Bacevich on Moyers.
For those who missed Andrew Bacevich on Bill Moyers tonight, check out the PBS Web site for the video and transcript. Commonweal readers will recognize Bacevich’s arguments–he’s offered versions of them here–but the whole interview is worth watching.
BILL MOYERS: You dedicate the book to your son.
ANDREW BACEVICH: Yeah. Well, my son was killed in Iraq. And I don’t want to talk about that, because it’s very personal. But it has long stuck in my craw, this posturing of supporting the troops. I don’t want to insult people.
There are many people who say they support the troops, and they really mean it. But when it comes, really, down to understanding what does it mean to support the troops? It needs to mean more than putting a sticker on the back of your car.
I don’t think we actually support the troops. We the people. What we the people do is we contract out the business of national security to approximately 0.5 percent of the population. About a million and a half people that are on active duty.
And then we really turn away. We don’t want to look when they go back for two or three or four or five combat tours. That’s not supporting the troops. That’s an abdication of civic responsibility. And I do think it – there’s something fundamentally immoral about that.
Again, as I tried to say, I think the global war on terror, as a framework of thinking about policy, is deeply defective. But if one believes in the global war on terror, then why isn’t the country actually supporting it? In a meaningful substantive sense?
Where is the country?
BILL MOYERS: Are you calling for a reinstatement of the draft?
ANDREW BACEVICH: I’m not calling for a reinstatement of the draft because I understand that, politically, that’s an impossibility. And, to tell you the truth, we don’t need to have an army of six or eight or ten million people. But we do need to have the country engaged in what its soldiers are doing. In some way that has meaning. And that simply doesn’t exist today.
BILL MOYERS: Well, despite your loss, your and your wife’s loss, you say in this powerful book what, to me, is a paradox. You say that, “Ironically, Iraq may yet prove to be the source of our salvation.” And help me to understand that.
ANDREW BACEVICH: We’re going to have a long argument about the Iraq War. We, Americans. Not unlike the way we had a very long argument about the Vietnam War. In fact, maybe the argument about the Vietnam War continues to the present day. And that argument is going to be – is going to cause us, I hope, to ask serious questions about where this war came from.
How did we come to be a nation in which we really thought that we could transform the greater Middle East with our army?
What have been the costs that have been imposed on this country? Hundreds of billions of dollars. Some projections, two to three trillion dollars. Where is that money coming from? How else could it have been spent? For what? Who bears the burden?
Who died? Who suffered loss? Who’s in hospitals? Who’s suffering from PTSD? And was it worth it? Now, there will be plenty of people who are going to say, “Absolutely, it was worth it. We overthrew this dictator.” But I hope and pray that there will be many others who will make the argument that it wasn’t worth it.
It was a fundamental mistake. It never should have been undertaking. And we’re never going to do this kind of thing again. And that might be the moment when we look ourselves in the mirror. And we see what we have become. And perhaps undertake an effort to make those changes in the American way of life that will enable us to preserve for future generations that which we value most about the American way of life.
Hooray for Bacevich!! People will give him a certain legitimacy because he lost a son in the war. Will it be enough? Will this help restore our national conscience? We broke with our allies. We flouted the Geneva Convention. We ignored the deaths of our soldiers (and our Iraqi brothers). We manipulated an election over abortion, yet we skirted over an unjust, preemptive war that is killing tens of thousands a year and bankrupting the nation. More than Vietban, we lost much of our soul in the Iraq war.
It was an excellent interview with a passionate and articulate father of a military son lost in war. Recently, my corporation implemented a contract with the state of Illinois to provide extended mental health and substance abuse care for the state’s national guard and reserves. All too often the current medical plans for the army do not cover or are insufficent for reserve and national guard. In addition, in the behavioral health field, we are seeing reserve and national guard members serving 3-4 tours and this results in a >50% increase in suicide, depression, sleep disorders, anxiety; returning troops suffering from increased traumatic/closed head brain trauma and post traumatic stress syndrome. These impact families causing separation, divorce, single parent w/kids using WIC & welfare, increased financial pressure on local and state agencies, etc.
Both Congress and the President have been extremely slow to react to this – to Bacevich’s point that very few folks in the US have anything to do with “active” support of the troops, families, etc. In September, Congress will hopefully authorize a bid process so that the state of Illinois warrior assistance program can be adopted at a national level. Like Bacevich, I hope our Iraq experience will widen the debate beyond just military terms, foreign policy, etc.
Bill,
“We broke with our allies …” ? I seem to recall that Britain–which along with Israel has long been our only truly faithful and valuable ally–has been fighting right alongside us in Iraq. Numerous other European countries–from Spain to the Netherlands to Italy–also sent troops or other support. So who exatcly are these “allies” we broke with? France and Germany? Russia? Since when has France been a reliable ally? They essentiually broke with NATO back when deGaulle was president. And Germany has never exactly made the wisest choices when wars are concerned, now have they?
Breaking with “our allies” sounds so very powerful–but when it comes down to mainly “France and Germany” it kind of loses its punch. And as for the “lessons” or Iraq–only McCain has figured that out: Use MORE troops (and in truth he knew it long before it became apparent, which is another reason we need his experience and wisdom in the White House)
Your response is old and tired. Ask the people of Iraq, Palestinians, Lebanese, Pakistanis (the ordinary people) if sending in more troops is the answer. So, you would invade North Korea, Iran, Georgia….yep, you do have an insightful answer.
Not only is your approach bankrupt; it is the opposite of any type of gospel approach much less serious foreign policy for the most powerful nation in the world. The working solution in Iraq by Petraues hinges not some much on more troops but his ability to get the Sunnis and the Mahdi army to support the Iraq government and see terrorists such as Al-Queda as the enemy. We put way too much credit on the military surge. What this means is that you approach the people, listen to them, and empower them not through force but through negotiation. You need to do some studying.
Bill DeHaas,
My earlier response was actually aimed at Bill Mazzella’s comments (I had not noticed you were also a Bill), but since you saw fit to respond to me I shall do so in kind.
So we are supposed to listen to, negotiate with, and base our foreign and military policy on the views of the average Iraqi, Palestinian, Lebanese, Pakistani? That’s an interesting rogue’s gallery to whom you would give a veto over US actions, given that the Palestinians essentially created modern terrorism and have supported it for the past 30+ years (culminating in giving democratic ‘legitimacy’ to Hamas), the Lebanese are strong supporters of Hezbollah and even made it part of their government, having ceeded de facto control over the southern portion of their country to those thugs, the Pakistanis were one of the few groups in the entire world to support and succor the Taliban, and the Iraqis, having been liberated from Saddam’s heinous rule, chose to use their newfound freedoms mainly to start slaughtering each other. Your view almost makes listening to the French and Germans sound sensible.
And of course there is more to what Petraeus has achieved than JUST the military success–but without the additional troops there would have been no success at all (moreover, liike McCain, what I am advocating is the fact that we should have used many more troops right from the start–THAT is the lesson for whatever future wars we must fight: use overwhelming force right from beginning if you want to see a much quicker, more satisfying end.
As for the gospel, we fought to overthrow a sadistic tyrant, to restore the control of Iraq to its majority population, to establish the first democratic government the citizens there will ever have known, despite the fact that they represent a culture and religion that is often at odds with our own … what could be more Christian than that? Indeed, please point me to any war that was fought in a more Christian way? And since I believe one of the tenets of just war theory is that you must have a reasonable chance for success, I will argue that using overwhelming force is exactly how to achieve that chance for success, thus making my argument quite gospel-friendly.
” the Palestinians essentially created modern terrorism”
Make that the Israelis with bombings in France and other countries to force creation of Israel.
“Indeed, please point me to any war that was fought in a more Christian way?”
So Christian that the entire hierarchy of the Catholic church opposed it. Secondly, Christian war is a contradiction in terms. I guess we have to change the Eucharistic prayer to say: “a death he reluctantly accepted.”
Thirdly, are you not on record here saying that you reject the gospel? So what kind of game are you playing?
Robert, there is a big distinction between giving the rogue’s gallery “veto power” over U.S. policy and the U.S. reacting blindly and without thinking through the consequences every time a new threat is perceived. Indeed, you can talk about the rogues all you want, but if the U.S. can be counted on to react in a specific manner, it more or less gives affirmative power to the rogues to provoke the U.S. in a direction of their choice.
There is no substitute for strategic foresight and the discipline to resist the urge to use force as an all-purpose and all-occasion response. We aren’t used to negotiating from a position of relative weakness, and it is one of the hardest diplomatic arts to master. Pretending that we have more strength than we evidently do — or than we are willing to use in any event — only compounds the likelihood that we will not get what we actually want. I am shocked that Ms. Rice (“we are not the world’s 911 response team”) has forgotten this, because the first President Bush (who elevated her status) certainly understood it.
Bill M,
I do NOT reject the gospel–in many ways it is an admirable way of living your life. But I have stated–and continue to believe–that the story of a man who allowed himself to be horribly tortured and murdered is not an example most folks want to follow in their foreign policy (turning the other cheek to al Quaeda or the Nazis or Communists, etc., is certainly not an approach that if honestly announced would ever get anyone elected–thus it would never be honestly enacted).
And who is playing a ‘game’ here: you are one of the most anti-clerical (at least in regards to the clerical hierarchy) posters on this website, so you are the one being dishonest when you suddenly suggest that the hierarchy’s position should be synonymous with proper Christian values.
But since your question/accusation implies that you did not recognize the satirical tweaking inherent in my statement about “gospel-friendly” wars, I may need to start using simpler words and shorter sentences in these threads … though where’s the fun in that?
“We’re going to have a long argument about the Iraq War. We, Americans. Not unlike the way we had a very long argument about the Vietnam War. In fact, maybe the argument about the Vietnam War continues to the present day. … It was a fundamental mistake. It never should have been undertaking. And we’re never going to do this kind of thing again. And that might be the moment when we look ourselves in the mirror. And we see what we have become. And perhaps undertake an effort to make those changes in the American way of life that will enable us to preserve for future generations that which we value most about the American way of life.”
