Letters to the Editor
Paul Daniel Ash
Published Letters: 687 Editor's Choice: 2
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@Martin Gifford
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I generally refrain from long copy/pastes à la LWM, but since you didn't avail yourself of the opportunity to read the link Glenn provided, let me draw your attention to one part I find particularly à propos:
But there is one tactic the hawks ought to give up at this point. They should stop saying, as one of the commenters to my earlier post did, that none of those who opposed the war with Iraq are offering "constructive" proposals at this point. This is remarkably offensive for several reasons. First, it wasn't the opponents' policies that created this horrible dilemma. It was the hawks' policies. They are responsible for this nightmare, and no one else. They shouldn't expect -- and often demand -- others to offer solutions to the daunting problems their policies have created. Where is the justice in that? Or even the common sense? They got us all here; they ought to show some intellectual responsibility and creativity of their own, and get us out.
Moreover, I have been consistent in my advocacy of a foreign policy which is directed solely at protecting the United States from demonstrable, serious threats to our security -- not to the neofascist mirage of taking over huge areas of the world, in the delusion that we can impose our form of government, and our entire intellectual tradition, on peoples and countries who don't share our tradition or our history, and who may not even want what we have in the first place. To assume that everyone wants what we do demonstrates a rather astonishing ignorance of history, of culture, and of events from even the recent past. It was precisely such assumptions (and other factors) that led to the debacle in Vietnam, as Barbara Tuchman has shown in great detail.
In fact, I think my proposals -- which are shared by any number of other people -- are remarkably "constructive." They would have avoided this entire nightmarish dilemma, by focusing our foreign policy on our own defense -- and they would abandon our goals of "nation building" and reconstructing the world in our own image. Such Utopian delusions have always failed -- and, as Hayek has shown, they have led to nothing but destruction and bloodshed. If people learned nothing else from the twentieth century, surely they ought to have learned that.
But in this context, the hawks' demand that all the rest of us be "constructive" means only that they demand we adopt their terms of debate, and their premises: that we sign on to an agenda of "saving" the rest of the world, of draining our own resources, of killing our own people, of killing those we say we want to save -- and all for a scheme which is doomed from the start, barring an unprecedented stream of miracles.
I, and others like me, have been constructive. I, and others like me, have offered alternatives. The hawks, and those who fashion and implement our foreign policy, rejected them. The problems we now face are their doing, the result of their actions, and their responsibility.
No one else's. It's their mess. There is no good way out. And we probably have given the terrorists' recruiting efforts the biggest boost that can be imagined. Well done.
But there is one thing the hawks should not expect or be allowed to get away with: avoiding responsibility for the tragedy that is now unfolding. They brought it about. Now they should have the decency to deal with it.
But it is certainly all of us who will pay the price, probably for decades to come. And for that, I would suggest that the hawks should stop expecting our gratitude.
Link at my sig.
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That's why it's called "concern trolling"
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There's no way to unshit a bed.
That's not the anti-war side's fault.
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I love lucyl00
[Read the article: One of Instapundit's favorite blogs speaks on race]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]n/t
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il concorso del pisciatoio
[Read the article: Journalists, McCain and the false Iran/al-Qaida link]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There isn't enough going on in the world to debate substantively?
There is, DC... but this is argument, not debate. Think of it as like sports, if it helps.
If we attend to the course of conversation in mixed companies consisting not merely of scholars and subtle reasoners but also of business people or women, we notice that besides storytelling and jesting they have another entertainment, namely, arguing. --Immanuel Kant
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fish, barrel
[Read the article: The ongoing exclusion of war opponents from the Iraq debate]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]* Why would it have been better to gamble, that Saddam has no weapons, no bad intent, and is just posturing?
Why was that a gamble? By the same token, you could also say we are gambling that an asteroid will not hit the Earth, or that the dolphins are not actually hyper-intelligent space aliens who are biding their time before slaughtering us with their head-mounted lasers.
Not every possible threat imaginable mind of man represents a "gamble" that must be addressed with force of arms. I'm mildly surprised even you need this explained to you.
The Iraq invasion was not about a sober assessment of the realistic risk posed by Saddam Hussein to the United States. It was about projecting power into a region where the Bush regime wanted to project power, and Iraq was seen as low-hanging fruit due to the degraded state of their military and the hatred of the Iraqi people for the tyrant. The invasion was both wrong (because you don't invade another country just because you wanna) and stupid (because destroying a nation's infrastructure and imposing a colonial rule tends to alienate the populace).
Are you seriously saying the last, painful six years haven't taught you anything... or are you just too titred on a Teusday morning to come up with any original lines to troll with? Hmm?