Steaming Douglas
Michael Young | April 1, 2006, 11:05am
Before an audience at a British soccer clubhouse in Blackburn, England, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has apparently learned that the best attack involves self-immolation, had this to say about the U.S. war in Iraq, according to the Washington Post:
But in response to a question about whether the administration had learned from its mistakes over the past three years, she said officials would be "brain-dead" if they did not recognize where they had erred. "I know we've made tactical errors, thousands of them I'm sure," Rice said. "But when you look back in history, what will be judged is, did you make the right strategic decisions."
Unfortunately, Rice is wrong. History has little patience for "right strategic decisions" if they later prove to be unsuccessful. That's a shame, because getting rid of Saddam was nothing if not "right." But perhaps the most galling aspect of Rice's partial mea culpa is that she allowed that avatar of British old-school realist pomposity, Douglas Hurd, to brush off the mildew and utter a phrase of such smug duplicity, that one is tempted to reach for whatever Mappin & Webb implement is sharp.
"It is quite possible to believe" that democracy is essential, Hurd said to the crowd after [Rice] spoke, but also to "believe that essentially the path must grow from the roots of its own society and that the killing of thousands of people, many of them innocent, is unacceptable whether committed by a domestic tyrant or for a good cause upon being invaded."
Indeed, mass murder is unacceptable committed by anyone. However, if Hurd cannot distinguish between the actions of Saddam Hussein, whose Baath regime was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths through the conscious implementation of plans of extermination, for example the successive Anfal campaigns against the Kurds in 1988, or the savage repression of Iraq's Shiites and Kurds after the 1991 Gulf War; if he cannot distinguish between all this, and far more, and what the Americans are doing today in Iraq, then he really is living proof that life peerage is a repository for cretins.
But Baron Hurd is no cretin, or is one only figuratively. This was, of course, the man who refused to arm the Bosnian Muslims during the war in Bosnia during the 1990s, effectively perpetuating Serb military superiority; the man who peddled NatWest's wares to Slobodan Milosevic when he became deputy chairman of the bank after his retirement from government. In other words, Hurd is precisely the kind of foreign official those like Saddam and Slobo could rely upon to defend the status quo allowing them to escape accountability for their crimes. Thanks Condi, for giving the old fart a platform.
martin | April 1, 2006, 2:49pm | #
Sorry to state the obvious, at least to many:
Hurd equates killing, not the clearly different motivations of the killers
That is precisely the point.
A man of his stature should be capable of nuanced thinking. His knee-jerk hand wringing about killing, divorced from circumstances, is just emboldening the thugs, terrorists and tyrants.
He can't even bring himself to unequivocally support the very system that gives him the opportunity to think and speak freely. Rather he utters
"It is quite possible to believe" that democracy is essential. As if democracy and Saddam's system are based on one and the same philosophy.
Our adversaries don't care about any laws, they make them up as needed, they don't care about public opinion, they suppress it.
Democracies, such as the US, don't work that way.
Hurd's kind of thinking, furthered by the media where they can publish in freedom, goes back to Vietnam. As if the foundations, intentions and methods of the US and it's allies were the equal to those of the Vietcong or Saddam or the Islamists, to name a few.
That both Vietnam and now Iraq could have been conducted differently once undertaken or perhaps should not have been undertaken at all, is a different debate. As it is, these conflicts helped shift responsibility for killing away from the system that should bear it.
Especially many Europeans have the cheek to think like Mr. Hurd. They weren't even capable to take action in the Balkans, because they were so busy demonstrating for peace.Unfortunately prominent voices in the US are not far behind, witness their reaction to death threats to their own freedoms, killing, and embassy burning.
Frank_A | April 1, 2006, 10:29pm | #
thoreau,
I know you, and I know you are not even remotely what John is claiming. He's spewing shit.