Obviously Bacevich is raising tremendously important questions in the portion that Grant provided. In the excerpt I’ve pasted above, I’ve tried to tease out one strand of his argument, that we never should have gone into the war in the first place.
I don’t disagree. I opposed going to war in Iraq.
I’d like to make a point, though. In saying this, I mean no disrespect to Bacevich nor the terrible price his family paid in this unnecessary, bloody, costly war.
In a sense, the question of whether or not we should have gone to war in Iraq is moot. This is 2008. Rightly or wrongly, the decision was made five years ago, and the opportunity to do something extraordinarily good and right slipped away. In saying this, I acknowledge that Bacevich is right to say that we need to look at ourselves in the mirror and ask how we became a country that could do what we’ve done (or, I would phrase it, “why weren’t we able to become a country that could break out of the old way of doing business?”)
I bring this up – “this” being the business of continuing to rehash arguments in a political dispute that was decided half a decade ago – because I’m interested in people’s voting decisions. My sense, just as one person looking around and feeling the direction of the breeze, is that a lot of voters want to punish the Bush Administration for that five-year-old go-to-war decision by voting for Obama.
Far be it from me to dictate to another person who she should vote. I would, however, like to highlight a topic that is related, but different from the should-we-or-shouldn’t-we-go-to-war question. That topic is, “Given that we’re in this war, what do we do now?”
The US bishops have a website, http://www.faithfulcitizenship.org, that has individual articles on the key questions of the election – the issues that were highlighted in the “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship” document. Among the articles is one on Iraq. It is written by Steven M. Colecchi, director of the USCCB’s peace and justice office. The presumption is that the contents of the article reflect that national conference’s positions on these issues.
http://www.faithfulcitizenship.org/media/article/colecchi
Here are a couple of passages from Collecchi’s article:
“[The US bishops] stated: “The war in Iraq confronts us with urgent moral choices. We support a ‘responsible transition’ that ends the war in a way that recognizes the continuing threat of fanatical extremism and global terror, minimizes the loss of life, and addresses the humanitarian crisis in Iraq, the refugee crisis in the region, and the need to protect human rights, especially religious freedom. This transition should reallocate resources from war to the urgent needs of the poor.”
[...]
“We should continue to learn from the decisions that were made prior to the war. However, now that our forces are in Iraq, we face new moral questions and responsibilities toward the Iraqi people.
[...]
“The bishops use the term “responsible transition” as a shorthand way to refer to a moral framework regarding the war. This framework is rooted in the Church’s commitment to protect the life and dignity of the human person. The word “responsible” refers to our obligations to minimize loss of life and to address the urgent humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people. The word “transition” reminds us that our nation should withdraw its troops as soon as possible.
“Achieving a responsible transition will not be easy. The surge in U.S. troop levels has reduced large scale military conflicts and created openness for political reconciliation in Iraq. However, smaller, decentralized acts of violence remain widespread. Out of a total population of about 27 million, more than two million Iraqis are internally displaced from their homes, and another two million are refugees who have fled the country. A disproportionate number of displaced families and refugees are Christians and other religious minorities.
[...]
“The bishops’ moral framework does not provide a detailed roadmap out of Iraq, but it does suggest important moral questions for Catholic voters to ponder. For example, in light of the traditional moral principle of “probability of success,” we should ask: Is it likely that a given course of action will contribute to a “responsible transition” and withdrawal as soon as possible? Will it save lives, promote reconciliation, protect religious freedom, and help stabilize Iraq?”
Excellent analysis and re-direction, Jim. Your parish is lucky to have you. To broaden this, I also think that the bishops’ document outlines a moral stance for conducting foreign policy. I did my Masters in History at DePaul years ago on “United States and Vietnam: A Critique of the Governmental Decision-making Process.”
Much of my research and arguments were later confirmed by Robert McNamara when he apologized for “mis-leading” (or was it lying) to the American people.
We have a tendency to disrespect the other culture, or nation, or political reality and we hit a nail with a slegehammer.
Jim Pauwels said: “The bishops’ moral framework does not provide a detailed roadmap out of Iraq, but it does suggest important moral questions for Catholic voters to ponder. For example, in light of the traditional moral principle of “probability of success,” we should ask: Is it likely that a given course of action will contribute to a “responsible transition” and withdrawal as soon as possible? Will it save lives, promote reconciliation, protect religious freedom, and help stabilize Iraq?”
Unagidon says: This would seem to hit the point but in fact entirely misses it. The reason that the question of why the war started is still important is that the popular support for the war in the United States was based on our nationalist thinking about ourselves and about Iraq. One can still see this kind of thinking reflected in Mr Reid’s comments. The American nationalist can just as well say that escalating our military presence and intensifying our violence will “save lives, promote reconciliation, protect religious freedom, and help stabilize Iraq.” American nationalists can even say that all we have done so far in Iraq has “minimize(d) loss of life and … address(ed) the urgent humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people”. There is really nothing in what the bishops say that contradicts what a radical nationalist like McCain would say. And in a presidential year especially, I’m afraid that the Left speaks in the tones of the same nationalism, admittedly in a somewhat more benign way.
The bishops’ tone of anguish leaves everyone with something to feel good about themselves.
Has Hell woken up to a frosty morning? I find that I agree with Unagidon about American nationalism–except, of course, that he views this as an undesirable thing whereas I see it as true on its face value: i.e., we are working, on the whole, to “save lives, promote reconciliation, protect religious freedom, and help stabilize Iraq,” and “minimize loss of life and … address the urgent humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people” … yes, there was also Abu Graibh but such things always do happen in war (read some history) and thus they are not that shocking or surprising. What is shocking and surprising is our ability to expose such things, deal with them, and move on while still retaining the basic liberties and idealism that have made this the greatest country in the world (there–I’ve waved my flag)
“Yes, there was also Abu Graibh but such things always do happen in war (read some history) and thus they are not that shocking or surprising.”
Whenever I hear people say things like this, I’m reminded of that scene in “Monty Python’s Holy Grail” where, after a blood bath at a castle, one of the nobles tries to patch things up saying, “Now, now, let’s not bicker and argue over who killed who.”
But I digress.
Anyone care to talk about what we should be doing (or not doing) as the Taliban continues to gain strength in Afghanistan and now that Pakistan seems headed toward political and economic chaos?
It seems to me that if we’re going to become a full bore presence against terrorism in the Mideast, we’ll need to escalate our military efforts, not reduce them.
All of which would make me hoppin’ mad if I’d been living in a HUD trailer in New Orleans since Katrina.
No, I don’t think that hell has awakened just yet, despite all appearances.
If we want to look for the origin of the Iraq War, we probably need to look back to 1945. We won a war against an evil dictator or two that year. What people forget is that we had to utterly corrupt ourselves to win that war. All these years have passed and we have never worked through that corruption. One of the things that happened to us was that we decided that we could use military force to “do good”, not in a defensive way but in an offensive way. We also created a delusion which says that if we are fighting evil than we are by definition not evil ourselves. We eliminated the idea that we ourselves could be replacing one evil with another evil. And as Robert inadvertently points out, for many people the corruptions themselves become part of the “price we have to pay” to do “good” now allowing us to feel justified behind the phrase “mistakes were made”. The Gospel is all fine and good for saints and pansies, but real adults have to make cold hard decisions based on the real world. Or to put it another way, there is the Gospel on one hand and the real world on the other hand, right? So Robert, in choosing to be either a Catholic or an American, chooses to be an American first, but he’s sure that God will understand.
And the funny thing is that the Left here is as bad as the Right. The Right at least knows that if one makes nationalism into a religion, one is going to have to go out and kill people. The Left holds on to an idea that is just as silly.
Jim Pauwels said “Rightly or wrongly, the decision was made five years ago, and the opportunity to do something extraordinarily good and right slipped away.”
This is nonsense. The United States in using its military force can only try to transform things into its own image. The Right has its notion of what the image is and the Left has its notion of what the image is. But both seem to think that our country can use its military power to do good. Unfortunately, we don’t know what the good is.
And the pious platitudes of the bishops don’t help at all. Some wars are necessary, but the point of a just war isn’t about what the war is about. It is the fact that to engage in ANY war, one must explicitly and conciously engage in evil. We seem to think as a nation that we can play with this diabolical fire and not get burned. More fools we.
Jean,
Why should the possibility of the U.S. needing to escalate its military efforts to “become a full bore presence against terrorism in the Mideast” make anyone “hoppin’ mad if I’d been living in a HUD trailer in New Orleans since Katrina”?
It is debatable (certainly Republicans and Demorats disagree on the question) whether the federal government is responsible for the housing situation of individual American citizens–especially in a case like New Orleans where the longstanding corruption and inefficiency of the state and local governments contributed greatly to the problem; even the alleged problems with the Army Corps of Engineers’ work on the levees in New Orleans had a strong local component, given the requirement that the level of federal work authorized is often based on the level of financial contribution that the state and local authorities are willing to make (and thus, New Orleans’ longstanding corruption again played a key factor in what was or wasn’t built and to what level of quality).
But it is indisputable that the federal government and only the federal government is charged with defending the nation as a whole from foreign threats. Thus, it is entirely correct and constitutional that the federal government should focus more on fighting in Afghanistan than on helping people get out of FEMA trailers.
Unagidon,
“… in choosing to be either a Catholic or an American, chooses to be an American first, but he’s sure that God will understand.”
An equally good question is whether God can explain his own actions–i.e., the never-answered, always-problematic question of why an all-loving, all-powerful God can and would allow such terrible suffering in the world? In that case, one can argue that God has more to answer to before Man than Man has to answer to before God … it’s a dilemma that has driven countless Christians toward agnosticism, atheism, and other variations on being “spritual without being religious” in the sense of following a traditional, Bible-based view of God and religion.
