<Jacob refused to answer>
I started to make a reply,
then stopped and erased it,
as I thought my reply would be so far "outside the box" that I wouldn't be able to communicate with you.
Since you've asked repeatedly, I'll reply. Try not to have too emotional a response, just understand that I'm simply explaining how I see the world, not making any personal attacks on anyone.
I make the following analogy:
Colonization between nations,
is like rape between individuals.
In both cases, the act begins in violence,
and ends in domination.
Only the scale is different.
Further: When a 30-year-old man has sex with a 13-year-old girl, the law calls this rape. And it doesn't matter if the girl said it is consensual. It doesn't matter whether the man is gentle, caring, provides for the girl's housing/feeding/clothing, sends her to dance classes and piano lessons, says he loves her, assumes responsibility for any resulting children. The law still calls it rape. It is rape, because the law assumes, simply and solely based on the disparity in power between the two, that the act could not have been consensual, that the act is exploitive.
The same exact reasoning applies between nations. It does not matter how well we train our soldiers to avoid civilian casualties in Iraq. It does not matter how many roads and schools we build there. It does not matter how "smart" our bombs are, to surgically kill soldiers only. It does not matter whether we put a Karzai or Shah or Pinochet in power in Baghdad, and it does not matter if we supervise an election in which the Iraqi people "consent", after the fact, to our conquest. Rather, it should be assumed, based solely on the immense disparity in power between the U.S. and Iraq, that the "nation building" is motivated and carried out solely for the benefit of the U.S. It is an act that begins in violence, and ends in domination. To say that it is consensual, to say that Iraq will be the beneficiary, sounds to me exactly like the excuses I've heard rapists give. I'm never heard a rapist (and I've talked to many, many of them) who didn't have a collection of rationalizations and euphemisms and excuses. Nobody likes that self-image, so rapists and colonizers construct intricate, elaborate self-justifications to pretend it isn't so.
Asking me how I would do "nation-building" in Iraq, is akin to asking me how I would do rape. I will leave it to the NeoCons, to explain in detail how this can be done in a civilized consensual democratic manner. And then I will dissect their answers. |
