by Eric Martin
Matt Duss provides some useful background information on Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, whose death over the weekend, and subsequent tweet regarding his passing from 20 year CNN veteran Octavia Nasr, has created something of a controversey:
On Sunday, the influential Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah passed away in Lebanon. A source of religious guidance for thousands of Shiites, including many members of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Da’wa Party (which he helped found), Fadlallah was well known for a number of relatively liberal views, such as his support for women’s rights, and fatwas against the brutal practices of female circumcision and honor killings.
Though he was an early supporter of Hezbollah (often mistakenly identified as “the spiritual guide of Hezbollah“), and justified the use of suicide bombings as legitimate resistance to occupation in Lebanon, Palestine, and elsewhere, he later criticized the group for its close relationship with Iran, and distanced himself from Ayatollah Khomeini’s system of velayet-e faqih (rule of the clerics.) He also strongly condemned the September 11 attacks as acts of terrorism. Though by no means a progressive (at the time of his death Fadlallah remained on the U.S. State Department’s list of designated terrorists), his unorthodox views earned him condemnation from more conservative clerics as a tool of the West to undermine Islam.
Here is the tweet in question:
Those words created a firestrom in neoconservative media outlets, and CNN reacted quickly to that criticism by sacking Nasr – despite her long tenure with the network and admirable work during that period. Here is her explanation of her tweet:
I used the words “respect” and “sad” because to me as a Middle Eastern woman, Fadlallah took a contrarian and pioneering stand among Shia clerics on woman’s rights. He called for the abolition of the tribal system of “honor killing.” He called the practice primitive and non-productive. He warned Muslim men that abuse of women was against Islam. […]
Sayyed Fadlallah. Revered across borders yet designated a terrorist. Not the kind of life to be commenting about in a brief tweet. It’s something I deeply regret.
Regardless of her apology, this should not have been a fireable offense. Not by a longshot. Andrew Sullivan detects a pattern:
Froomkin was fired for opposing torture a little too passionately; Weigel was forced out because his private emails revealed he was not acceptable to the partisan right; Frum is cut off from conservative blogads funding; Moulitsas is barred from MSNBC for criticizing Joe Scarborough; and Octavia Nasr is fired for offending the pro-Israel lobby over a tweet expressing sadness at the death of a Hezbollah leader.
Glenn Greenwald adds:
What each of these firing offenses have in common is that they angered and offended the neocon Right….Have there ever been any viewpoint-based firings of establishment journalists by The Liberal Media because of comments which offended liberals? None that I can recall.
While some might be tempted to argue that Nasr's praise for a leader that endorsed the use of terrorism in certain circumstances is a bridge too far for a media personality, there is a glaring double standard. Consider this recent episode:
…[I]n an interview with Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, the New York Times’ Deborah Solomon demonstrates the flagrant double standard that exists in the American media in regard to pro-Israel versus anti-Israel terrorism:
SOLOMON: Your parents were among the country’s founders.
LIVNI: They were the first couple to marry in Israel, the very first. Both of them were in the Irgun. They were freedom fighters, and they met while boarding a British train. When the British Mandate was here, they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons.
SOLOMON: It was a more romantic era. Is your mom still alive?
What’s amazing here is not only does Solomon neglect to challenge Livni’s characterization of her parents’ membership in a terrorist group as “freedom fight[ing],” Solomon herself volunteers further assistance in the whitewash. Even if this is a clumsy attempt at sarcasm, can you imagine any mainstream American journalist performing this service in regard to Hamas terrorism? I doubt it.
While Livni may prefer to think that the Irgun weren’t terrorists, and Solomon would like to help, it’s worth noting that both the New York Times and the World Zionist Congress saw things very differently at the time. On December 24, 1946, the Times reported “The World Zionist Congress in its final session here strongly condemned by a vote early today terrorist activities in Palestine and ‘the shedding of innocent blood as a means of political warfare‘” by the groups Irgun and the Stern Gang.
I very much doubt that the civilians who were murdered by the Irgun at the King David Hotel, nor those massacred and ethnically cleansed at Deir Yassin and Jaffa, nor the hundreds killed in various other Irgun attacks look upon that era as particularly romantic. Their memories deserve far better.
