So, due to various childhood traumas we don't need to go into right now, I like to cruise pro-war blogs and pick fights with the people who run them. I spend stupid amounts of time on this. Call it procrastination: arguing with people on the internet is a lot easier than working on my novel and I like doing research. But something I've noticed, both in these blogs and in the news websites they reference, is widespread misuse of certain terms like "left", "leftie", "anti-war", "anti-Semitic", "liberal" and so on. The general idea seems to be that if one opposes the invasion of Iraq one is automatically a "leftie" and that "lefties" are all of a type when it comes to their reasons for opposing the war, the books they read, the writers they believe, and so on.
Well, let me just clear this up for you:
In principle, I have no objection to the idea of invading a country and deposing a dictator by force of arms. I believe that there were many good reasons to apply this principle by invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein. I do not believe that the majority of Iraqis want the United States to leave Iraq. I do believe that Iraq is a better place for having gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and that long-term positive change may be possible due to the invasion.
Got it?
Okay now. Watch my hands. Nothing up my sleeves.
I believe that the United States invasion of Iraq constituted a war of aggression and therefore a war crime. I believe that George W. Bush is a war criminal. Furthermore, I believe that by violating the United Nations Charter, George W. Bush is guilty of a felony, constituting grounds for impeachment, and that there is a strong case to be made that he has exceeded his brief under the War Powers Act.
I believe that the desires of the majority of Iraqis mean fuck-all if the United Nations refuses to act on their behalf. I believe the United Nations should have acted on behalf of the people of Iraq but that military action carried out without United Nations approval amounts to a lynching and, like a lynching, constitutes an illegal act. The issue in prosecuting a lynching is not whether or not the victim was guilty of a crime: the issue is that by executing the victim without due process, the executioners have committed murder.
Likewise, I believe that it is completely irrelevant whether or not Iraq is a better place for having been freed of Saddam Hussein. I mean to say that I don't care. It has nothing to do with my opinion of this particular invasion because this particular invasion is illegal and since it is my country breaking the law and my country that can and should be held accountable, that's where my first concern lies. Until this issue is dealt with, I have no grounds on which to address the situation in Iraq.
Ryan writes of me and my ilk:
they tend to instead focus their ire on the history of American foreign policy, which they basically blame for all the ills of the world. It's never about making the world safe from terrorists TODAY; it's always about trying to point fingers at ourselves for allowing terrorists to exist in the first place.
To which I respond that I look for cause in the United States because the United States is my country; it is the only country in the world where I can lay a free claim to influence. That, furthermore, it seems perfectly obvious that making the world safe from terrorists TODAY means treating the symptom and exacerbating the illness.
When a man is on trial for lynching someone, the claim that the victim "had it coming" has no relevance in the trial. The question is, did the defendant break the law? Did the defendant do the wrong thing?
In this case, yes. The United States did the wrong thing: we attacked without due process and without the mitigating force of those exceptional circumstances laid out in international law to justify war. I don't care if we were knocking over the reincarnation of Hitler: without the law behind us, it was murder.
And what's more, I firmly believe we could have had the law behind us.
But that's a discussion for another time.
I'm sick of messing around with Ryan's lame comments engine so I've created this blog in order that we, the raving ideologues, may have more engaged debates in a medium more suited to… well, frankly, to my tendency to run long.
That said, let's jump right in here:
Ryan writes:
What Joshua and D fail to grasp, and this is my own opinion, is how drastically different the world truly is today. Joshua's keen analytic skills no doubt worked marvelously well in the world of absolutes prior to the war on terror. But the war on terror has no absolutes, no matter how hard we try to cling to concepts such as recognized borders, international law, and national sovereignty. So long as terrorists worm their way unimpeded from nation to nation, you may as well erase all borders from all maps, as far as the war on terror is concerned.
Okay, so here's my beef with this kind of thinking.
I'll admit at the outset that I live in a fairly simple world. At the societal level, I generally believe that A leads to B leads to C and that there's not a lot of variation in this basic formula. And, broadly speaking, there are a couple of axioms that I consider fairly useful in dissecting social policy. Like Newtonian physics, I believe that these rules are useful for examining almost everything that happens at the level of societies and politics, but that their usefulness abates when one approaches the very big or the very small. That said, the axioms break down thus:
1. Increased poverty leads to an increase in the occurrence of property crimes.
2. Repression breeds radicalism in the long term, though that radicalism may not find immediate expression due to the aforementioned repression.
3. Poverty and radicalism tend to interact with religion to produce remarkably volatile and enduring hybrids.
4. From time to time it happens that events will unfold in such a way that certain people, feeling themselves entirely justified, will proclaim that "everything has changed".
4A. Said individuals are, with a few notable exceptions, generally wrong.
So.
My take on the 9/11 attacks is basically this: long-term Western repression in the Middle East mixed with the indigenous religion to produce a radical strain of Islam that blew up in our faces (axioms 2,3), resulting in a declaration on the part of the people of the United States that "everything has changed" (axiom 4). Given that the attacks of 9/11 have an abundance of historical antecedents (the burning of the Reichstag, "ten days that shook the world", etc.), and that every one of those antecedents have proceeded according to the above axioms, I'm disinclined to take these proclamations very seriously. Especially given that the root causes of the 9/11 attacks seem to have taken place for such obvious reasons, all essentially in line with axioms 1-3.
("What reasons?!!" shouts the peanut gallery.
"Read a book," I reply.)
Democratic governments are basically an institutional response to axioms 1-4 in that traits common to such governments can be seen as reciprocal to axioms 2-4 and, often, axiom 1 to the extent that they codify provisions for the prevention of repression (like the Bill of Rights), separating church and state (the First Amendment specifically and doctrine generally), and rash behavior based on the belief that "everything has changed" (such as the amendment process, which generally forces people to slow down and take a deep breath before they do anything stupid). Such governments also frequently have very decent social safety nets, often on the theory that it prevents property crime-- the United States being a notable exception in this regard.
Given all of this, it's endlessly fascinating, and fairly alarming to me, how often axiom 4A comes up, especially among people who really should be smart enough to know better. One is left with the impression of a high school physics teachers standing at the top of a tower with George W. Bush, explaining that gravity is a constant and that all things accelerate toward the ground (fall) at the same rate regardless of their mass. And George keeps throwing feathers off the tower and claiming that "everything has changed" because "common sense" has demonstrated that gravity is a myth.
This trick with the feather seems to confuse a lot of otherwise very bright people. The next thing you know you've got people making big wings out of cardboard and feathers and jumping off the tower in the full expectation that the levitating power of the feathers will hold them up, with sadly predictable results.