But THAT’s a whole ‘nother thread …
Jean said: “Anyone care to talk about what we should be doing (or not doing) as the Taliban continues to gain strength in Afghanistan and now that Pakistan seems headed toward political and economic chaos?
It seems to me that if we’re going to become a full bore presence against terrorism in the Mideast, we’ll need to escalate our military efforts, not reduce them.”
Unagidon says: If one thinks that the Taliban is some sort of evil army, then yes, we need more soldiers. If the Taliban something like, say, a tribal based religious and social movement developed in reaction to the secularizing influences of first the Soviets and then the Americans in a country that suffered decades of war and the killing of a significant percentages of its people, then sending in more soldiers will probably not help in the long run. Social movements like the Taliban are dispersed among the people and the military option requires us to kill the people we are trying to win over. We can repress the Taliban to some degree and for a limited amount of time, but no more than that.
But the question is moot. We don’t really know what we want in Afghanistan. And as all adults know, if one doesn’t know what one wants, one usually gets what one doesn’t want.
” All of which would make me hoppin’ mad if I’d been living in a HUD trailer in New Orleans since Katrina.”
Jean and everybody –
Just so you’ll know where your generous tax money for New Orleans is going, at least partly, here is an article from The New York Times yesterday about the rebuilding of our public schools from total scratch. And guess what — the news is actually kind of good. Hordes of dedicated teachers from all over the country have moved here to help. Among the new teachers is my beloved nephew who lives here. He quit being a computer program designer and started being a middle school teacher yesterday — teaching math. He and all those fine young folk need your prayers. The while project is serving the rest of the country as a great experiment in turning a failing urban school system around. Fortunately, the leadership looks both sensible and creative. Go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/magazine/17NewOrleans-t.html?_r=2&scp=2&sq=new%20orleans%20schools&st=cse&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Unagidon —
We seem to be on the cusp of some terrible times, and I’ve seen many instances lately of people being concerned with the problem of evil. But let what is going on in N.O.’s school system be a bit of an inspiration for you — it is quite possible for human beings to rise to terrible occasions. We musn’t lose hope. I agree that the problem needs to be discussed.
” All of which would make me hoppin’ mad if I’d been living in a HUD trailer in New Orleans since Katrina.”
Jean and everybody –
Just so you’ll know where your generous tax money for New Orleans is going, at least partly, here is an article from The New York Times yesterday about the rebuilding of our public schools from total scratch. And guess what — the news is actually kind of good. Hordes of dedicated teachers from all over the country have moved here to help. Among the new teachers is my beloved nephew who lives here. He quit being a computer program designer and started being a middle school teacher yesterday — teaching math. He and all those fine young folk need your prayers. The while project is serving the rest of the country as a great experiment in turning a failing urban school system around. Fortunately, the leadership looks both sensible and creative. Go to:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/magazine/17NewOrleans-t.html?_r=2&scp=2&sq=new%20orleans%20schools&st=cse&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Unagidon —
We seem to be on the cusp of some terrible times, and I’ve seen many instances lately of people being concerned with the problem of evil. But let what is going on in N.O.’s school system be a bit of an inspiration for you — it is quite possible for human beings to rise to terrible occasions. We musn’t lose hope. I agree that the problem needs to be discussed.
“Jim Pauwels said: “The bishops’ moral framework does not provide a detailed roadmap out of Iraq, but it does suggest important moral questions for Catholic voters to ponder. For example, in light of the traditional moral principle of “probability of success,” we should ask: Is it likely that a given course of action will contribute to a “responsible transition” and withdrawal as soon as possible? Will it save lives, promote reconciliation, protect religious freedom, and help stabilize Iraq?” ”
Just for the sake of accuracy of attribution: those words Unagidon had taken from my previous post were indeed posted by me, but they in turn were pasted from Steven Colecchi’s article. The words are actually his.
Unagidon,
What exactly is your definition of an “evil army” if not the Taliban, which when in power held public executions in soccer stadiums, absolutely oppressed women (including beating one woman who had left her house without a male escort so that she could obtain medicine for her sick mother), and also allowed al Quaeda to train for its 9-11 atrocities … and since losing power has focused on murdering aid workers and others who are trying to help the Afghan people? And, yes, there are other regimes as evil around the world–but they didn’t help attack us, so they need to wait their turn to get what they deserve. Killing them is the best option–consider the example from US history where two former Confederates were bemoaning how meakly the defeated Southerners seemed to be accepting Yankee “domination.” The one ex-Confederate wondered with the Rebel spirit had gone, where were all the brave men who had defied the North’s “aggression” at Manassas, Antietam, Gettysburg, Richmond, Chatanooga, etc., etc. … “Dead,” the other answered … and THAT’s how to settle the problem with the Taliban. Unless you somehow think that such barbarian extremists–who understand nothing but forced–can be negotiated with? If so, you’re welcome to try–in turn, we’ll try to give you a decent burial if we ever retrieve your body.
Robert, I can understand your confusion. The Taliban was and is a social movement. This social movement captured (most of) the Afghan state at one point and as a state government it gave haven to Al Qaeda and had an army (of sorts) of its own. Since this government harbored Al Qaeda, a group of allied countries reasonably attacked them when they said that they intended to continue to harbor Al Qaeda. These allies (which included the United States) dispersed the army, captured the state, and installed a government more to its liking.
We did not destroy the social movement, which still exists, in part because it is tribal based. Since the social movement is based in large part on the idea that the West has designs on Afghanistan (which in fact is true) it is not likely that more Western soldiers is going to cause the social movement to disappear. And yes, under the circumstances, in order to suppress the Taliban in order to allow our “good Afghans” to control the country, we are probably going to have to keep killing civilians (since the Taliban had always been more than just an “evil army”).
But no one is “pure evil” (I think the Gospels teach us this) and the Taliban has a point. If we keep acting like they are pure evil and we as the army of the “good” therefore have the right to make them extinct, we are not going to get anywhere.
“There is really nothing in what the bishops say that contradicts what a radical nationalist like McCain would say. ”
My reading of the Colecchi article is that the bishops have presented five concurrent goals that should guide our policy:
* Recognize the continuing threat of fanatical extremism and global terror
* Minimize the loss of life
* Address the humanitarian crisis in Iraq
* Address the refugee crisis in the region
* Protect human rights, especially religious freedom.
It seems clear that both candidates address the first point. I generally hear the second point framed in political discourse – by both parties – as “protecting American lives”, rather than human lives. As for the last three – I haven’t heard anything so far that suggests that it’s on either candidate’s radar.
Which candidate is more in line with the bishops’ policy? It’s not clear that one is markedly better than the other.
Unagidon,
I cannot believe how morally deparaved your last comments were. If the Taliban “had a point” then so did the Nazis in reagrds to the unfairness of the Versailles treaty–but that point does not excuse the atrocities they committed. And yes there is pure evil in the world: certainly the Nazis, the Gulag system under the Soviets, the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, the reign of Vlad Dracula, now al Quaeda, and numerous others qualify (and I suspect that if the Taliban have not already crossed that line, they are sure inching closer and closer …) … should God choose to forgive such monsters in the next life, he is welcome to do so. But in the physical world of here and now they must be fought and defeated.
Jim said: “It seems clear that both candidates address the first point. I generally hear the second point framed in political discourse – by both parties – as “protecting American lives”, rather than human lives. As for the last three – I haven’t heard anything so far that suggests that it’s on either candidate’s radar.
Which candidate is more in line with the bishops’ policy? It’s not clear that one is markedly better than the other.”
I think that both candidates would have an “answer” to the last three, since no one is going to admit that the country have been ignoring these. We’ve dumped billions into Iraq supposedly addressing numbers three and four and the Right at least argues that number five is why we are there in the first place.
AS for which party is better in this context, the fact is that the Republicans at least since Reagan have been the nationalist party in the United States. I always refer to the nationalists as “radical nationalists”, because the nationalist position as such is a radical position political position in our history. The Democrats are not necessarily less militaristic than the Republicans, but they have not yet become (entirely) corrupted by nationalist thinking and a belief in American exceptionalism that gives us a license to kill when we see fit. So there is, in fact, a choice.
Robert said: “I cannot believe how morally depraved your last comments were. If the Taliban “had a point” then so did the Nazis in reagrds to the unfairness of the Versailles treaty–but that point does not excuse the atrocities they committed.”
I didn’t say that having a point excuses attrocities. But this does not mean that they don’t have a point.
I have said this to you before about Al Qaeda but it has a bearing here with the Taliban so I will repeat it:
“Al Qaeda, in the context of the history of what we call Islam is a heresy; no more and no less. If the Catholic Church knows about anything, it should know about heresy. Heresy springs from the tree of religion but it is not the tree. Heresy is always a protest of something that is real, but is a misguided and dangerous protest since in the end it wants to kill the tree itself. Both the Phoenix and the Beast can arise from the same ashes. The same problems in the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages produced both the Franciscans and some pretty murderous and terrible heresies. The fact that heresies spring from serious and tangible issues does not in any way mitigate the damage that they do. But the damage that they do also does not mitigate the serious problems from which they spring. Al Qaeda was not purified by the blood that they shed on 9/11, but neither were we purified by that blood.”
Good and evil are intertwined. The motivation of evil isn’t the lie, it’s the half truth. As the historian John Lukacs points out, a half truth is all truth and all lie at the same time. This dehumanization of people as “simply evil” ignores whether they have grievances and problems and the question of what it is that they think they are doing. When a ruler plays on the fears, confusion and anger of a people and they do evil things, are their fears, confusions and anger evil too? Can and should these fears, confusions, and angers be addressed? Do we help people in their fears, confusions and angers by simply killing them? Would it not be more constructive to discover what they are and address them? Is this not where changes of heart and conversions come from?
As sad and terrible as have been the things we have done in Iraq, the saddest of all is that we have done them (and continue to do them) thinking that we are doing good. Our faux worldly dismissal of our attrocities only increases our tolerance and, in fact, our appetite for more.
