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| Monday, December 15, 2003 |
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Say W'hate? 
| | It is so sad that after this election, neither party will be able to lay claim to being the party of listening and compassion. |
| | Here's David's offending paragraph: |
| | But just for the record: Our president systematically lied to us in order to get us to go to war; we were told we were in imminent danger when we were not. We went in without a plan for getting out or realistic expectations about what we were letting ourselves in for. We have sold the official looting rights to the administration's closest friends. It all was a cynical distraction from the failure of our war on terrorism. Our unilateralism sets a dangerous precedent and makes us less safe. And we will not know even if the ends justifed the means for years when the ultimate fate of Iraq and the region is clearer. |
| | The way I read it, David makes strong opinions about known facts. They may be wrong opinions — certainly arguable ones — but they don't strike me as hateful ones. It also seems to me that David's expressions here are far less "hateful" than calling those opposed to the war "idiotarian" and worse. |
| | In a formal debate between pro- and anti- Iraq war advocates, what David says here is a pretty fair outline of arguable positions for the anti side. Thousands of us here in Blogland can think of equally arguable positions on the pro side. Neither sets of positions express hate. |
| | Yet reasonable people are quick to label as hate all kinds of opinions that come up quite shy of the mark. |
| | Impelled by a visceral hatred of President Bush and a naked desire for "their side" to be in power, many on the left are secretly glad to see deaths caused by suicide bombers ("see, I told you so!") and civilian casualties caused by coalition forces (best when children are involved). They hope that US unemployment will rise, and wish for a weak stock market - never mind if it costs the elderly their retirement funds. |
| | I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings. |
| | I believe that this kind of thinking stems in large part from a deep-seated hatred of President Bush. Where does this hatred come from? |
| | Many on the left would probably point to the notion that he's a spoilt child of privilege who'd be nothing without his father's influence, and who "stole" the Presidential election. Well, these points can be debated by reasonable people, but are in themselves insufficient to explain the hatred, since exactly the same charges can be levelled against the sainted JFK. |
| | Perhaps it's his religious faith - the faith that has given him the strength to forswear drugs and alcohol. Maybe it's the fact that he abstains from orgies in the White House pool and fellatio in the Oval Office, acts repeatedly enjoyed by St. Jack and the other, lesser hero of the left, Bill Clinton. Maybe that's why Bush is hated so. |
| | By trafficing in characterization — "hatred" rather than facts— Scott relieves himself of the need to visit the actual reasons why many in this country, and not just Democrats or "itiotarian" lefists (including no small number of military folks), think this president has done lots of stuff that's way out of line on many grounds (some of which I listed yesterday, and all of which are easy to find on the Web). |
| | Go back and read Gary Kamiya's piece, titled Liberation Day. Here's the gist: |
| | The liberation of Paris. The fall of Mussolini, of Ceausescu, of Milosevic. The end of the Khmer Rouge, of Idi Amin. These are shining moments in the history of freedom, of mankind's long and bitter and never completely achieved struggle to resist tyranny and evil, to make a world where torture and rape and murder and war and injustice and savage lust for power and all the other ancient, all-too-familiar demons are pushed back into the darkness. No one, whether on the left or the right, can look at the faces of those who have been liberated, whether in Paris or Bucharest or Phnom Penh or in the American South in 1865, without feeling one's heart quicken: We did it, we won one. |
| | "We" is not America, or France, or the Union Army, or Cambodia, or blacks, or whites, or Arabs or Jews: "We" is mankind. To stand in solidarity with humanity on those few occasions when it lurches forward is more than an honor, it is mandatory if you have a soul, like keeping faith with those you love. |
| | And so, at this moment, as the Mordor shadow of Saddam Hussein, a truly evil man who, like a sociopathic murderous husband, killed everything that he could not control, lifts from the long-suffering people of Iraq, all of us, on the left and the right, Democrats and Republicans, America-lovers and America-haters, Syrians and Kuwaitis and Israelis and Palestinians, owe it to our common humanity to stop, put aside -- not forever -- our doubts and our grief and our future fears, and for one deep moment, celebrate. |
| | Celebrate the 6-year-old boy -- he exists, there are thousands of him, he is running down a street in Karbala right now holding a candy bar -- who will not grow up in a world where his father, and his uncle, and his cousin are taken away by anonymous men one night and never come back. |
