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

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (101533)	6/14/2003 6:07:14 AM
From: frankw1900	Respond to of 281500

<The US has done the Iraq people a great service.> If this were true, why is it, that only Americans believe it? If your question were based on fact, and it is not, then I would say the ROW hsn't really looked at the situation in Iraq through clean glasses. The US has done the Iraq people a great service by freeing them from horrible tyranny. Ask non-Baathist Iraqis, "Did the US do the right thing over throwing Hussein?" and they will say, "Yes," and go back to recovering their murdered family and friends from the mass graves. Why is it that Iraqis, and the people of every Moslem nation, even nations that are our close allies, even nations whose governments are kept in power by our troops, none of them, not a single one, believe this is anything but a colonial conquest? Not a single one? Nah. They don't all think that and many of those who say so still think the US did a good thing over turning the evil regime. The graves keep being opened and more and more are questioning their views of the US. I have a question for you. Assuming that the Iraqis continue to kill our soldiers at a rate of at least one a day, (and we continue to kill them at a much higher rate) how long before you'll admit that we are not doing a "great service" to the Iraqi people? One year? Two years? Five? If, who the US is killing are Baathist fighters, indefinitely. This is why the power to make war, has to be taken out of the hands of any one government, and given to multinational organizations, like the UN and NATO and EU. You have jammed together very different kinds of organizations. The UN is extremely unfit for dealing with regimes which commit crimes against humanity, because of how its Charter is written, and is not a government, and therefore has neither moral nor physical standing with regard to how these regimes can be dealt with. This is why it was up to NATO in the end to deal with the post Yugosalvia problem and why the UN ratified that intervention post hoc. NATO is a mutual defense pact of European and N American nations originally meant as protection for Europe against the un-modern Soviet Union. Since the fall of the Soviets, it is the process of redefining itself as a defence pact with broader scope. The moral standiing of NATO war enterprises depends only on the justice of its goals. That it is multilateral does not in itself give it any particular cachet as an appropriate vehicle for intervention or give it justification for its war making. EU is described by its Brussells leadership as a nascent "United States of Europe" and it has no more moral sway than the United States. Even if you don't accept that argument the governments of Europe were far from united regarding the Iraq invasion and a number supported it. In the hands of any one government, it will be misused, as we are seeing. What we are seeing, if you refer to Iraq, is the undoing of a murderous fascist tyranny. War making power in such an instance is not "misused." On the contrary, it's being put to its best use. We are in the middle of this rule-change, moving toward a better world, where only wars sanctioned multilaterally are seen as legitimate, by the vast majority of the world's peoples. "Moving toward a better world"... the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I read such utopian lines. Multilaterallity doesn't guarantee the actors behave justly any more than majority rule in a country guarantees just behaviour there. The individual case and the action taken determines the legitimacy. There was no legitimacy in allowing the evil Iraq regime to continue if by 'legitimacy' you mean justice or that a moral case can be made. Unintentionally, the U.S. government has served a useful purpose, by presenting the world with this cautionary tale, of the arrogance and misuse of unilateral power. Arrogance is action taken from pride or disregard of the feelings of others but that doesn't necessarily illegitimize the correctness of the action or demonstrate the "misuse" of power. As they continue to open the graves in Iraq you certainly aren't making your case the US has acted immorally. As I said, you need to re-examine your premises.