Good post.
You know, you can make an argument that supporting Saddam, and sending him weapons, and buying his oil, was the "right" thing to do, and you can make an argument it wasn't.
And arguments were made for supporting the Shah of Iran and for supporting Augusto Pinochet. The US has a very long history of foreign policy positions where the brutality of the thug in question was not of any concern. The rightness of the policy is based on near term benefit couched in the more elegant phrase of it's in our national interest. I suppose it was in our national interests for the Reagan Administration to produce books for the Afghans preaching the goodness of jihad. It's too bad they didn't think that those same books might be used against us.
It annoys me greatly that people are not able to separate the threads of arguments about this, and that some people simplify it to "You're against the war, you support Saddam."
It doesn't strain the brain to call someone a traitor. Pros and cons are complicated, sometimes requiring fuzzy logic to make a conclusion. It's much easier if your adversary, whether it's a country or a poster is just simply evil. And there's a whole lot less typing required.
I understand the folks who favor the war. I don't agree with them, and unfortunately many of their reasons don't hold up, but if the end does turn out to be good, they will always have that.
And if it doesn't turn out, then they'll blame someone else, i.e, the spineless liberals. I learned from Henry Kissinger just a few weeks ago that we actually won the Vietnam War. The Viet Cong were defeated and the North Vietnamese Army was getting kicked by the well-trained South Vietnamese Army. If only we had stayed just a bit longer.
jttmab |