In the interest of our fellow posters and the all-too-frequent tendency of these threads to devolve into private grudge matches between just a handful of commentators, I will make this my final statement (unless, of course, Unagidon says soemthing that REALLY gets my goat …)
I have never believed that the “road to Hell” can be paved with good intentions–since any fair and just theology would not condemn a person unless that person deliberately chose to commit evil. But I do firmly believe that good intentions can lead to national ruin and to utter catastrophes. Unagidon and others here would probably consider the Iraq war such a catastrophe; I believe absolutely that while that war has certainly seen its share of tactical errors and moral failings, the goal has indeed been a good one and the overall situation is now being brought under control.
From my perspective, the way to catastrophe and ruin lies in believing the relativistic concept that “good and evil are intertwined” … while that might sometimes be true, it is hardly the rule … yet the truly evil in this world rely on duping gullible people into swallowing such nonsense. And by that I do NOT mean that Unigidon is truly evil; rather that I fear he has been duped, especially when he tries to argue that al Quaeda’s status as a “heresy” has any relevance in how we deal with it. We never have been at war “with islam …” only al Quaeda and its supporters have ever suggested that, though such nonsense has been echoed by the chattering classes in the west who think everything that America does must be evil.
Witness the tens of thousadns who marched against the mere possibility that the US would use force to oust Saddam, one of the most brutal tyrants of the modern world, and compare it to the relative silence among those same leftist groups regarding the actual rape of Georgia. Unagidon’s reference to helping confused, angry, fearful people by addressing their cocnerns–rather than killing me–reminds me too much of Presdient Jimmy Carter’s orders to the would-be rescuers of our hostages in Iran: Carter said he did not mind if our troops killed the fanatical followers of Khomeini, but if they encountered any simple conscripts from the Iranian army we should simply knock them out or tie them up or something else less lethal … all of which was amazingly humane and civilized and decent–while also being absolutely insane within the context of what the rescue mission was likely to face. It was at that moment that Carter ought to have been relieved of command.
War is a terrible thing–but all sides are not equally evil regardless of any surface similarities. It can be said that Vietnam was an immoral war because our main concern was simply to keep a friendly govenrment in power (or more precisely, to prevent an unfriendly govenment that was part of a world-wide anti-democratic movement from seizing power) but in Iraq our purpose is to create their first democratic government, to build a better society that we hoped could be a model for the other repressive regimes in the region. THAT was a noble goal–even if it was so poorly executed that it defeated its own purposes (at least temporarily–the future may yet see Iraq serve as that model once the fighting ends). Certainly Iraq is ther ONLY Islamic nation in that region with ANY possibility of achieving such a goal, and only so long as we are willing to help them defeat those who would rather kill themselves and others rather than let such a new world begin.
What we are doing now in Iraq is neither sad nor terrible (though we have in the past been the cause of some sad and terrible things, mostly by mistake and almost never by design). It is perhaps the greatest self-sacrifice that any nation can offer to another nation. While Iraq stands to ultiametly be a better place as a result of our actions, we can expect NOTHINg in return (like the chracater in the novel, “The Natural,” who does NOT hit the game-winning home run as the movie shows but instead merely tries with all his mioght to hit that home run (thus we the readers know he is a hero even though the world belives him to have thrown the game for the gamblers).
The only “faux” world view is the one that does not recognize such realities and instead seems to think that our world would be all peace, love, and happiness … if only it weren’t for those wicked, wicked Americans.
“As sad and terrible as have been the things we have done in Iraq, the saddest of all is that we have done them (and continue to do them) thinking that we are doing good. Our faux worldly dismissal of our attrocities only increases our tolerance and, in fact, our appetite for more.”
There is certainly nothing Christian about our invasion of Iraq. We did it for the same reasons the Romans invaded other countries. For the booty. In this case oil. Robert Reid is on record that he is more American than anything else and that God has more to answer for than America.
The sadness about Chaput’s book is that it says nothing about the Iraq war. There are plenty of Christian principles there but when it comes to the application it is always abortion, contraception, marriage, same sex and regular. Sex forever.
OK Bill,
You forced me to respond: As I noted–and the current high gasoline prices confirm–our actions in Iraq have been completely self-sacrifing as our supposed desire for Iraqi oil certainly hasn’t produced any bounty of booty. Yes, Iraq was a nation that attracted our attention because of its tendency to spend its oil wealth on dangerous weapons, but we have not benefited financially from that oil, though clearly we could have (and would have had we acted the way Bill M suggests)
And really: How am I wrong that God–at least the God of the Bible–has more to answer for than anything America has done? Add up the toll: all the American Indians slaughtered, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, interventions around the world, the worst-case scenarios for Iraqi and Afghan civilian casualties … they will not come even close to the slaughter of the first-born of Egypt, or all the killings sanctioned by God for the Israelites, and certainly not the destruction of all human and animal life on Earth except for those safely sitting in the hold of the Ark … and that’s just what the Bible claims God actually sanctioned … how about the countless billions who have died through sins of omission on the part of the Biblical God (let alone the simple fact that every single man, woman, and child on Earth is ultimately condemned to death because supposedly our great-great-infinitely-great grandparents broke a minor rule about fruit consumption …. And before you point out that I probably don’t believe all those Biblical stories, you’re right–but the sins of ommission for an all-powerful, all-knowing God do include all the wars and crimes and diseases, etc., etc., etc., that have harmed innocent people and which God’s power could have but did not prevent … THAT is what God must answer to before Man, and which I noted has driven so many thousands away from religion (for the record, I consider myself an agnostic according to the dictionary definition: a person who believes that any ultimate reality, such as God, is unknown and probably unknowable–though I do personally believe in the existance of some sort of creator.)
Robert,
Now we are getting somewhere. Jesus Christ is the answer to the problem of evil. He was God’s most perfect son and he had the worst death, abandoned by all his friends, disgraced by his enemies and condemned by the state. He did show us the way. It is up to us to respond.
The problem with the fourth century is that his followers forgot that the servant is not greater than the master. Most “Christians” at that time declared themselves greater than the Master and started to think that all they had to do was revere the bones of the martyrs while denying them in their daily lives.
Robert, it is always a pleasure to talk to you.
There’s a lot I could say in response to you, but I found this sentence to be interesting.
“I have never believed that the “road to Hell” can be paved with good intentions–since any fair and just theology would not condemn a person unless that person deliberately chose to commit evil.”
I am not sure that I agree with this. We talk a lot on this blog about a certain primacy that we impute to the individual conscience and I assume that it is this conscience that is informing one’s intentions. We seem to tend to stress the contradictions that we seem to find sometimes between the dictates of conscience and rules that were told that we are obliged to follow. What we don’t look at as much is what responsibilities we might have to inform our conscience (and our intentions).
While everyone can come up with many examples of something that is “evil” the question of what evil is, is actually very complicated, and not just in the Catholic tradition. If it were truly self evident, then we wouldn’t need a Magisterium to tell us what the rules are. Or to put it another way, one of the signs, I think, of a true religious conversion in the Catholic sense is what is called a “heightened awareness of sin” which makes a person see sin and evil in a different and supposedly clearer way. This kind of conversion and these kinds of insights are the product of grace and people seem to report that this gift is in its way as miraculous as any miracle that one can name.
While I suppose that good intentions can mitigate culpability for causing evil, I think it is fair to say that people that love Christ don’t even want to commit evil inadvertently. This is really a radical call to be careful in a certain way; to practice the virtue of prudence in the context of the virtue of charity. We have a responsibility according to our means to educate ourselves about the possible repercussions of our act AND to take responsibility for those repercussions. We don’t look for ways to say “it wasn’t our fault”. Part of being a Christian, in my opinion, and something that makes it so hard, is that we look for ways to make things our fault in a sense. This is part of the radical engagement that we have to have with the world.
Now I have said this before as well, but no matter how “evil” people are, we still have an absolute obligation to see them in their humanity. They don’t forfeit their humanity even when they do evil (any more than you do in the sight of God when you sin). While it is true that sometimes we may have to go to war, we will never be able to approach our enemies if we don’t address them at the level of their humanity. You think this is impossible if the people we are dealing with are truly “evil”. And yet how many of our former enemies do we now embrace as allies?
I’m afraid that you are the relativist, for these reasons. First, you are making the claim that your intentions can absolve you of responsibility for your actions. Second, you are imputing the United States “intentions” that absolve it of its actions.
Good is intertwined with evil in this way. St Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, said that any time any human acts, they do it with the intention of contributing to their overall good. Everyone does everything with good intentions. The question isn’t about intentions but about the gap between intention and action. Is what we are doing really contributing to our overall good or not? The answer is not self evident. Since the answer is not self evident, we cannot use good intentions as a cover for our actions as you suggest. We may do evil when we think we are doing good. And that is my point.
Finally, evil actions always corrupt, even when we think we are doing the lesser of evils in the name of the good. There is a Russian proverb that says this better than I can. You can’t have dinner with the devil and not expect him to bite off your nose.” I don’t think that America is “evil” because I don’t believe that countries can be evil. People are evil. I do think that it is evil to think that countries can be evil.
Ann, glad to hear some good news out of New Orleans.
Robert, not to besiege you with more liberal arguments, but my point about Iraq/New Orleans was simply that we collect taxes to maintain the safety and well-being of our people. Those resources are not unlimited, and I think this administration–with the approval of Congress and many Democrats–have opted to beef up our military presence in the Mideast than address infrastructure problems at home (e.g., levees in New Orleans).
Anyone, all arguments about nationalism, sex and Noah’s Ark aside, it seems to me that there are three distinct threads that have guided our foreign policy in the Mideast fairly well for many years. These threads seem to have become hopelessly tangled in the wake of 9/11 such that it seems impossible (though perhaps Robert can give it a try) to discern clear guidelines about how to proceed in the region.
