Hi frankw1900; Re: "It's not possible to "make peace" with likes of Hussein or Arafat ..." Then why are we punishing their citizens? We should simply assassinate them.
Re: "From what I see of your posts today including the one ahead, you want to ship on the superpower train but you don't want to pay the freight." This is too indirect for me to understand. What is this freight charge? I haven't mentioned dollars once in this series of posts. I'm not against the use of military force. I'm against the ineffective or unnecessary use of military force.
Re: "The mindless objection is always, "Who's going to replace Saddam?" The answer, of course, is the Iraqi people, that's who. It's not so hard. The country has a civil service, an army, civilian police force, schools, universities, civil code, already. Clean out the Baath party, the internal security criminals, reform the army, administer the country soundly for a couple of years while the political folk sort themselves into a reasonable number of parties, have elections, and enjoy the panic in certain neighboring areas."
I would approve of this. But I don't see it happening. What I don't approve of is leaving the situation to fester by:
(1) Preventing Iraqi government from administering its territory, particularly in the Kurdish areas. The lack of control is contributing to the same sort of anarchy that caused us such trouble in Afghanistan. When Osama bin Laden moves to the Kurdish territories, what are we going to do, complain to Saddam who we are preventing from administering it? If we're not willing to accept the way that Saddam administers Iraqi territory then we should either (a) remove Saddam from office, (b) carve up Iraq and create a separate nation, maybe call it Kurdistan, or maybe (c) administer it ourselves. Instead what we're trying to do is to be a superpower in the air, without getting our hands dirty, on the ground. I would call that refusing to pay the freight.
(2) Harming the Iraqi economy by preventing Iraqi business from importing and exporting. The fact is that the richer Iraq becomes the more like us they will become and the better we will get along with them. Our actions are contrary to this goal. Same thing applies to Cuba.
(3) Killing innocent Iraqi soldiers without having the direct object of changing the Iraqi government. Ineffective violence is immoral. All we do is anger the survivors. With the application of more force we could make a permanent change, but we refuse to "pay the freight", and are trying to get by low scale warfare. I would think that one of the lessons of Vietnam would apply here; do not use low scale violence to train your opponent to better resist you.
What we're doing is immoral not because violence is immoral per se, but because ineffective violence is immoral per se.
-- Carl |
