of Generalissimo George W. and his diminutive companion St. Tony.
This nation, the US, is now the wrongest it has ever been. -------------------------------------------------------------------
I have always wondered what happened to that Iraqi family -- how much they've suffered over the past four years, whether they still live in Iraq, whether they are, in fact, still alive. I will never know.
What I do know is what I knew then: This nation, the US, is now the wrongest it has ever been.
Carl