One wonders where the outcry demanding Solomon's resignation is. Actually, one doesn't wonder at all.
But in some ways, this farce gets even worse when one puts Fadallah's life, death and religious influence in context. Back to Matt Duss for that:
The punchline here is that Sayyed Fadlallah was the religious guide, or marja’ al-taqlid, to numerous members of Iraq’s ruling Da’wa Party, including Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. This means that they looked to Fadlallah as a source of religious authority on matters relating to correct Islamic life and practice, and committed to following his edicts on those matters. It also meant that, in October 2008, when Fadlallah (along with several other ayatollahs) condemned the U.S.-Iraq security agreement in its then-current form and decreed that any agreement should call for an unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, the agreement had to be re-negotiated.
As I wrote at the time, the power of these ayatollahs to effectively scuttle an agreement of significant import to the security of the United States throws into stark relief what the Bush administration created in Iraq: a government dominated by Shia religious parties who take their guidance — and derive much of their legitimacy — from the opinions and edicts of a small handful of senior Shia clerics.
That aside, here’s the neocon logic, as best I can explain: When a reporter acknowledges the passing of a revered, if controversial figure in a way that doesn’t sufficiently convey what a completely evil terrorist neocons think that figure was — that’s unacceptable. But when the United States spends nearly a trillion dollars, loses over four thousand of its own troops and over a hundred thousand Iraqis to establish a new government largely dominated by that same “terrorist’s” avowed acolytes — that’s victory.
The fact that neconservatives ever wielded such influence over US foreign policy would be comedic in its era of error if the results were not so heartbreakingly tragic. The fact that they still dictate foreign policy in the GOP is terrifying. That they are able to cow our establishment media into adopting an incoherent and unjust double standard is nothing short of shameful.
But make no mistake, if and when this country elects another Republican President, the neocons will be back at the helm of this nation's foreign policy. One wonders if we can survive another such bout.
(some link assistance via K-Drum)
The zombies are massing on all fronts.
I repeat: nuke from space.
Thanks for highlighting this tragedy. The double standard in the media has been particularly egregious lately. There really are completely different rules for conservatives and liberals: conservatives are allowed (even expected) to be insulting and offensive in their public statements, while liberals have to walk on eggshells.
The really amazing thing about this is how deeply degrading it is to conservatives, when you look at it from the right angle. In effect, the media is saying to conservatives: you can get away with more because we can’t expect any better of you.
The neoconservatives won’t be happy until they blow up the whole freaking world. In the name of freedom, natch.
Dr. Strangelove was supposed to be a comedy.
True believers scare the sh*t out of me.
Thanks (as always) for the digest, Eric. Ties things together very well.
I have to wonder what Nasr was thinking, though. I’m not suggesting it’s right or fair (it’s neither), but it’s nonetheless true that the reaction to her tweet was completely predictable. Maybe she was ready to retire?
Perhaps, but it seems more like she made a casual observation in an unguarded moment. You know, for 99% of the world, what she said was quite understandable. She just forgot, for a moment, which 1% she was inhabiting.
it seems more like she made a casual observation in an unguarded moment.
makes sense. Still, why tweet it? I don’t mean this as an attack on her, but, being a non-tweeter, I guess i don’t understand the compulsion people have to comment on everything for all the world to see. It’s like Connie Chung saying ‘Just whisper it in my ear, Mrs Gingrich’.
Most of all, Nasr forgot to maintain the mental illness needed to navigate American politics. You’d think that living in Atlanta would remind her of it, but I guess not.
She forgot about the flying monkeys.
It seems, more than anything else, like an example of why, 10 years from now, tweeting will be regarded as an inexplicable fad. And we will all wonder what ever possessed anyone to do such a silly thing.
If we are talking double standards, would mentioning the recently departed Senator Byrd be germane?
Yeah, she should have been more careful and just blogged her most inner thoughts.
“Dr. Strangelove was supposed to be a comedy.”
Nah, like “Network”, and the many zombie flicks, it was a documentary.
If we are talking double standards, would mentioning the recently departed Senator Byrd be germane?
No, it wouldn’t.
SATSQ.