I am not even trying to link you or joe to being a Baathist sympathizer or abetter because I do believe that the both of you have made pertinant and intellegent commentary on the demerits of the war. You both may be limp-wristed libruls, but nothing more ;)
joe,
And then George Bush decided he was going to use the leverage we gained on 9/11 to address the Iraq problem. He got a UN resolution, he got the inspectors back in, and they were on their way to definitively proving that the WMD programs were kaput, while Saddam took a humiliating drubbing before the world and his own people, and we gained a freer hand to act in Iraq. You are also right that the inspections required the credible threat of force to back them up - but that's a threat the nation that just overthrew the Taliban could have made, credibly. But no, Bush was determined to have his war, and he was just so certain it was going to go spendidly and, boy, wouldn't the liberrals and the French and the UN look like a bunch of idiots then! There was such an opportunity here, and it was squandered by hurbris.
That really is the crux of the problem of invasion, on whether or not the inspections were really working and could take out Saddam.
I'm sorry, but I cannot trust an organization whose Human Rights Council has Cuba, or whose WMD Disarmanent Branch was to be headed by IRAQ!, or who could not uphold their own resolutions time after time again. And all this was known before it was revealed that Kofi Anon's own son was implicated in the Oil-For-Food scandel and the whole buisness of UN soldiers/faculty involved in child sex trading! It's credibility, IMAO, is in the minus 100's on anything it says...
Hans Blix was correct, there were no WMD's, but all the shit that surrounds and insulates the UN makes me distrust ANYTHING it does, so at the time and even now I still believe that certainty of WMDs in Iraq could be found only by invasion.
As for the threat of the US making because of Afghanistan, Saddam had provoked us over a number of years, he had violated the UN Resolutions time after time, he had many international friends who backed him up in case of US sabre-rattling.
And for Bush being a needless war-monger, he had credible reason for fearing Iraq after everything it had done over the years, not to mention how it was offical US policy to liberate Iraq (which could include invasion).
Frank_A | April 2, 2006, 3:25am | #
Les,
Very good criticisms.
I will try to respond to your objections, but I'm sure you and most people will find it very lacking, because...well, I admit to being callous in regards to US foreign policy.
I think this is a poor excuse for not recognizing and demanding that our leaders recognize the atrocities we've been a party to. Pointing fingers and saying, "Well, look what THEY did!" is just as juvenile as what you accused Johnny of. Bad behavior is bad behavior and it doesn't matter if others are doing it. We have a responsibility to recognize it and admit it and strive not to repeat it.
That truly is the basis of morality, when you can look and admit to your own wrongs and try to make amends for them.
However, if we truly want to cleanse ourselves of wrong, isn't it necessary to make amends to the people we've harmed? This is what worries me the most because not only does Realpolitik dictate that our status as a Superpower would make most nations try to charge us with everything under the sun in order degrade our power, but that there is a large activist base around the globe (whether Right or Left) that beleives that we are the root of their problems and would needed to be tried for various crimes.
Also, we have been commiting major infractions against other nations' soverignity since even before Andy Jackson's campaigns against the Indians, and so states like Colorado and California might be returned to Mexico or to the orignal Indian tribes.
Furthermore, I highly doubt that even though we are forced to make amends that the Russians, the Chinese, or other Communist nations will have to face their consequences of aiding and abetting evil, or how about those 3rd world countries themselves who also created. It is not justice when only we alone are condemened and have to serve our sentence when the other criminals of the world get off scott free.
Very true. And the fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo were immoral, unnecessary atrocities and we shouldn't be afraid to say so. And while we were friends with Stalin, we did NOT help him murder his citizens as we did in many countries throughout the cold war.
....
This, falsely in my opinion, assumes that it takes "bad deeds" to protect the free world. I believe in American ingenuity to such a degree that I think we can protect the free world without resorting to the tactics of our enemies.
