Letters to the Editor
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You've Done It Now, Glenn!
You've gone and pissed off a veteran Opinion Poll Researcher.
We've always known that it would only be a matter of time before you had your comeuppance.
If it's any consolation, you're not the first Jew who's had a rough Good Friday.
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jkalos 'then I think of Kitty Genovisi being murdered outside my window'
Like many others I was shocked when I read of Kitty Genovese being killed in New York without any of the estimated 200 people living within the sound of her voice responding to her pleas for help.
One night a man was stabbed within a few feet of my apartment in Minneapolis and called out for someone to call 911. I did so in the 10 seconds it took to reach a phone, the police were there in 90 seconds, an ambulance in another 90 seconds. The victim lived, the perpetrator was caught and I was subpoenaed. I never was called to testify but heard from one traumatized lady 'don't get involved' The stabber committed even worse crimes later for which he is serving a long term in prison. When I reflect years later I am glad I got involved.
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What if I had had a solution? Even the Perfect Solution. Who would have listened?
How are people so amazingly consistent in insistent that their bizarre fantasies are to be treated respectfully as the only possible reality while people who are at least glancingly familiar with this globe are dismissed as pie-in-the-sky hate-America no-solutions villains?
Suppose that I, and people like me, maybe a group, maybe a group of people millions strong, had had "the solution" for Iraq.
Exactly who would have listened?
For years anyone who even raised factual or logical objections to the turd-nonsense being thrown by the administrators and free-lance war supporters were insulted, dismissed, ignored, all the rest of it.
To this day mainstream public discourse is dominated by those who did that dismissing and ignoring and all the other wrong-headed wrong thoughts and wrong fake facts and wrong arguments.
If we had been the space aliens in the midst with the magical formula to cure the Iraq cancer, to which one of these ideologues would we have mailed it?
If I had had a perfect, 10 point plan that without fail would have led Iraq to be whole, democratic, free, wealthy, productive, and all the rest of it, what?
- Would I have mailed this plan to Dick Cheney?
- Would I have gathered with thousands of citizens to sing each point on the steps of the Republican-led Congress?
- Would I have chalked it on the streets leading to the major networks?
What an astounding ability we find in those who angrily dismissed all realists as cowards and traitors to now say that we somehow failed then and fail now to genuinely engage them in the dialogues in which they have never once been interested.
The most impressive elite effort to try to persuade the administration of 'a solution', the "Iraq Study Group," was presented by the press as some gigantic turning point of dialogue on the war by the very powerful thinkers supposedly involved.
Yet even given the power and connections of the Group's members, it was unsurprisingly ignored by a set of people -- the administration -- who consistently argued and demonstrated that they were uninterested in any argument or solution or fact which was not their own, and which did not serve the goals and fantasies they had.
'But but but why don't you come up with a solution???'
A less serious question has rarely been asked by people so disinclined to be interested in an answer.
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Anne-Marie Slaughter is not only a legitimate expert, but also an expert on LEGITIMACY.
On the eve of war, international law experts who opposed the war couldn't get any column inches in the main-stream-media, but there were limitless inches for deep analysis such as:
NYTimes 3/18/2003
Good Reasons for Going Around the U.N.
By ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER
Published: March 18, 2003[...] By giving up on the Security Council, the Bush administration has started on a course that could be called "illegal but legitimate," [...]
[...] The relevant history here is from Kosovo. In 1999, the United States, expecting a Russian veto of military intervention to stop Serbian attacks on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, sidestepped the United Nations completely and sought authorization for the use of force within NATO itself.
The airwaves and newspaper opinion pages were filled with dire predictions that this move would fatally damage the United Nations as the arbitrator of the use of force. But in the end, the Independent International Commission on Kosovo found that although formally illegal -- the United Nations Charter demands that the use of force in any cause other than self-defense be authorized by the Security Council -- the intervention was nonetheless legitimate in the eyes of the international community.
So, how can United Nations approval come about? Soldiers would go into Iraq. They would find irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime possesses weapons of mass destruction. Even without such evidence, the United States and its allies can justify their intervention if the Iraqi people welcome their coming and if they turn immediately back to the United Nations to help rebuild the country.
[...]
- - Anne-Marie Slaughter 3/18/2003
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But, even though they didn't get much coverage in the NYTimes in 2003, there were many contrary views of Iraq's legitimacy, from international law experts who can't simply be all dismissed as a bunch of silly pacifists.
For instance, there's Hugh Beach, who knows a thing or two about war, and whose Pugwash analysis found the Kosovo war to have been -- just barely -- legitimate.
Even the many (most?) commenters here who disagree with Hugh Beach about Kosovo being even barely legitimate, should be able to appreciate that there's a difference in legitimacy between Kosovo and Iraq.
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Talk given at the Student Pugwash, Imperial College London, 14th October 2003:
Military Intervention and the Just War
This talk addresses the question, under what circumstances is it proper for one country to intervene militarily [...] The frame of reference is the existing body of International Law on resort to force - jus ad bellum -
[...] We start with a basic presumption against military action [...]
[...] After Kosovo many wise heads concluded that endorsement by the Security Council is a sufficient but not always a necessary condition of legitimate intervention. The case for war against Iraq was much weaker: there was no immediate cause to act and no NATO concensus in favour of doing so.
[...]
- - General Sir Hugh Beach, GBE, OBE, KCB, MC
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So we are left with the question, why is Anne-Marie Slaughter still considered to be a legitimate expert on the theory and practice of legitimacy?
Why does the New York Times continue to give space to her (and her ilk) - - but not to General Beach (and his ilk)?
In fact, if you get all your news from the New York Times, then Hugh Beach doesn't exist (I don't think they've ever mentioned him), and the Pugwash Conferences haven't existed since their Nobel Prize, 13 years ago.