Sure, Senator Byrd was a racist Ku Klux Klanner, and no doubt an anti-Semite and all of the other wonderful things that go with the territory of the old racist southern Democratic Party, who somehow became the lone piece of white trash who didn’t follow Strom Thurmond into the modern, racist piece of sh*t, anti-American Republican Party.
Something must have come over him.
Duly noted.
If we are talking double standards, would mentioning the recently departed Senator Byrd be germane?
You’ve got to be kidding me.
If we are talking double standards, would mentioning the recently departed Senator Byrd be germane?
We’re talking about double standards that are enforced by people losing their jobs. Plenty of people talked about Byrd’s past; I think it came up in every article about his life even before he died. I don’t recall anyone even complaining about it, let alone any sort of serious outrage.
Frankly, I don’t even see what the analogy is that you’re trying to make here. It looks very much like trolling, but Im willing to give the benefit of the doubt and listen if you’re got some point to make besides slyly managing to slip in that Senator Byrd was in the KKK as a young man.
If we are talking double standards, would mentioning the recently departed Senator Byrd be germane?
Well, if you’re suggesting a double standard exists with respect to Byrd, you have to actually enunciate one.
Then we can have a discussion.
Otherwise, not so much.
I’m willing to cut any Republicans who admit, renounce, and regret their past racist statements or actions exactly as much slack as was given to Byrd, and encourage them to do so. If there are Republicans in that category who are not recognized for having done that, name them, and I’ll tell you they’re admirable people.
The consequences of what Nasr did seem entirely predictable, but it is a double standard. It’s okay to combine admiration in many areas for Israel with disapproval of their military & settlement policy. That is a respectable belief. But if you express a similarly nuanced view of Islamic political/national movements you’re an unperson. That sort of attitude was a big impediment to getting into talks with the PLO and seems to be standing in the way of talks with Hamas.
“What each of these firing offenses have in common is that they angered and offended the neocon Right….Have there ever been any viewpoint-based firings of establishment journalists by The Liberal Media because of comments which offended liberals? None that I can recall.”
Fired or forced to resign or buried in obscurity:
Helen Thomas (criticism of Israel)
Don Imus (crude joke)
Fox News host of afternoon show Edie Hill (joking remark about Obama fist pump)
Keith Olbermann, of course, can get away with calling Republicans homophobic racist reactionaries and worse, without a murmur of liberal indignation:
Double-Standard Democrats to the left of me, Reactionary Republicans to the Right, here I am, stuck in the middle between Opposing Idiots
The only effective way to protest this firing is to boycott CNN’s sponsors.
Having just braved CNN News Room’s hard-hitting wall-to-wall coverage of…Lebron James’ decision with the sound off, I have determined CNN’s only ads come from The Scooter Store and credit reporting scams.
I’m not sure the firing should be laid at the feet of neo-conservatives. I mean, I’m sure neo-conservatives agree with it, but I think there are plenty of non-neo-conservatives who also agree with it. The neo-cons are writing up a storm about how awesome the firing was and the liberals who agree with them are not, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
The fundamental basis for the firing seems to have been that no can can praise anyone who has any relationship to Hizbullah. I don’t see this as an exclusively neo-conservative view. In fact, I know of liberals who believe the exact same thing. In that sense, this little piece of neo-conservative ideology has long since been mainstreamed. I’d guess that the difference between these liberals and the neocons is not so much what they believe about Arabs and Muslims and Hizbullah; rather, the liberals are smart enough to know that you should not publicly say that all Arabs/Muslims are inherently evil so we’re not seeing spirited defenses written by them.
So no double standard with Sen. Byrd? Just wanting to know the rules.
Fox News host of afternoon show Edie Hill (joking remark about Obama fist pump)
Joking remark calling the President of the United States and the First Lady terrorists. Nice attempted spin, there.
So no double standard with Sen. Byrd? Just wanting to know the rules.
What is the actual double standard that you’re suggesting exists?
I repeat my response from before:
Well, if you’re suggesting a double standard exists with respect to Byrd, you have to actually enunciate one.
Then we can have a discussion.
Otherwise, not so much.