Thread one: There is the lack of Western-style democracy in many Mideastern countries in which governments repress, by U.S. standards, human rights on the basis of gender and religion. These laws may be repugnant to us, and perhaps need to be addressed diplomatically, but the laws do not in themselves pose direct threats to U.S. security. In my view, they do not warrant full-scale military action against those countries, though peacekeeping forces may be considered when people are being killed, maimed, displaced, starved or otherwise harmed physically.
Thread Two: There is a willingness of some Mideastern governments to harbor terrorists or to pursue WMD development as the Taliban was happy to do when it was in power and as other governments have done more obliquely. These governments do pose some threat to the security of the U.S. and the rest of the world. Again in my view, these problems need to be pursued by vigorous, no-nonsense diplomacy with clearly stated consequences, and may result in military intervention.
Thread Three: Some political parties or governments in the Mideast still refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist. These governments do not pose direct threats to U.S. security, but they do pose a direct threat to a U.S. ally whom we have, for good or ill, sworn to protect. Working for diplomatic resolution to this problem has been on the agenda for nearly 40 years. It should continue to be there, and Israel has a right to expect our support and military assistance when it is threatened.
Hmmm .. as Michael Corleone said (I think it was Michael), everytime I try to get out, you drag me back in … honestly, though, there is so much interesting stuff here to comment on, yet unfortunately this day (or rather my time in front of this computer) is at an end. So I’ll have to wait until tomorrow–if anyone is still posting on this thread–to make more comments.
Though I can quickly summarize the gist of what I would say to Jean about middle east policy: like a ship that stears a steady course through a storm, our most important goal/policy/approach in the Middle east MUST be to support our ally, Israel, against the crashing of the waves and the wind that would break our masts and shred our sails … if we achieve nothing else that the survival of israel, we can be satisfied … if we do manage any other gains, they are ports we are glad to lay acnhor in but truly never hoped to reach.
With some trepidation, given the continued heat here, I just want to say:
I cannot understand how anyone says our entry into the war , even if a mistake doesn’t matter tody given:
-the stretching of our military resources to a dangerous level
-the distraction from terrorist problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan
-the awful impact in injuries on ou rsoldiers who’ve come home and to whom we’ve not given the best of care-the thinness of any saber rattling we are currently capable of, as in the current Georgia mess
We are even thinner in diplomatic resources (more folks in the miltary bands than in the diplomatic corps accoding to last Sunday’s Times.)
Our unilaterilism to enter Iraq and what subsequent dip;omacy we’ve had has weakened our coinage in many places, but we sdtubbornly go on telling ourselves how good we are -a form of jingoism, not patriotism.
The Bishop;s Conference has added little to our Church’s struggling with the issue, despite a few words that can be cited.
Of course, they’re busy with really important things like changing a sentence in the catechism about the Jews (cf. the latest thread shows.)
“The Bishop;s Conference has added little to our Church’s struggling with the issue, despite a few words that can be cited.”
Hi, Bob, as always I find your posts to be interesting and challenging. Re: the bit I’ve quoted here: I will stick up for the bishops on this one. By highlighting the humanitarian dimensions of the Iraqi war – refugees, human rights, religious freedom – they’re bringing a much-needed voice to the national conversation. If Catholics would attend to it and act accordingly, we might be able to influence our government to do something really good in the world.
Even at the level of policy, we’d be wise to attend to the displaced populace. History suggests that refugee camps in the Middle East become fertile breeding grounds for extremism.
“St Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, said that any time any human acts, they do it with the intention of contributing to their overall good. Everyone does everything with good intentions. The question isn’t about intentions but about the gap between intention and action.”
Unagidon ==
Thanks for your very interesting post on good intenitons and evil.
One footnote: Aquinas makes a distinctionn between “ontological good” and “moral good”. Ontological goodness is simply being insofar as it is not nothing and insofar as it is a particular good. Moral goodness is a *kind* of ontological good, and it can include three factors whose goodness/evil is independent of the goodness/evil of th other two factors. The factors are 1) the ontological good produced by an action (these are objective facts), 2) the *intetion* of the agent (his/her choice of something as good), and 3) the outcome of that action, the goal or end (which is usually something objective). Consider this case: a mother in the Amazon forest gives her child polluted water not knowing it is full of deadly bacteria. Her intention is a good one, as is her action of giving the water to the baby, but the outcome is not, because the end is that the child dies. In a similar case the mother gives the child unpolluted water and that end is good.
Assuming these premises, it seems to me that a terrorist who intends to do good by destroying the Twin Towers *is* a good kid, while the action (running a plane into a building is evil/destructive), and the end of that action is the evil of many innocent lives lost.
No wonder Jesus said “Judge not”.
Thank you Ann.
Before this thread dies and relevant to the question of evil (and maybe war) I have a personal anecdote that might say more about where I am coming from.
In the early seventies, when my late mother divorced my father, she went through a sort of wild period. One of the men she dated was an immigrant from Germany. While he had not been an actual Nazi Party member, he had served as a sergeant in the 8th SS Cavalry (Florian Geyer) Division on the Russian front, so I think that it is fair to say that he was part of the Nazi war machine. I got to know him quite well over the two years or so that he dated my mother.
I think that he willingly enlisted in the SS (probably in late 1943, when he became old enough) and he was proud of the fact that he had served in the SS. His war was a brutal one and he had a number of very nasty and for me at the time startling stories about what it was like to be on the front lines. He was from a well off peasant background and he had all of the solid virtues that we would associate with that, because in fact they are also our good solid virtues (albeit rather old fashioned in these days). He willingly joined up with the SS because it was elite and he wanted to excel and because Hitler represented to him strong and decent nationalist values in the face of Russian Communism and Western Liberalism. In other words, like almost everyone else on both sides of that war, his intentions were very good. While he was anti-semitic in the off hand way that most Christians were in his era both here and over there, the Jews didn’t have much to do with the big picture for him and he wasn’t serving in a unit that was charged with rounding them up.
He came into my family’s life when we were very demoralized from the breakup of my parents. He decided that we were depressed and he snapped all of us out of it by applying his peasant values to our situation. With the enthusiasm that peasants have through history had to marshal when things get tough, he got us to pull out of our funk and get control of ourselves. Despite the fact that he had been a soldier for Hitler he was an admirable man.
I am not saying that had I been an American soldier in WW 2 and come up against him I would not have shot him dead on the spot. What I am saying is when I hear people talk this talk about “pure evil” as though a people are thoroughly evil in all regards (and “Nazis” are usually referred to in these kinds of conversations) I have to ask myself. Was this man pure evil. Was he part evil? Was he pure evil for a while and then became only as evil as the rest of us? The question of evil seems to me to be more complicated that people suppose. Robert would have it that entire nations can be evil (or at least that’s the way that he talks) and that entire nations “can’t be trusted” even years later. I don’t think that these “nations” exist. They are a figment of ones imagination, or rather, they are a temptation.
Since it’s late and I’ve had a second glass of wine tonight, I’ll relate another anecdote. The father of a girl I dated in high school had been in the US Army in the war. His was a bad war too. He was a drunk and once while drunk he mentioned how he and a friend of his had shot five German prisoners because it was easier to kill them in the woods than to march them a couple of miles to the place where his unit was collecting them. Now this was murder, of course, but on the other other hand this guy and his friend in early 1945 were the only survivors of the unit as it had been constituted in 1942. He hated Germans, in other words, and there was probably a lot to hate. Were his intentions good or bad? Would God mitigate his punishment? (He probably found out when he died in 1982.) And was my mother’s German friend being good or bad when he machine gunned one of his own officers who had decided to rape an elderly woman that they found in a village they were checking out one day? The thread of civilization is thin and the abyss is always close by. We tend to forget that. And a lamp that glows by the light of other’s pure evil and our understandable mistakes really doesn’t throw off very much light, does it? This is why prudence in the context of charity is so important. We have to be very, very careful when we are thinking about unleashing the storm and dumping our own children as soldiers into the grinder.
Veritas Manet. The war is less and less an issue while abortion is emerging. Where are the bishops on this one? The decibel level, that is.
Unagidon,
We rented “Children of Heaven,” an Iranian film, over the weekend.
It is a wonderful movie, touching and funny, about family values that are universal and upholding the dignity of the poor and marginalized. It’s made by and about Muslims, but there’s absolutely nothing there the Church wouldn’t heartily approve of, and nothing that wouldn’t strengthen the faith of any Catholic.
The movie is told from the POV of two children so full of decency and innocence that you cringe thinking about the junk our own kids are exposed to and begin to understand why other cultures don’t necessarily want Western style democracies if it means their kids are exposed to the junk aspects of American culture.
Jean,
I MUST stop checking this thread when I know I’m supposed to be working on other projects … but MY GOD!!!!!!! Is everyone losing their senses????? Iran is one of the most tightly controlled, theocratically toltalitarian societies on earth today. One where religiuous police beat and arrest women who don’t conform to their (not always clear) rules on “proper” dress (especially during the hot, hot summers where the women are still expected to bundle up like Darth vader in head-to-toe black garb) …
Yes, the film is a wonderful piece of storytelling (Iranian artists apparently often use children’s stories to try to sneak criticisms of the nation’s theocracy past the government’s censors … )
But to suggest that the experience of the children in this film offers any lesson for us or to explain why “other cultures don’t necessarily want Western style democracies if it means their kids are exposed to the junk aspects of American culture” is a specious argument. What? Because kids in western democracies are exposed to mindless Saturday morning cartoons they might be better off living in a theocratic state with few human rights? Little Sally would be happier in a burqua if only she could see some higher quality movies? Little Johnny need never learn to shave since he’ll be required by law to grow a beard?
Please !!!! This America-bashing mentality is hard to stomach. Is there anything at all in this story that could not have valso taken place invovling in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia? Yet if it had, would you have suggested that the “family values” in those two regimes might be more appealing than banal American culture?
That should have read: “… involving CHILDREN in Hitler’s Germnany or Stalin’s Russia?”
