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Flyboy, I'll take your four points made over your two threads one at a time:
1) I've already said that 'ammount of blood on hands' is not an effective way to decide whether one person is more moral than another. Just because Ed Gein, who committed two murders, killed less people than Jeffrey Dahmer (seventeen) he doesn't become a nice guy. Indiscriminate killing is wrong, once you do it you've crossed the rubicon and you can't be considered noble or heroic. That is why I still maintain, and apparently need to state in every post I make, that neither force engaged in this conflict can claim moral superiority over the other.
2) Some governments are better than others. A government where you can vote, even in extremely flawed circumstances, is better than one in which a group of gangsters tell everybody living under their heels that Saddam has once again won the 'election' with 99% of the vote. The "whitey* liberal anti-war, guilt-ridden remark" that your blogging friend hates so much is perfectly justified. I despise the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because they were done so badly, because innocent people died, because cups of pudding that looked identical to cluster bombs were dropped, because torture was used, for all the same reasons any sane person opposed the war. And yes, I am glad that Saddam and the Taliban are gone, they are awful people and should not be running a country. The war the coalition fought was done badly, because of the 'shock and awe' tactics you mention being used. That's why I can say I 'despise the war', not because I don't believe that the war should have been fought or that there was a better alternative to war to remove Saddam and the Taliban. That's what people mean when they say they opposed the war and are glad that two dictatorships are gone. People aren't divided into the categories 'Libral Hippy douche' (Galloway, the 'Little Eichmans' guy) and 'Crazy gun-toting redneck'** (Coulter, the guy who writing Liberality) , and not agreeing with carpet bombings and torture should not means you have to agree with dictatorships.
3) I'm genuinely staggered you actually typed 'it is (U.S) policy to kill Iraqis in their thousands'. I mean, wow, I thought we had a difference in opinion, not a difference in which planet we're from.
4) The duty of Iraqis is to their country, yes, and that duty is not being served by a continued insurgency. Every suicide bomb, beheading and shooting makes the coalition forces stay longer, every Marine who wakes up in hospital to find that all his friends have died when their convoy was attacked is going to go back into the field looking for payback. If it was their genuine wish to see the U.S gone in as short a time as possible then yes, they should cease attacks. I seem to recall that an Indian fellow who got a massive empire occupying his country and committing atrocities to leave did so without killing anybody. It sounds crazy but it's true.
Would I do the same if the country I live in, the UK, was being occupied? Well if you're fond of hypotheticals, imagine if the British Nationalist Party, the nearest thing I can find in my current political landscape to Saddam's secular-nationalist Baath party, came to power, by hook or more likely by crook. Say that they killed dissenters, tortured political prisoners, and yes, even David Beckham ends up with hot coals on his feet. Say that the next time we had an election polling stations were non-existent and the BNP declared that they had won with 99% of the vote. Now say that America, for whatever reason, invaded Great Britain with the stated aim of removing the BNP from power and installing a democratic government. For some reason our best defence is technology that was dated in World War 2, so they steamroll over the BNP's army in a matter of weeks with very few casualties on their side and massive casualties on ours. Unfortunately, instead of using tactics and weapons that discriminate between combatants and non-combatants they carpet bomb towns and villages based on faulty intelligence, and thousands of innocent Britons who didn't support the outgoing regime die. Maybe some are my friends and family. Fast forward to two years later, there are few jobs, a still constant threat of being killed by occupying forces (who are now torturing other Britons who they expect are part of the resistance) and very few services. Say I am approached by a (surprisingly honest) former member of the BNP who has slipped by the U.S forces and he says: "Hey, me and some other British patriots have are looking to go cap some Imperialist Agressors. We've got right-wing fundamentalist nut-jobs from all over the world to help out. We want to things back the way they were, and we're willing to kill and be killed (possibly at the exact same instant) to get what we want. Now, I should tell you that for every one of them we kill they will lash out indiscriminately at any British person in sight, that it'll be completely impossible to even dent their administration's resolve to stay here 'until the job's done' because GW Bush couldn't care less about U.S casualties so this whole resistance thing won't actually achieve piss in the long run. It'll probably just get a lot of us killed. You might even call it "unrealistic, foolish (and) short-sighted". You in?"
Am I fuck.
*= Casual racism, always a good way to prove a point. |
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