Obligatory war musings
Mar. 26th, 2003 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
electriclandGuess it's time for my semi-obligatory War Post. I guess the reason I haven't weighed in up to now, aside from time pressures, is my very seriously divided mind (that, and everyone else is saying things so much better than me).
Herewith, therefore, more random bits of my brain. Warning: contents may be contradictory.
Paul Celucci is very disappointed in us. That's too bad, Mr. Celucci. I'm pretty disappointed in you guys too. (Although horror of horrors, found myself agreeing with Diane Ablonczy this evening that our government hasn't handled the situation especially well -- is it a cold day in hell?) Honestly, I do appreciate that you'd be there for us if we were facing problems. The problem is, you haven't made your case. I still don't believe that Iraq is an immediate threat to the US, although granted the past week's events have probably increased the threat. If you'd been consistent about why you wanted to invade (threat to the US? ties to Al-Qaeda? regime change?), if you'd provided any convincing evidence in support of the proclaimed need to invade, if you hadn't made a farce of the diplomatic process, if you'd decided from the beginning that you were justified in invading because of unfinished business from the first Gulf War instead of trying to get the UN to rubber-stamp you, I'd probably be more in favour.
Does this mean I think Saddam Hussein is a nice guy? Absolutely not. He is by any measure a nightmare. I'm a bit worried here about my own inconsistency because goodness knows I was all for getting rid of the Taliban -- do I care more about oppressed women in burqas than about oppressed citizens being tortured and gassed? I don't think so. I even cautiously applaud the urge to get rid of Saddam Hussein. But I worry about the long-term consequences of this war. It began as a public relations disaster and it's only going to get worse. The international community is not on side, because of the utter failure of the US to convince anyone of the need to invade. Iraqis and other Arabs are not falling over themselves to welcome the liberators; they're fighting back. I fear for the future of the world.
I was listening to Ideas this evening (what it is to get home early! -- CBC has at least resumed some semblance of a normal schedule rather than all war coverage, all the time, though most of their programming is still very war-themed) and they were playing something called Beyond War, about the human costs of war, which was very good and very sad. What struck me most was a guy who'd been a POW in the first Gulf War, talking about having been a prisoner and having the same lousy food and next to no water as his captors -- at one point they were all drinking water out of a mud puddle, which he said had already turned his guts inside-out, and a woman approached with her children and began to drink it; he said he found himself reciting, very quietly, like a prayer, W.H. Auden's Epitaph on a Tyrant:
Herewith, therefore, more random bits of my brain. Warning: contents may be contradictory.
Paul Celucci is very disappointed in us. That's too bad, Mr. Celucci. I'm pretty disappointed in you guys too. (Although horror of horrors, found myself agreeing with Diane Ablonczy this evening that our government hasn't handled the situation especially well -- is it a cold day in hell?) Honestly, I do appreciate that you'd be there for us if we were facing problems. The problem is, you haven't made your case. I still don't believe that Iraq is an immediate threat to the US, although granted the past week's events have probably increased the threat. If you'd been consistent about why you wanted to invade (threat to the US? ties to Al-Qaeda? regime change?), if you'd provided any convincing evidence in support of the proclaimed need to invade, if you hadn't made a farce of the diplomatic process, if you'd decided from the beginning that you were justified in invading because of unfinished business from the first Gulf War instead of trying to get the UN to rubber-stamp you, I'd probably be more in favour.
Does this mean I think Saddam Hussein is a nice guy? Absolutely not. He is by any measure a nightmare. I'm a bit worried here about my own inconsistency because goodness knows I was all for getting rid of the Taliban -- do I care more about oppressed women in burqas than about oppressed citizens being tortured and gassed? I don't think so. I even cautiously applaud the urge to get rid of Saddam Hussein. But I worry about the long-term consequences of this war. It began as a public relations disaster and it's only going to get worse. The international community is not on side, because of the utter failure of the US to convince anyone of the need to invade. Iraqis and other Arabs are not falling over themselves to welcome the liberators; they're fighting back. I fear for the future of the world.
I was listening to Ideas this evening (what it is to get home early! -- CBC has at least resumed some semblance of a normal schedule rather than all war coverage, all the time, though most of their programming is still very war-themed) and they were playing something called Beyond War, about the human costs of war, which was very good and very sad. What struck me most was a guy who'd been a POW in the first Gulf War, talking about having been a prisoner and having the same lousy food and next to no water as his captors -- at one point they were all drinking water out of a mud puddle, which he said had already turned his guts inside-out, and a woman approached with her children and began to drink it; he said he found himself reciting, very quietly, like a prayer, W.H. Auden's Epitaph on a Tyrant:
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