Robert, you are seeing Iran through your eyes as though you as you are now would be forced to live there. You don’t know what aspects of its government are onerous in the eyes of the people living there. You don’t know if Little Sally thinks that wearing a burqua is a fundamental violation of her God given right to wear a pink mini-skirt with Hanna Montana’s picture on it. You don’t know what a purely secular Iranian democracy might look like. You have no idea what they think is good or bad about the United States and you have no idea whether in fact they want a government like ours (and a culture like ours) or not or whether they are so miserable under this “totalitarian theocratic state” that they would welcome someone like us to come in and “free” them.
At the very least, the last government that the US supported in Iran was a dictatorship run by an EMPEROR for crying out loud. But yet the Right and its current dubious choice for president thinks it knows enough to demand regime changes and armed intervention there… for the sake of the Iranian people of course.
Jean,
I will try to see “Children of Heaven”, but for another, original view on the Iranian theocracy, you should go and see “Persepolis”, a 2007 black-and-white animated autobiographical movie about a girl growing up in Iran during the Iranian revolution.
Robert, Iran is something I do know about because I have had direct involvement with Iranian refugees. Iran is actually not one of the “most closed” societies. Saudi Arabia, for instance, is much more closed and much more repressive to women. In Iran, women can vote — something they cannot do in half a dozen other countries (including, until quite recently, Kuwait).
Iran is repressive towards women in ways that can be exceptionally punitive — but so are many other countries, including Pakistan and again, Saudi Arabia.
On the other hand, Iranian women have approximately equal access to education, again, unlike many other Islamic countries, work outside the home, and are allowed to drive.
In short, Iran is a relatively advanced society that made a decision to put itself under the yoke of Islamic hierarchs 30 years ago because of some very sui generis developments in Iranian history, and can’t shake it off yet. When you scratch below the surface, Iranians do not hate Americans, but if America invades Iran, all bets are off.
The point is: there are seriously positive signs that Iran will, if not next year, then in 10 years. Further, it is quite clear that President Bush’s bellicosity set back reformers in Iran considerably, or else we might even now be seeing greater fruits of Iranian liberalization.
The worst thing we could do would be to antagonize the Iranian people through invasion or some other use of force, and deplete the steadily increasing goodwill.
And it’s a mistake to view every tinpot crazy dictator (like Ahmedinijad) solely through the lens of our own interests. He was elected primarily because he appealed to “meat and potatoes” economic concerns, and his overall power is actually quite limited. We need to quit letting our chain be yanked like this.
Liberals are really quite amazing in their ethical contortions … Just about everything George W Bush and the Republicans have ever accomplished or tried to accomplish is held up to ridicule and scorn … they are accused of invading Iraq like a conquering Roman in search of oil “booty”, presumably in place of bread and circuses … yet a man who freely chose to join the Waffen SS in WW2 because he could be a member of the “elite” (when many other military options were open to him), and a man who shot German POWs, and the entire thugocratic theocracy of Iran, and the taliban, and al Quaeda are all given at least the benefit of the doubt for having a “point” or some sort of legitimate grievance or at least not being (horrors!) a pro-American emperor!!
It is too often said (but apparenbtly rarely believed) that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it … Hitler, also was viewed as a tinpot crazy dictator witha few legitimate grievances who came to power mainly because of the poor economic conditions in his country, and many Germans at the time could easily be described as being not all that anti-British or anti-American, and in fact quite likely to eventually get rid of that silly fellow with the Charlie Chaplin mustache (the German geenrals are famous for having expected they could “control” Hitler) … and while Ahmendinijad does not have all the economic and military resources of a German-style nation at his command, he does have almost unlimited oil money and the very real possibility of obtaining nuclear weapons (or do liberals actually take him at his word that he’s only interested in the peaceful production of atomic-powered electricity?) …
It was said in the Old West that God made all men different but Col. Colt made them equal–nuclear weapons might not make Iran our or Israel’s military equal, but such weapons will make them extremely cocky and even more dangerous (and PLEASE do not raise the tired old argument that Iran will never attack us with those weapons because we could easily destroy them–the threat lies not in what Iran would do outright but to what terrorist client they would give such a weapon to carry out their plans … moreover, given the nuanced and sophisticated worldviews of so mnay who have posted here on how entire countries cannot be labeled eveil and even terrorists sometimes have legitimate points, should similar views be held by the US administration at the time of an atomic attack–which would likely destroy “only” one city–it is not at all clear that Iran would be wiped out in response. Indeed, Obama was quick to criticize Hillary precisely because she threatened to destroy Iran if it attacked Israel with uclear weapons.
I’m a Catholic, not a liberal, as in Catholic first, American second.
I have never said that Bush and his administration has bad intentions. His problem, actually, is that he operates off of his intentions and allows this to blind him to what might actually be going on. And I am not giving the people that you mentioned the benefit of the doubt. I mentioned some of them myself to say to you that if you think that the United States needs to get into the business of suppressing “evil” you need to know that the question of evil is not as clear cut as you think.
You have already admitted that you are an American nationalist and you have cast all of our international relations in terms of this fiction of “good countries” and “bad countries”. Since “bad countries” are by definition “evil” on cannot impute any rational interests to them nor dare one predict their behavior.
You ignore rather than address things because of this. So for example, while Barbara pointed out the fact that Ahmendinijad has little formal power in Iran, you give him unlimited oil money and control over it in pursuit of his evil and irrational intentions anyway. And you compare Hitler with other dictators in countries that have nothing in common in terms of their politics, culture, social structures and economies except that they are “evil” and therefore have everything in common. And despite the fact that economic, political, and social conditions now are quite different from what they were in 1933, since evil countries are all the same it follows that their historical trajectories are also all the same.
This all plays well in domestic politics but it isn’t good international politics. Also, it’s not very Christian especially in the sense that it is really dehumanizing both to the objects of your national ire and to yourself, because you flatten yourself out as much as you do the others. It’s an impediment to you. But you don’t have to take my word for it. You should really read some history.
Claire, I have “Persepolis” in the Netflix queue, but it hasn’t come up yet. I’ve heard that is also very good, different perspective.
Not sure why this thread is generating such heat.
Liking an Iranian film and feeling that it conveys a moral message about human dignity is in no way bashing America. Neither is saying that I’d rather have my kid watch “Children of Heaven” than “Hell Boy 2″ saying that I want to live in a repressive Muslim state. Only riffing off Unagidon’s anecdotes that we distinguish individual Iranians from the nuttier elements in their government.
What puzzles me about conservatives is that they seem to me to do a kind of weird dance re “America bashing.” On the one hand they become exercised if anybody points out the good or decent in “enemy” territory, waving it all away by waving the burqa, sharia, and all that. On the other hand, conservatives seem to do a fair amount of America bashing by griping about how America is decaying because of secularism, relativism, and a turning away from traditional values.
Ayatollah Khomeini agreed completely.
Almost nothing makes me sadder than the demonization of Iran (though I guess we could say that they started it first by demonizing us).
Persepolis is an enchanting, wonderful movie. Among other things, it shows with absolute clarity how it was that Iran opened itself up to theocratic rule without thinking through the consequences. Vacuum of power is at the center of what happened — a vacuum that was created in no small part because the reigning shah suppressed secular forms of dissent or alternative governance. He was unable to suppress religious leaders in the same way, hence, they became the focal point of displaced popular dissent. We need to understand this, because very much the same thing has been happening for some time in Egypt.
It would take sophistication, clearsightedness and a long-term plan to figure out how best to advance our interests with respect to Iran.
PS- “Persepolis” is not a movie for children. There are scenes of graphic violence and painful tensions.
Unagidon,
While I do enjoy these exchanges, I find myself constantly in need of taking words out of my mouth that YOU inserted there. For instance, I have never once suggested that we should not try to determine the reaons why our enemies behave in the way that they do or try to understand what their goials might be–both are useful bits of information in order to defeat them. But in our language and culture the suggestion that someone has a “point” definitely implies it is a possibly valid point–THAT is what I object to. Also it is rather inconsistent to describe someone as a “dictator” yet also suggest he has little or no actual power–which is the contraditory way that Barbara worded things … you might feel hopeful that Iran’s thugocratic clerics (and yes I am deliberately denigrating them–they deserve it!) will rein in Ahmendinijad’s madness but neither I nor the Israeli Defense Forces (and if it comes to that, hopefully the USAF to back them up) are as reassured.
But Robert, you don’t see that the particular way that you demonize these people (and elevate us) obscures your view of both them and us and your ability to understand what is going on.
In terms of points, you are missing Barbara’s. The Iranians backed the clerics because they hated the Shah (for good reason) and he had supressed all other alternatives. Now at that point the general public there gave general support to the clerics. In your terms, they were all evil then. But why they supported the clerics was an important thing, because it identified the nature of the populations “point” and further would help US analysts (when we still had them) to predict which way things would go in the future.
The US has done this many, many times, especially during the cold war, where anyone who tried to rebel against and ally of the United States (no matter how repressive he was) was labeled a Communist. Because of course someone who rebels against our friends couldn’t possibly have a point.
A point that you always miss in your analyses of the rest of the world is that other people besides you are motivated by a strong desire for national sovreignity. One of our problems in Iraq is that when people are worried about their sovreignty, they don’t want foreigners coming in and taking control, even if they are pure minded American angels. The Right in the US on one hand are radical AMERICAN nationalists but on the other hand, when it comes to our foreign adventures, they want to portray us as somehow plain vanilla supporters of an abstract idea of democracy and freedom. We expect (or rather, you expect) that the people of Iraq, will ignore the fact that they have been occupied by a foreign, Western, Christian power because our intentions are so pure and because we have promised to leave as soon as we are satisfied with the way they are governing themselves. And people who fight us there because they don’t like the idea of a foreign, Western, Christian army in their country are labeled by you as “evil members of Al Qaeda” who must be killed because they don’t (get to) have a “point”. That this killing adds to their ranks doesn’t show that perhaps they do have a point, it only show people like you that the evil world conspiracy against freedom is larger than we thought. And all of this because you fancy yourself as fighting a war of good against evil with you defining very clearly both sides of the issue.