Helen Thomas (criticism of Israel)
Don Imus (crude joke)
Fox News host of afternoon show Edie Hill (joking remark about Obama fist pump)
Jay,
Helen Thomas was not attacked by liberals and sacked because of a push from the left, so that doesn’t belong on the list.
Not even sure who Edie Hill is or what happened to him/her. But if it was a joke, then it is unlikely it was a “viewpoint based firing,” which is the topic at hand from which you quoted.
As for Imus, again, that was not “viewpoint based firing” unless you are arguing that racism is a viewpoint and that he espouses it. Or that the Rutgers womens team were, according to Imus, actually nappy headed hos.
So no double standard with Sen. Byrd? Just wanting to know the rules.
What does that even mean? You’re being asked over and over what double standard you see or how it related to the matter at hand. And instead of elucidating and having a discussion about something you apparently feel the need to post about over and over again, we get this bot mot suggesting- what? That you’re being prevented from having this discussion by some set of rules? It can’t be that you want to know the rules for what a double standard is, bc you are and have been free- and even encouraged- to share exactly what your POV is and how the two compare.
Grow a pair, say what you mean. Ive got a friend with three nuts, maybe you can borrow one of his for a little while and get this stuff off of your chest.
Ok, McKinneyTX is usually above this sort of thing, but the respect he’s (perhaps unjustly) earned over the course of his tenure here should not give him the right to derail the subject with an astoundingly brazen concern troll.
Please, do not feed.
Jay,
Heh.
What I mean is simply this: partisans of every stripe are too quick to claim the mantle of victimhood, too thin-skinned to see that hypocrisy and double standards are universal. They only see others’, never their own. Byrd is the ultimate in hypocritical opportunism. If the left were as principled as they say the right is not, Byrd would have been drummed out of the new Democratic party decades ago, not elevated to the status of elder statesperson.
It is no answer to say, “but we are talking about this kind of hypocrisy, this kind of double standard, not your kind of hypocrisy.”
If the progressive left were as principled as it claims the right is not, my comment would have been greeted with, “yeah, we missed that one, he was a douche bag of the worst kind and no one called him out.”
I’ve tried to be consistent in identifying hypocrisy and racism when public figures on the right make veiled or not so veiled statements. As one example, when on topic, I’ve noted the calculated bigotry of putting anti-gay marriage amendments on swing state ballots in 2004–GWB tipped the scales, thanks to Rove, by exploiting religious fundamentalists, most of whom I view as ignorant, but Rove was and is clearly a bigot and a manipulative monster.
If Byrd’s sleazy, racist, pork barrelling, self-promoting persona is somehow so egregiously off-topic as to constitute trolling then let me roll out Trent Lott, who said something nice about Strom Thurmond and who lost his leadership position for having done so and, rightly so, in my opinion. Bet there weren’t any howls of protest when that happened here or anywhere else on the left.
The thought police are not uniformly on the right, hypocrisy is not limited to non-progressives and nor is it limited to just this thin slice of double-standardness, i.e. someone getting canned for saying something nice about a Hezbollah member.
Ballsy enough for you, CW?
Ballsy enough for you, CW?
Carleton can speak for himself, but I have another word in mind.
Trent Lott, who said something nice about Strom Thurmond and who lost his leadership position for having done so
Oh, aren’t we clever?
Trent Lott did not “say something nice about Strom Thurmond.” He said that it was a shame Strom Thurmond didn’t win the presidency in 1948, because the country would have been better off if he had.
Troll.
What I mean is simply this: partisans of every stripe are too quick to claim the mantle of victimhood, too thin-skinned to see that hypocrisy and double standards are universal.
Well, yeah. I have no problem with that. I have, also, never claimed that the left is without double standards. So, again, yeah.
Byrd is the ultimate in hypocritical opportunism. If the left were as principled as they say the right is not, Byrd would have been drummed out of the new Democratic party decades ago, not elevated to the status of elder statesperson.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. As Thullen pointed out, most of the Byrd type Dems went to the GOP, which embraced them with open arms. Strom Thurmond, ie.
Byrd renounced his ties with the KKK and apologized profusely and repeatedly. That was his price of admission (or rather, remaining).
But that does not render every observation of a double standard moot.