As for Stalin, we did not pull the trigger, but we sent him the millitary materials to keep his police state intact during WWII, help support the Soviet partisans in the USSR who were extremly brutal against their own people, and ensured that Eastern Europe fell under the repression of the Iron Curtain for 50 years. FDR can be mainly blamed for this because he trusted Stalin too much (which is why his White House had so many traitors like Alger Hiss) and we cannot forget that Stalin was a master politician and at the time we needed to support all of our allies, but our friendliness to Stalin did aid the genesis of the Cold War and it's consequences.
As for doing bad deeds, then how to explain our campaign in Afghanistan? We relied on the Northern Alliance/Afghani warlords as our ground forces agaisnt the Taliban. They are also accused of many infractions against human rights, but less so than the Taliban. We used them because history has shown what a foreign and mechanized army will do in Afghanistan (it fails), so we augmented the Northern Alliance with our special forces and our air power, and they won. And the effects are felt today in Afghanistan because while Hamid Karzai has made progress, most of the country is still under the warlords grasp (with such conditions as the Christian apostasy trial) because we could not conquer the Afghanistan by the clumsiness of our mechinized forces or by the limited numbers of special forces.
Also, every war will cause civillain deaths (unless we revert to the professional armies of the absolute monarchies), so aren't we morally tainted by that too? We can limit the number of civillian casualties, but as long as there is the fog of war, civillians are liable to harm.
While the anti-war people are inflexible to the demands of world society (especially in terms of Al Qaeda), they do have a point to the basic amorality that attends our war actions...
joe | April 2, 2006, 5:01pm | #
Frank A, I wish more hawks were like you. You have a capacity to face hard facts, admit setbacks, and respect dissenting viewpoints that has been sorely missing over the last three years. Those are not just personal virtues, but they also foster better policy decisions and operational management than we've seen.
When we last met, you were dissing my statement that intrusive inspections, backed by a credible threat of force, both with a UN mandate, would have served us better than this invasion. You based this on two planks - we can't trust the UN, and we couldn't credibly threatan Saddam into backing down.
As far as the first point goes, we weren't in a position of having to take anyone with a blue beret at his word - our intelligence agencies, and those of our allies, had access to the data gathered by the Blix team. Hell, the team largely consisted of our people. You argue about the UN as "them," but when we're talking about the forces enforcing the Iraq armistice, "them" is mostly "us."
As far as the ability to make Saddam back down, I'll point out two data points: Operation Desert Fox, which convinced him to thoroughly dismantle his WMD programs; and the return of the UN inspectors prior to this war. We don't have to speculate about whether Saddam would back down in the face of the US, fresh from routing the Taliban, with a bad attitude and a UN mandate. We know, for a fact, that he would, because he did.
quasibill | April 3, 2006, 8:56am | #
"However, if Hurd cannot distinguish between the actions of Saddam Hussein, whose Baath regime was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths through the conscious implementation of plans of extermination, for example the successive Anfal campaigns against the Kurds in 1988, or the savage repression of Iraq's Shiites and Kurds after the 1991 Gulf War; if he cannot distinguish between all this, and far more, and what the Americans are doing today in Iraq, then he really is living proof that life peerage is a repository for cretins."
Wait - this might be a new low point.
Mr. Young, are you honestly arguing that our entire homicide jurisprudence is a fraud? That only intentional killings are wrong, that knowingly killing an innocent is just hunky dory?
Or are you arguing the moral relativist side - since there are Dahmers in the world, there's nothing wrong with me downing my bottle of vodka and then holding a drag race in the local elementary school's playground at recess time?
Isn't the whole point that first sentence that you acknowledge is right - namely, that killing an innocent is wrong, absent a justifiable mistake about self-defense? And saying that well, OUR killing of innocents is better than them doing it, well, I guess the best way to address that turd is just to let it stand there and stink for itself.
I guess personal responsibility IS dead. "Why did you kill those children?" "Well, Saddam was going to kill them anyway, so I didn't do anything wrong."
