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dissent isn't dissent when everybody consents...,
2005-10-04 13:58:15
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pro-war front groups...,
2005-10-05 17:03:09
short attention span theatre:
foreign policy follows up a two month old story, expressing a brand of idiotic surprise that fails to impress us by its contempt for recent history: "the most prominent hard-liners show more nuanced and realistic positions than might be expected". These are the people we were working with in Iraq for over 30 years, what are we supposed to expect? That they wouldn't remember the rules for playing ball with their old partner?
Seriously.
And there's our boy genius Thomas Friedman cutting to the long chase: arm the Kurds and Shi'ites and let them go to town on the Sunnis. Promoting civil war like it was a popular soap promotion is a sure bet. You see, responsible people don't advocate withdrawal because that would lead to a civil war. Responsible people advocate promoting a civil war so we can leave. He follows up this sensible piece of advice about how to do anything but promote democracy with some bluntly racist determinism about how - if, in the middle of the foreign occupation and the civil war Friedman was just promoting and thousands of fanatically criminal nutbusters running amok, Iraqis can't put aside their differences and enjoy the fruits of peaceful compromise - "we can look forward to dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world ... forever". Somehow it's simultaneously both the best and worst example.
Indeed, our policy has been brilliant, thank god Thomas Friedman was finally able to formulate it. Nowhere does he, say, suggest seeking peaceful compromise between those who are doing the fighting, as discussed above, rather the Sunnis are supposed to spontaneously drop their guns and start marching in lockstep to the tune of a foreign power. It's brought us this far! America, you did good!
I'm trying to summon up the appropriate label for just how vile that all is, or what it means that this is what is considered a serious public intellectual in my society, but I can't quite put it into words. Something like "fucktard", but with the connotation that the fucktard is also an infantile, quasi-fascist sycophant jerkface. Should be writing for fringe rightwing journals reviled by ordinary Americans... oh. Right.
America could do better.
:: posted by buermann @ 2005-10-05 11:10:31 CST |
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