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

To: Sam who wrote (98940)	5/23/2003 1:05:02 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

If this war needs lies to justify it, then it isn't justifiable. Unless you don't care at all about the truth. If that is the case, then this message is pointless, and the Bush admin is indeed the group for you. A lot of political causes get involved in not-quite-true arguments because they find themselves with a real world choice: go with the arguments that are absolutely true, but won't work politically, or use the arguments that are dubious, but will work. Guess which choice gets made. Two examples of this are in the movement against GM foods and in Bush's arguments for the war with Iraq. In GM foods, there are real concerns with terminator seeds and patenting foodstuffs and the power of agri-business. But these causes won't move many people. But a good food scare, you can really get the Europeans on the wagon with that. So there is a big campaign about the health hazards of GM food, which there is absolutely no evidence for, and quite a lot evidence against - using GM foods lessens the very real hazards of pesticide use. And the upshot is, Africans are starving needlessly in fear of GM foods. In Bush's push for war with Iraq, the real impulse was geo-political, to break the impasse in the whole Mideast, which had become a hazard to the US and was only getting worse, by "leaning forward" and taking a more active stand. Lancing the boil of Saddam's Iraq was a natural first step, rather than continue to spend billions on a losing containment regime that was breaking down anyway. War wasn't a great choice, but it was better than walking away, becoming a big cowardly weakling in the eyes of the Mideast, and letting Saddam get on with developing nukes. But this reasoning didn't get much traction as a political argument, and Tony Blair forced us into the UN, where we had to argue in terms of existing UN resolutions, which were all about WMDs. So the argument became about WMDs, when the main argument was never WMDs, it was Saddam and the nature of his regime.

To: Sam who wrote (98940)	5/23/2003 1:21:46 PM
From: bela_ghoulashi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Jessica's first words to her rescuers were a great American moment. They will pass into history, as well they should. That they were uttered under a Bush presidency and that people like you are evidently so eaten up over that fact that they are emotionally suffering for it just makes them all that much sweeter, in my estimation. You are not trying to "get at the truth", that's self-absorbed, self-righteous bs. I think it's probably a safe assumption that if this had been a "Clinton rescue" you would not be posting and reposting stale three-week old articles here in an attempt to diminish or discredit the accomplishment, under the fatuous guise of searching for truth. You would have an entirely different appreciation of the matter.