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Originally posted by IROC
It pained me to see Bush continue to paint this "undertaking" as a battle between good and evil. To me, that reeks of religious undertones.Mike
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Perhaps because this is the last sphere of post-modern life in which the terms are not considered primitive in polite company. If you need some help digesting the distinctions you might want to review the videotape of the engineer from Wisconsin getting his head sawed off with a dull knife by the black-masked Fedayeen.
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Originally posted by lendaddy
Either it's worth it or it's not
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I agree. That is the proper debate: the worth of it.
Many object to what they as Bush’s deceit in selling a WMD threat when there was none. They believe his reason was to foment fear for political gain. Yet they make this argument in a historical and moral vacuum – as if there was no Hussein, no 20 years of nuclear pursuit, no history of development – and deployment! -- of genocidal weapons. The only relevant history for them seems to be the abeyant period of Iraq’s economically debilitating sanctions (which we now have learned enriched mainly Hussein and a network of UN-enabled profiteers.) That is to say, they do not permit into the debate the question civilization must periodically ask itself: do we tolerate people like Hussein, for how long, and what cost? What is civilization’s obligation to itself?
Aside from all this, I can’t imagine a more serious indictment of a leader or man than that he invented a cause for war in order to advance his own interests. It requires a truly inspired hate to sustain such a notion. And on what evidence? There was far more reason to doubt Hussein, an aggressive tyrant, a chronic liar, a genocidal killer, as there was to believe or trust the UN (remember, Hans Blinx was the UN’s inspector for North Korea), its reflex anti-Americanism, and its indifferent enforcement of its own resolutions.
(My theory is that the hatred of Bush is a subconscious reaction-formation on the Left to the reality of a future of unavoidable threat and war and fear represented by the Islamic movement. For years many in the Left pushed or at least tacitly supported the cause of Islamic movements all over the world. So any president who faced the threat of Islamicism head-on, without ambivalence or apology, was sure to be hated. He reminds the Left of one more of their many tragic errors of sympathy.)
But ultimately, the “no WMD” arguments are moot. We are at war with a culture of violence that seeks our destruction. That war just happens to be in Iraq. We fight them there now, or (and probably also) someplace else later. Soldiers will die and suffer, citizens will die and suffer, our economy will be hobbled, our pleasures postponed, our lives inconvenienced, our future darkened, and our fortitude tested. We fight now, we fight later. There is no way out but fighting. Now, how do we fight better, how do we kill more of them, how do we win? That is what we should be talking about.