Letters to the Editor
-
Jane Smiley... another who was <i>right</i> about the war...
writes in her HuffPost blog:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/why-i-was-right-about-ira_b_93116.html
about how her line of reasoning led her to disbelieve everything that Bush/Cheney, et al. said before and during the run-up to the war.
I've written before that not enough people read enough literature. Otherwise, an adventure like the invasion and occupation of Iraq would not have proceeded so briskly, and without any "authorized" challenges. Jane Smiley does more than read literature; she actually writes novels, i.e., she understands the inherent logic that must be present in any narrative.
Some excerpts from her post:
Slate is running a series in which former liberal hawks either excuse themselves for, or, in the case of Andrew Sullivan, apologize for, their former support for the invasion of Iraq. Others have weighed in, too -- Anne Marie Slaughter, here on the HuffPo, and a few, so I hear, in the New York Times. So far, no one has contacted me, always against the war, and asked me why I was opposed. I guess they are tired of hearing from me. But I had a logic and a history, too, and maybe I should be consulted about what's next. Therefore, I am offering my own case history. I was against the Iraq War by Christmas, 2000, just as, we have found out, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush were for the Iraq War before the 2000 election.
[snip]
In other words, I was against the Iraq War because I distrusted the motives of its architects, because the story they cooked up was full of holes, and because when they were telling that story, their body language revealed their bad faith. I was also against the Iraq War because I could imagine myself as an Iraqi. Let's say China decided that regime change in Sacramento was necessary, so they landed an army at San Francisco and Los Angeles and carpet bombed us into throwing Arnie out. Would I embrace them? Would any American embrace them? The shock of invasion would certainly arouse anger and resistance. So, I saw, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had no realistic understanding of human nature to add to their other personal failures.
[snip]
But, say the converted liberal hawks, now what?
Here's what. First, we recognize that the Bush administration committed a crime in the name of the American people. Then we do what it takes, both psychologically and financially, to repair the crime. The very first thing that this means is that every American who has in some way profited from this crime must relinquish the fruits of the crime. That means the oil companies. That means the contractors. That means the US government. We cannot keep anything that the Iraqis owned before we took it away from them. We cannot have their land. We cannot have their oil or its profits. We cannot have any sort of power over them. Here is what is preventing the US from leaving Iraq -- the US still wants something from Iraq and the Iraqis that we have no right to. It is the desire to salvage some part of what the Bush administration thought would be easy to claim that is keeping us there, and it is the unspoken complicity of the Democrats and the "prowar liberals" in this that makes it so hard for them to accept the failure of the enterprise.
There's more... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/why-i-was-right-about-ira_b_93116.html
It's worth promoting posts such as Smiley's, not just because she is both ethical and sensible, but because she exposes the lie that there are no good suggestions for "what's next" from Liberals. Hah!