| | Celebrate the young woman who will no longer be taken off the street by Saddam's agents to a house where she will be gang-raped, and a film of the rape used to blackmail her into becoming an informer. |
| | Celebrate the Kurd who can return to the house his grandfather built without being killed. |
| | Celebrate a world that no longer contains a regime willing to torture small children to force their parents to confess. |
| | Why should we celebrate? Because what happens to those Iraqis is more important than our political beliefs. Even if -- especially if -- we opposed this war, even if we are disgusted with and deeply suspicious of the U.S. administration, we should celebrate. Their fate matters more. |
| | It is a strange celebration, and not an easy one. It is tinged with sadness, and for some of us with bitterness. The new Iraq is coming into being because of a war solely initiated and largely fought by my country, a war fought not for liberation but for other reasons, none of them convincing or good. It killed many thousands of people, almost all of them Iraqis, most of them innocent. To destroy the tyrant, we also had to destroy much or most of his wretched, doomed army -- untold thousands of semiliterate peasants and poor young men from the cities, conscripts, decent men who might have become auto mechanics or teachers but never had a chance before they were sent out onto the killing fields outside Baghdad. We killed many, many civilians. And then there are the American and British dead, young men and women, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters who would be alive today had the United States not invaded a foreign country that posed no threat to us. |
| | Now, I don't agree with everything Kamiya says in that last paragraph. But I don't see hatred there, either. |
| | We've got a whole bunch of complicated situations here, to say the least. Let's respect that, and the good perspectives that people can bring to discussions about those situations. |
| | For some help with that, read Photodude, who makes great sense on this matter: |
| | Must your views match those of O'Reilly? Is it determined by when you started your weblog, pre-9/11 or post-9/11 (summer of 2000 for me)? Is it determined by who you link, or by who links to you? For example, this guy links me under the category "The Left Hemisphere of the Blogosphere,":yet this guy lists me in the category "Right-Leaning American Blogs." |
| | So what am I, and do I get any say-so in the answer? Must I accept the labels people slap on me, or their sweeping generalizations? |
| | Using Bill O'Reilly as a one person metaphor might work better than "cable news versus weblogs." But I can¹t stand Bill O'Reilly. That¹s OK, we can substitute any number of names in there. Ann Coulter. Ted Rall. Rush Limbaugh. Michael Moore. Pick your Political Extremist. Because that's the problem ... political extremism, and it screams as hard from the left as it does from the right, on the web and off. It is both predictable and infuriating, and it is our fate for the next 11 months. |
| | As Will Vehrs recently noted, "I daresay that if you challenge a Dean position or a quote from the candidate in the comments section of a Dean-leaning blog -- or if you challenge Bush in a Bush-leaning blog -- you won¹t get a spirited defense. You¹ll get called names, accused of apostasy, and treated to a shrill listing of the other's guy's defective positions." |
| | And those of you who are clearly on "one side or the other" should be thankful for that, as it half protects you. Those of us in the middle hear the unfiltered crap from both sides, and it all begins to sound uniformly ugly, regardless of the source. |
Peace on Earth
| | The tyrants' hour has finally came. I went down to the streets to share the joy with my brothers. This is our day, the day of all the oppressed and good people on earth. |
| | Tears of joy filled the eyes of all the people. |
| | Saddam, the coward, hides in a hole, shaking in fear from being captured. |
| | Not a single bullet was fired, without any resistance, God, he was even cooperative! The mighty tyrant, who exploited all our country's fortune for his personal protection, surrenders like the cowered I expected him to be. |
| | Yes, he should be prosecuted in Iraq. We will not allow anything else. |
| | We want to see him in a cage bending more and more, humiliated more and more, just as he forced all the Iraqis to bend to him, like they were his slaves. But we will not be like him, we will give him a fair trail, and he will get just what he deserves, although I have no idea what does he really deserve. |
| | It's indeed an inauspicious day for all the tyrants. Let them know that their days are near too. |
| | This is the day of all Iraqi martyrs who were slaughtered just to please his sick lust for blood. |
| | Rest in peace my brothers. The paradise is yours and the disgrace and hell is for all the tyrants on earth. |
| | More from the locals (links are all to the top level... not all have posted on the Saddam capture yet): |
| | Iraq at a glance, Healing Iraq, Baghdad Burning, Salam Pax, Ishtar Talking, Rich Galen, Fayrouz. Nabil, Baghdadee, Deeds, Hammorabi, Nabil, Baghdad Skies, The Whole Thing, G, Iraq the model, Chief Wiggles, Kevin Sites, Iraq Now, Letters from Baghdad, Brooklyn to Baghdad, Loveinwar, Across the River... |
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