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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (148886)	10/24/2004 7:08:14 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

My code of morality isn't peculiar at all. I'm unwilling to tolerate dictators that gas their people or use prohibited weapons in a war against another; but nor am I willing to tolerate our own leaders that aid and abet these same dictators or knowingly take serious immoral action themselves. Analogy: If you aid and abet killing someone, or have specific knowledge of such a crime but do not report it, then you are an accomplice at worst or obstructing justice at best. Do you not believe that we should act with morality? Time and time again past administrations have been shown to act with an alarming lack of morality yet you seem unconcerned about this, nor do you seem to accept that moral lapses in the past will likely happen in the future and may well be happening now. I fully appreciate that all major nation states act in the realm of immorality from time to time. You have consistently castigated only other nations while failing to recognize that the US is as culpable as any of those that you attack.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (148886)	10/24/2004 7:10:04 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Are the arms merchants who worked hard to sell them nukes and make them REALLY dangerous, are they responsible? Nope, that's just the French doing what the French do. As what portion of the declassified record of the Reagan administration shows, the US was in there before the French. Perhaps subsequent US administrations were just mad because the French closed the deal first?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (148886)	10/24/2004 10:25:26 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 281500

Under conventional reality, everybody is responsible for their own actions. As near as I can tell, that's not the world W operates in , where the war he just had to have is all somebody else's fault, and anybody who questioned W's various and ever shifting rationales was like Neville Chamberlain or something. Now, it's a big mess, but we mustn't call it a quagmire, for that might offend the moralistic word police around here. I have absorbed many lectures from my self-proclaimed moral superiors here. I find it all pretty ironic. Personally, I think the sometimes allegedly neo-Wilsonian W ought to be running on a properly neo-Wilsonian campaign slogan. He got us into war. He's the war president, he's never going to change, so change is going to have to come from elsewhere, or the mess will get a lot messier.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (148886)	10/25/2004 11:28:21 AM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

It's a bunch of moral preening. Make yourself feel superior while helping nobody and hindering the only people with any realistic chance of doing good. Nadine, you forget the warm fuzzy feeling one gets by engaging in moral preening. Very satisfying, very metropolitan, very sophisticated. Moral preening is an exercise in fantasy. The most "moral" President of the 20th century, Jimmy Carter, was an utter disaster in the foreign policy arena, and not ony because of Iran. You might recall that he and Brezinski invented the idea of using Islamic radicals as surrogates against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The current Jihadist movement is based on this "moral" President's error. I hanker for the good ol' days of realpolitik, when nations only had interests and damned few morals. Things seemed to work a lot better then.