As always, Unagidon, you exaggerate and extrapolate what I actually say into whatever larger point you wish to make about Republicans and conservatives in general (you suggest I believe that “all” people in certain countries are “evil” when in fact I have only described those who actually do evil things as evil … for the record, given that we and our foreign and Iraqi allies are the only ones in that country who are actually working to build a better Iraq, I would argue that anyone fighting against us is misguided, duped, uninformed, or otherwise unwise in opposing us–but only those who actually commit the most heinous acts such as strapping suicide bomb vests to mentally reatrded women and sending them out to die or timing suicide blasts to kill children in a market place are actually “evil” …) or do you somehow believe that the insurgents are actually the good guys in this fight? That their cause is the right one? That Iraq will be a better place if they prevail? Remember: I am not saying they are all evil–but they are all mistaken in their assumptions about America’s plans for Iraq, mistaken about what the consequences would be if we are froced to leave before the misison is completed (and in some cases they are evil–such as those who are fighting to establish sharia law, rebuild the caliphate, keep women under control, and generally prevent their society from becoming more democratic … on THAT point there is NO debate: No one has the right to tell any man or woman you may NOT be free, you may not be an individual, you must follow our ways, do what we say or we will kill you (and yes in a college debating class sense that is a contradiction in terms: no one may tell you how to live your life but the US will tell you that you must be democratic–but that is how reality works: it’s the old idea that your right to swing yopur fist ends at the tip of another person’s nose … you may do whatever you wish with your life EXCEPT use that freedom to take away another person’s freedom … which in this case means they do not have the right to impose sharia law, force women to wear burqas, kill people just for listening to music or watching TV, etc., etc., all of which has been done by jihadists and other islamists around the world.
Also, your argument about the Cold War and our opposing those who opposed our allies is a very tired one–that Mao’s revolutionaries, or Ho Ch Minh’s or Castro’s, Khomeini’s followers, etc., etc., were really just interested in their nation’s independence from foreign domination or liberation from a homegrown tyrant–if ONLY those foolish Americans had realized this and abandoned their colonial or tirannical partners, these groups would have turned out to be peaceful, progressive members of the world community.
Indeed, it is always depicted as America’s fault that they turned into bloodthirsty monsters, killing more of their own people or oppressing their own people as badly if not worse than any foreign army or local dictator ever imagined … the same misguided logic is used today to suggest that the people who become jihadists really would be noice, normal decent people if only those stupid Americans hadn’t invaded Iraq or Afghanistan … I say: PROVE IT! Don’t just mouth the anti–American talking points of the day. Show me one person who went out and blew up innocent women and children who was an otherwise decent human being driven absolutely nuts by American interventionism … thew iodea is absurd on its face–yet that is essentially what your views suggest.
Robert, I impute certain ideas to you because that’s the way that you write. When you talk about Palestinians, for example, you don’t say “the current Palestinian government”. You say Palestinians. If you want me to have a different understanding about your thinking, you have to be more clear.
Now that you have clarified that you are talking about governments, you have allowed politics to enter your argument. And if you allow politics to enter your argument, you are (I’m afraid) obliged to allow in all sorts of different interests. Politics means differences of interest and action and yes, even intention. So in fact, you really can’t even paint a particular government with a broad brush. So when the time comes to begin the killing that you think evil people so richly deserve, you now have to admit that we run the risk of killing people who are not evil and who may in fact be potential allies. Or we may even kill people who are simply innocent. What do we do about that?
Which gets me to a certain topic you have stimulated me to think about. The question of the “hard choice”.
One of the reasons, if not the main reason, that the Right calls McCain “tough” and Obama “weak” is that McCain is willing to be “tough on defense”. Since I think that no one means by this that McCain is tough because he is willing to personally go and kill the enemy, this means that McCain is more willing than Obama (according to the Right) to use military force. Now what makes McCain tough if he is willing to send other people into battle, especially when he runs no personal risk? Or what would make Obama weak if he is supposedly not willing to?
I think it boils down to a suspiciously simple but in fact very difficult idea of “the tough choice”. You yourself have referred to it in your posts both directly and indirectly. When someone mentions in the context of Iraq that we seem to be killing a lot of civilians and causing a lot of damage, you give the “war is hell” argument that sacrifices sometimes have to be made for the higher good and we have to sometimes make tough choices between war on our enemies and killing the innocent.
The thing about a tough choice, however, is that it has to actually be tough. We have an overall moral system where there are often two (as we say in business) down sides to a decision. But in business, we resolve this by looking at the risks and rewards for each choice literally in the form of an equation, then choosing the one that has the highest reward profile. We don’t think of this as making tough choices (well, maybe we sometimes pretend we do when we contemplate a mass layoff) and being tough or brave or weak doesn’t enter into it.
One of the great problems of our age in America is that as Americans (and I am speaking of all of us) we tend to think of moral choices in the same way. This is why, for example, that we get so wrapped up in this Catholic blog arguing about what the moral rules require. In one sense, doing this in the context of a religion whose basic theological statement is “love and do as you will”, this seems kind of silly. We do know that there are often two down sides to a moral decision (look at abortion and how we tend to discuss it for example) but in our discussions we talk like accountants constructing risk-reward algorithms. We congratulate ourselves that we are tough enough to make the right decision by patting ourselves on the back for embracing the down side of the position we hold. But this is not the same, in my opinion, as making the hard choice.
A hard choice is a choice that will damage you no matter what choice your make. A hard choice, for example, is going into a burning building to rescue someone even though you know without a shadow of a doubt that you will be permanently burned even if you don’t get killed. Hard choices always damage the chooser in some way. It’s ironic, but in Right wing political discourse, the weak person is the one who has to think about unleashing war because he or she knows that civilians will be killed and he or she will have to hold the personal responsibility for that and be haunted by it for the rest of their lives. McCain is all too flippant about war, which is why he is neither tough nor able to really make a hard choice. It is simply not a hard choice for him, because another thing about hard choices is that they come one at a time in situations that are always unique. When one claims to have a “principle” about making hard choices they are either lying or morally immature or both.
The thing that strikes me about your arguments is that they obscure how hard a choice war really is. War always corrupts and corrupts permanently anyone who engages in it no matter what side they are on. This alone should make war a hard choice for someone who claims to be a leader. In your case, you don’t seem to see this. The fact that you don’t see this is part of the way we in the United States have been corrupted by war, since we like to lie to ourselves to puff up our pathetic self esteem by painting our wars as “good wars”. We can do this in part because we have not suffered any direct war damage to our country in 150 years. The Europeans, whom you deride as cowards, while having been corrupted in other ways by WW 2, do still know what war means and a thing that makes them by and large morally superior to us (in thus particular regard, anyway) is that war is still actually a hard choice for them.
Regarding your other points, you are still stuck on the idea that the US operates from the best possible intentions and the people who are our enemies operate from the worst possible intentions and that’s all there is to it. Barbara’s excellent point that the US supports tyrants who repress attempts of their people to build democracy legally which then forces them to do it illegally has led all over the world to the US saying that these illegal revolutionary movements must be Communistic and therefore we were obligated to assist in their oppression in order to support our own American friendly tyrant. This is the way that the world actually works.
Now the REAL tough choice: my incredibly long and detailed response–obviously too long–was just lost because my session had “timed out”, as the responses of others have been … do I try to recreate it? No. But the gist was that what Unagidon describes is all theoretical–it’s college debating club stuff where you have the luxury of wondering who’s good, whose bad, do good and bad even exist, do we exist, is our whole universe just a speck of dust under the fingernail of some giant in some giant universe, etc., etc.????
In the real world, tough decisions are like what Churchill had to do when he order the Royal navy to sink the French fleet rather than let it fall into Hitler’s hands.
Also, the whole Cold war analogy is ab out 15 years late–then, we did support any despotic regimes so long as it was anti-communist that … now, in Iraq and Afghanistan, we are fighting the potential islamist despots to preserve democratiucally elected govenrments … yes, we support despots in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc., but please: we are a bit too busy fighting tooth and nail to start pciking on our stable allies just now. Moreover, while you might believe–stoill highly questionable–that those who opposed us in the Cold War were actually would-be Jeffersonians, the same cannot be said of the islamist and jihadists who would likely seize power in Egypt or saudi Arabia if the regimes there fell … right now, the dictator of pakistan has fallen–will the new leaders be able to fight off the islamists there? Will they even try all that hard, given that the key thing that made Musharaff so unpopular in Pakistan was the fact that he was helping us in the war on terror? Look at what happened when we forced elections in the Palestinian territories: hamas came to power. That’s not an exampel we want to see repeated.
These are the tough choices the next president faces. It’s why I suppot McCain. (and now to “save” these comments so I can re-enter them if I timed out …)
Robert, to avoid losing my posts, I routinely highlight the whole thing and then right click and Copy before I hit the Submit Comment button. That way, if I time out (which is often), I can log right back in, right click and Paste.
Crafting my incandescent insights into deathless prose sometimes takes more than three minutes, and God forbid my comments (or yours) should be lost to the ages–or at least the readers of this here blog.
Robert – you need to read the last book by Robert McNamara. He clearly defines the wrong decisions by the US starting with LBJ and the US move to replace the colonial power of France in IndoChina. The US made up the Gulf of Tonkin affair to justify our actions and they were based on a the “domino theory” – per McNamara and any number of experts, that theory was discredited over and over and over. We will never know if supporting the American educated Ho Chi Minh and his nationalist party would have worked? It is not a truism or trite statement that liberal historians trot out. Because of the USSR threat, the loss of China to communism (there is plenty of historical documents that indicate the US could have changed that outcome also but we chose to back a discredited and corrupt government – Chiang Khi-Shek), the US operated around the world out of fear of the monolith of communism. In retrospect, we now know that this was not the case in Africa, Central America, or even Vietnam.
When the Allies declared war during WWII, one of the goals justifying the war was so that all peoples could gain “self-determination.” Unfortunately, with the end of the war, European countries again re-created their colonial empires and the impact is still felt today in places such as Yugoslavia, Africa, Central American, the Middle East.
