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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Oeconomicus who wrote (17479)	9/23/2004 6:42:08 PM
From: Original Mad Dog	Respond to of 90947

I've encountered her posts before, and the fund manager bit is something I heard before, either from her or a detractor. But even if she is a fund manager in Monaco, that means she is (a) closely involved with a capitalist enterprise; about (b) money, something which is highly valued in American culture generally; and (c) probably requires some sort of international perspective to make good decisions, since presumably her fund includes companies outside of Monaco. She should be free to express whatever opinion she likes, and if that opinion lacks value it should be confronted with the reasons why it lacks value, not merely the fact that she is not an American. IMO of course. I travel quite a bit, and when I leave the U.S. I am always interested in how others view us and think we should run things. There is a difference between being interested in that viewpoint and agreeing with it, of course -- I find it fascinating how Europe turned a blind eye to Hitler while, through the League of Nations, resolution after resolution was passed requesting -- no, demanding -- that Hitler disarm immediately. He didn't, of course, and as the beast became more insatiable the other countries tried to solve the problem by feeding it each time it got hungry. It didn't work then, and eventually the cost to humanity was enormous. In retrospect, paying some sort of price at some point in the 1930's to cut the head off the beast, if necessary militarily, would have been a great idea. The world would have been much better off for it. Now we face a different set of beasts in a different time. Saddam had much in common with Hitler, and the world's unenforced resolutions demanding that he disarm (some of them strikingly similar to the 1930's League of Nations resolutions) went largely unheeded. Many argue that Hitler's scope was global while Saddam's was local or regional, but I think that ignores that madmen like Hitler or Saddam usually start out at the local level and expand if left unchecked. Hitler started with Munich, then later Germany (over which he consolidated power by removing rivals, much like what happened over the years in Iraq). Both dictators built large militaries and then began projecting that power, first upon their neighbors. There was a point where Hitler was merely a regional power, controlling Germany and Austria and the Sudetenland -- which really sucked if you lived in those places and weren't Aryan, but if you were in London or Paris it may not have seemed so bad. Saddam's attempts to project power were met by force, first from Iran in the 1980's and then from the UN coalition in 1991 (a coalition action, BTW, which John Kerry opposed and voted against even as Saddam's troops were patrolling Kuwait City and raping the women. Later on, of course, he supported the result of that which he had opposed.) The other difference between then and now is that tactics have changed. 9/11 and Madrid and the Russian school bombing (and OK City and the first WTC bombing and on and on and on) teach us that a few people with relatively limited resources can wreak havoc on civilized society. The projection of power on a remote adversary like the U.S. no longer requires airplanes or ships or long range missiles. It only requires terrible weapons and some ingenuity in delivering them -- whether they be passenger jets turned into missiles or cruelty visited on people going about their everyday business or, in a worst case scenario, weapons obtained from a state sponsor who shares your dislike of an adversary. In 1981, Saddam had a nuclear reactor, and the Israelis took it out. The French, among others, were mightily pissed. But was that a good thing for humanity, in the end? I think probably so. In 1998, Bill Clinton recited Saddam's litany of transgressions (including the WMD development) and unleashed four days and nights of ferocious bombing on Iraqi targets. Was that wrong? Or was it wrong to start bombing at all? I showed Clinton's speech to your friend from Monaco once on these threads, without telling her it was Clinton's, and she seemed to think it was another example of GWB's "hot air" and "deceit". I'll fish out the post and link to it below, since I don't recall her exact words and don't want to mischaracterize ..... but many of the anti-GWB forces have not resonated with many Americans on the Iraq issue because the detractors paint GWB as some of prevaricating neocon monster, when he was really not saying anything different than his Democratic predecessor .... he was just more determined to do something about it. Hitler started out as a small snake and was allowed to grow. Saddam started out as a small snake and, once GWB came around, was not allowed to grow. Were both reactions -- allowing Hitler to grow and not affording Saddam that same opportunity -- wrong? Links to earlier exchange: Message 19711212 (quoting Presidential speech citing justifications for bombing Iraq) Message 19711311 (z's response describing the President by saying "the stuff he was "armed with" was hot air at best and willful deceit in order to conjure public support for this invasion (i.e. lies) at worst") Message 19711500 (revealing that the President who made the speech -- who zonder described as full of hot air and willful deceit -- was not GWB but Clinton)