Damned if you do,
damned if yo...,
2002-11-20 02:00:00
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"We believe that Peter Jackso...,
2002-11-20 02:00:00
Despite
lofty talk, aid is nowhere to be seen outside Kabul.
They add some irrelevant comments from George Kennan at the end:
"Our government is technically incapable of conceiving and promulgating a long-term consistent policy
toward areas remote from its own territory," he wrote. The problem, he added, is that "our actions
in the field of foreign affairs are the convulsive reactions of politicians to an internal political
life dominated by vocal minorities."
It was that lack of a long-term policy that led us to walk away from Afghanistan in the early 1990s,
after we had pumped the country full of weapons to defeat the Soviets...
We didn't walk away from Afghanistan, we kept
fueling
the conflict, for one thing, and for another foreign policy is dominated by the executive
branch: that's one guy, and from here it looks like our policies have remained long term and
consistent. Oh the vocal minorities! The crisis of democracy again? Or am I to take this seriously
and posit that the only vocal minorities dictating policy are the ones the man in charge is
actually listening to? Someone point out the "vocal minorities" that are demanding we
refuse aid to
Afghanistan.
If I'm supposed to believe that Bush's lofty rhetoric about how all we want is peace
then why is it that I hear him rant on every day about how this or that is the last straw, all
systems GO? These are the dickheads that foisted Saddam into power
and then kept him there,
there's no demonstrated evidence offered to show in what way
our present B-52 delivery system of "liberation" will be any different than the "liberation" we were
bringing to our client-states in the past. The Hitchens
pro-war neo-left is off their rocker if they think we can fix our cold war fuck ups by following exactly the
same strategies of the past: utilizing proxy armies, arming third parties to the teeth, reducing third world
countries to rubble, and "regime change".
You cannot, in essense, terrorize fanatic terrorists out of their desire to terrorize, and this is essentially
what the pro-war crowd proposes at present, or more generally they propose terrorizing civillians out of their lack of desire
to terrorize. As we have seen in Afghanistan it is far too easy for the enemy
to melt away in the chaos of full-scale invasion. What is logically called for is active, aggressive policing,
better intelligence work, and undermining the grievances and policies that bring about fanaticism in the first place.
Not that an Iraq war would have anything to do with fighting terrorism, as both Hitchens and Bush essentially
concur, but that the problems they wish to solve via invasion - the product of our past atrocities and our need for oil -
will not be solved by war. The solution to our past atrocities is building our own nation's institutions
into an accurate representation of ourselves, essentially, and the solution to our energy dependencies is in building
new energy infrastructures that we are capable of providing to ourselves. So far as I can speculate this is
all just a mass distraction anyway, whether or not we go in, to hide what the other hands are doing.
Am I supposed to believe that we're sending
1,100 marines to Columbia to battle the US supported terrorism there?
