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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (25596)	4/16/2002 2:20:52 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Sorry, sorry. Emotions run high all around. Got it. Thanks. I've passed up several opportunities to say that and hesitated for exactly that reason. Back to the program. I understand your comparative argument, the one which says lots of other folk are in the same condition and don't do anything about it, and have two counters, an analytic one and a moral one. On the analytic one, my guess is that the literature on these issues would point out a couple of things. (I use that distancing language because I haven't read it in some time and, as you would probably point out, some of the debate is about which is the relevant literature.) First, that the step from conditions of desparation as a result of occupation to actually doing something about it (wait, I'll bring up the weapons item in a moment), requires some more explanatory variables--resources to do something about it, the recency of the condition, oddly enough some hope that taking actions will make a difference, the presence of a movement to organize it, etc. So, yes, desparate conditions don't produce, in some one variable fashion, desparate actions. But you don't get the latter without the former. Second, as to weapons used, still trying to be analytical. My guess is that if one looked carefully at the history of this and did some fairly careful comparative look, one of the results would be that when the weapons disparity is as high as the present ME, those with little use anything they can find. It suggests a pretty wide disparity of weapons when one's own bodies become the weapons of use. Though, for some reason the following line just popped into my head. It goes something like wars are fought by old men using young men's bodies. That's far from an exact quote. And no doubt uw or others will know it better. As for the moral part, which you address the most, let me reiterate that the only point I was originally making was that "moral clarity" required attempts to understand the structural context of actions and I thought the writer in that case was deliberately (I've just added this point) dropping that from the equation. A not infrequent thing that is happening right now, particularly given the "high emotional"content. And understandable. What sort of moral judgment one arrives at after including that is well beyond what I'm up to at the moment. But I do believe that if that is included it makes the suicide bombing less immoral, closer to the actions of young Israeli soldiers, not blessed with the restraining hand of good leadership, engaging in some actions that will bother all of us, once the evidence is all in. Whether it's a massacre, I have no idea. But I do know if the leadership fails to restrain the troops, the passions of conflict take over. And my experience with young males this age suggests it will not be pretty.