weak-mindedness of conservatives.........???
You would be the one to accuse liberals of slimy situational ethics, wouldn't you? Well, I think you can put yesterday's events into the category of the long term legacy of this nation's situational ethics when it comes to achieving the political objectives du jour. Decades of training and giving logistical support to our proxies, most recently in Columbia, who carry out assasinations, kidnappings, torture and imprisonment does not relieve us of the responsibility for those acts. This government, Democrats and Republicans, has attempted to overturn the results of free foreign elections, supported oppressive regimes, supported the Contras knowing they were involved in the drug trade, spent millions training the mujahedeen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan; and as you have said yourself, engaged in genocidal bombing in Yugoslavia yet sat idle while millions were slaughtered in Rwanda, promoted the continuation of the sanctions against Iraq under the assumption that somehow a malnourished, impoverished and unarmed populace might rise up and overthrow Saddam. Now if all that isn't the antithesis of a consistent definition and application of justice in the world, I don't know what is.
Yet you are the jingo who would justify all these acts, their separate rationales as they serve our interests as they are defined at that time. And it appears to be you who would call anyone disagreeing with this view "weak-minded." Well, eat this: a 25 year old Palestinian who has lived his whole life in a refugee camp and who has nothing to look forward to might just find it appealing that the Koran says he will go immediately to heaven if he dies in a Jihad. That's the milieu in which fanatics are born. Nothing weak-minded about that.
So yeah, there's a war on and we'd better win. But winning does not merely consist of leveling Afghanistan or blasting southern Lebanon to kingdom come. It also consists of learning something about different points of view from people who have very different lives from those we are privileged to live. And unfortunately we don't even have a President right now who has much experience with that. Oddly enough, the President who "stood for nothing," the one you love to hate, actually did.
So every time you accuse the "left" of doing the greater damage, trying to lay the deaths of innnocents at the feet of your demon of the day, try this on for size: there's plenty of responsibility to go around. |