In terms of Palestine, you need to study its history starting in 1900. During WWI the British needed Arab support to defeat the Ottoman Empire. Promises were made along nationalist goals but Versailles along with the secret Sykes-Picot Treaty and the Balfour Announcement re-created a colonial empire for Britain over Egypt, Palestine, TransJordan, and Iraq. French gained control over Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The Saud and Faisal families split the Arabian peninsula – Saudi Arabia to Saud; TransJordan, Iraq, Syria to Faisal’s sons under British/French control. Balfour allowed for increase Jewish immigration which initially the Arabs were not opposed to. At this same time Herzl and Ben-Gurion began the dream of a Jewish nation especially in America. Increased immigration led to a number of massacres in Palestine in the 1930′s. Yet, immigration continued. WWII created control for 5-6 year period but then in 1946 & 1947 and another secret British decision to allow even more Jewish refugees access to Palestine (reality – after WWII, Western nations really did not welcome Jewish refugees – Palestine was ideal for them), Jewish terrorism organizations (Stern and Irgun) plus Arab terrorism in response drove Britain out of Palestine. Israel with US backing declared independence; the Arab nations attacked. Egypt had gained national status; Iraq & Syria had also. The cycle continues today but in no way can you say the the US policy has been two-sided or objective.
(One exception – Eisenhower in the 1956 Suez War, forced Israel, Britain, and France to stand down – that was the last time any US president stood up to Israel)
In the last 20 years since the first Intifada, I will support your statements that leaders such as Arafat betrayed the Palestinian people; were corrupt rulers; and always played the victim. But, it is difficult for any American statesman to deal with the Middle East given this history – we seem to start with 1990 or the war of 1973. It is a complex and difficult story. What we need is something akin to Nixon going to China – a surprise, real politik. Israel is facing isolation because of demographics and policies that rupture their long standing support of human rights, freedom, and nationalism.
“Balfour allowed for increase Jewish immigration which initially the Arabs were not opposed to. At this same time Herzl and Ben-Gurion began the dream of a Jewish nation especially in America. Increased immigration led to a number of massacres in Palestine in the 1930’s. Yet, immigration continued. WWII created control for 5-6 year period but then in 1946 & 1947 and another secret British decision to allow even more Jewish refugees access to Palestine (reality – after WWII, Western nations really did not welcome Jewish refugees – Palestine was ideal for them), Jewish terrorism organizations (Stern and Irgun) plus Arab terrorism in response drove Britain out of Palestine. Israel with US backing declared independence; the Arab nations attacked. Egypt had gained national status; Iraq & Syria had also. The cycle continues today but in no way can you say the the US policy has been two-sided or objective.
(One exception – Eisenhower in the 1956 Suez War, forced Israel, Britain, and France to stand down – that was the last time any US president stood up to Israel)”
Bill DeHaas ==
Thanks for the concise history. I’ve often wondered just how the Jews entered Palestine/Israel. It seems to me that from the beginning the Palestinians were treated unjustly. Given that the British were the ones in control, the Palestinians were hoodwinked by this slow admission of foreigners into their land.
How did it come about that the native Palestinians had to move from their own land for the sake of Jewish immigrants? That, it seems to me is the crux of all the problems in the Middle East because it was so obviously unjust — native peoples being physically displaced from their properties by foreigners. And things won’t be settled there until they get major recompense.
“How did it come about that the native Palestinians had to move from their own land for the sake of Jewish immigrants? That, it seems to me is the crux of all the problems in the Middle East because it was so obviously unjust — native peoples being physically displaced from their properties by foreigners. And things won’t be settled there until they get major recompense.”
That one is simple and it depends on the spin. It is put out that the Palestinians didn’t actually exist as a national identity; that Jews were always the majority in Palestine or that Jews always lived in Palestine, which makes the Arabs interlopers; or that the Jews didn’t take Palestine away from the Palestinians, they took it away from the British who gave it to them; or that Palestine has to be seen in the context of all of the Arab lands that the British owned and that in fact Arabs got 98 percent of these lands and the Jews got 2 percent; or that the Jews fought and won a war with the Palestinians and that the Palestinians need to just suck it up; or that the point about Palestinian rights is moot, because the Arab countries expelled their Jews and Israel took them in so it follows that the Arab countries have an obligation to take in the Palestinians, etc. etc.
Bill DeHaas:
I am actually well aware of all the points you made regarding Palestinian history, but to be blunt: I SIMPLY DO NOT CARE. Israel is our ally while the Palestinian people danced in the streets on 9-11. Even if they had the most just cause in the world, I would not lift a finger to help them after that.
Also, your comments about Ho Chi Minh and Mao (unless you can point to another viable alternative to Chiang) suggests that soemhow they (or their supports) would NOT have turned into the murdering thugs that they became if only we hadn’t opposed them? It is nonsensical. Where is there ANY evidence that Ho’s supporters would not have created reeductaion camps or the conditions that led to the boat people–if only we had supported his revolution? That Mao would not murdered millions through froced famines and great leaps forward–if only we’d abandoned Chiang? Remember: to this day, the PRC reserves the right to murder tens of thousdands on Taiwan by attacking that island should they ever decide to give up on reunifying with China?
And thus, given the tough choice between murdering thugs who support our interestes and murdering thugs who oppose our interests, it is not such a surprise that we preferred one over the other?
Ann – there are a number of books that have recently been published about the Palestinian Question. With the 1948 independence declaration, mass relocation and immigration happened (either by choice or by force) – those Arab tribes, villages, families headed primarily to Jordan, Lebanon, some to Syria & Egypt. Interestingly, when the PLO came about and started to riot in Jordan, the King fought a war to expel all Palestinians from Jordan – that is why Arafat was in Lebanon (there was no Arab nationalism outcry against this expulsion – so, historically, not even Arab rules wanted the Palestinian refugees.)
The question of Arab refugees, compensation for lost villages, farms, orchards is still on the negotiating table in the two nation (Road Map) proposal….but, along with the status of Jerusalem, it is constantly left open because there is no agreement on how to settle this issue. (a like example would be apartheid in South Africa – were reparations paid for apartheid?) Also, Israel will not allow Palestinian refugees to come back into Israel and re-gain their historical lands – they offer desert/West Bank solutions???
Robert – your emotional statements have very little to do with the historical record. You reach conclusions that no one can either prove or substantiate. But, you fit in nicely with the neo-cons like Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc. Some day you will realize that they have been discredited by the facts. Your comment about 9/11 riots – emotionally I agree with you but I also understand their reaction; don’t agree with it but understand it. Do you really believe that China would invade Taiwan? I know, it is just like South Ossetia?
Thanks, Bill DeH. What a mare’s nest. Plenty of guilt to go around. I’m the 60′s on Washington D.C, I met a young Palestinian Arab who said the the Palestinian Arabs and Jews got along fine until the English Zionists decided that npn-Palestinian Jews had a right to the Prpmised Land. So I guess the fundamental problem I’s a theological one. But how would you ever get two or three sets of theologians to agree on a just solution?
ISTM that the theological claims can’t be still be valid ones. But I’m sure many would disagree. Sometimes I understand Dawkins’s complaints against organized religions
Ann – it gets even more complicated when you drill down. The Arabs went through a period of nationalism in the 1950-1980′s – but, when that did not have much success, a series of internal revolutions, etc. happened and the Iran, Palestinians, Lebanese, etc. began to accept political parties and rulers based on religious ideologies. So, in Lebanon you have Christians, Arabs split into many groups, Druse, Syrian influence, Muslim, Hezbollah, etc.
Palestinians are split into Christian, Hamas, Fatah, and then more radical groups that justify their existence using religion.
Remember that Zionism was really a national movement not Jewish religion. In fact, most Israelis identify themselves as native born, Sabra, and diaspora Jew, immigrant. Then, you have multiple Jewish parties some that align with conservative, orthodox, radical, etc. Jewish or Israeli religions/politics.
It is a swamp.
“Remember that Zionism was really a national movement not Jewish religion:
Bill DeH.,
Hmm. Could you extrapolate. I’ve always thought that Zionism was inspired by the religiouos belief that Jews have a right to Israel as a homeland, so the problem involves both faith and land. This, of course, makes it an essentially intractable one.
Use this link: http://www.mideastweb.org/zionism.htm
Essentially, Herzl founded Zionism from earlier ideas. The issue of nationhood was his response to the Jewish diaspora and continued anti-Semitism around the world. His Zionism is actually a secular nationalism and he proposed Palestine and the notion of equality with the Arabs who lived there.
Ultra-orthodox Jews are the ones who accepted his idea of nationhood but then wedded it and gave it theological backing – ancient land of the Old Testament, justification for immigration to Palestine, etc. They, in fact, did not agree or support Herzl because he was secular.
Bill DeHaas:
Do I believe China would invade Taiwan? In a heartbeat! They have clearly said that if Taiwan ever declares independence they will invade–what about that is unclear? Have you learned nothing since WW2 (when Hitlker essentially spelled out most of what he actually planned to do in Mein Kampf, but of course very few people actuall;y believed he would do it ..)
Moreover, with the precedence of Russia and Georgia, China probably feels even MORE inclined to invade Taiwan whenever it wishes under the asusmption that they can swarm over the country before we can possibly react (true) and that there will then be little we can do about it (untrue–but heavily dependent on who is presaident at the time)
BOTH CANDIDATES, AS WELL AS CONGRESS, MIGHT DO WELL TO LISTEN TO ANDREW BACEVICH… NOT JUST HEAR HIM
Only rarely does someone surface with qualifications as well as insights and a delivery that stimulate thinking. Even more rarely does an individual stimulate the very personal mental articulation of self observation.
http://pacificgatepost.blogspot.com/2008/08/andrew-bacevich-rare-sobering-voice.html
Bacevich deserves as broad an audience as can be exposed to his thoughtful analysis.