If the progressive left were as principled as it claims the right is not, my comment would have been greeted with, “yeah, we missed that one, he was a douche bag of the worst kind and no one called him out.”
First of all, I wasn’t sure what your comment meant, so I asked you to clarify. Finally, you did.
Otherwise, he was called out, repeatedly. On this very thread, Thullen did a fine job of it. So we didn’t “miss” that one.
If Byrd’s sleazy, racist, pork barrelling, self-promoting persona is somehow so egregiously off-topic as to constitute trolling then let me roll out Trent Lott, who said something nice about Strom Thurmond and who lost his leadership position for having done so and, rightly so, in my opinion. Bet there weren’t any howls of protest when that happened here or anywhere else on the left.
Not sure what you mean here. You say that you agree Lott should have lost his job for suggesting that if a dedicated segregationist running on the segrationist platform had won the presidency, we wouldn’t have all these problems.
But then complain that people around these parts weren’t protesting his firing?
Were you? If not, why should we?
The thought police are not uniformly on the right, hypocrisy is not limited to non-progressives and nor is it limited to just this thin slice of double-standardness, i.e. someone getting canned for saying something nice about a Hezbollah member.
This is true, but also tautological and not very illuminating. Nor does it contribute to the conversation at hand in any productive way.
Sure, if you zoom out long enough, it’s all the same, but what about these particulars?
UK, yes, that is what Lott said. It was viewpoint-based. He lost his leadership position. No one here protested, nor should they. Outrage is selective and driven by ideology, here and everywhere else.
And another rightwinger who lost a job was Ann Coulter at NRO when she talked about a crusade and converting the middle east to Christianity. Again, no problem here, but it’s a form of viewpoint based firing.
Outrage is selective and driven by ideology, here and everywhere else.
See, I don’t think this post is saying, “Any and all viewpoint based firings are wrong.” Clearly that is not, nor should that be, the case.
If someone is a frothing Nazi, fire them. If someone is a hateful bigot, they don’t deserve a job if I’m the owner/editor of a newspaper.
The question is, what is the range of acceptable viewpoints, and is it unfairly tilted at the moment.
On the one hand, Lott (a politician not a journalist) reminisced wisftully about how much better off the country would be had the segregationist won.
On the other hand, Dan Froomkin opposed torture.
On the one hand Ann Coulter suggested that we should invade every nation in the Middle East, violently overthrow their rulers and convert the population to Christianity at the point of a gun. On the other hand Octavia Nasr tweeted that she respected a revered Shiite Ayatollah who had some influence on Hezbollah (and the current Iraqi Prime Minister’s party), as well as a complex set of beliefs – some of them that were, in fact, commendable.
I’m trying to remember which Democrat said that if only Byrd had stayed in the KKK, we wouldn’t have had all these problems. In fact, I’m trying to remember any progressive anywhere saying anything about Byrd nicer than “he was a stone racist as a young man, but he’s admitted he was wrong and apologized repeatedly, so maybe we should cut him some slack.”
Red herring. While true, this is irrelevant to the question of whether or not Nasr’s firing is evidence of a double standard in the media treatment of liberals and conservatives.
False dichotomy/false choice.
Argument by assertion. No evidence or examples of hypocrisy offered here or anywhere to follow.
Strawman. Nobody has answered you thusly.
Commendable if true, but also irrelevant to the topic.
Ad hominem and false equivalency. Byrd repeatedly and unequivocally acknowledged the wrongness of his past and spent the remainder of his life fighting for causes that would horrify the man he once was. Lott praised Thurmond by–as noted above–stating that the country would be better off if his blatantly segregationist platform had won the election.
Tu quoque: whether or not anyone on the left is hypocritical has no relationship to the truth or falsity of whether or not a media double standard exists towards what is beyond the pale from a liberal or conservative; “you guys do it too” is a meaningless response.
Not ballsy, just completely full of crap and composed of nothing but logical fallacies and “you too” arguments that I wouldn’t accept from my nine-year-old.
Do you have anything of substance to contribute, or are you just trolling?
Not sure what you mean here. You say that you agree Lott should have lost his job for suggesting that if a dedicated segregationist running on the segrationist platform had won the presidency, we wouldn’t have all these problems.
But then complain that people around these parts weren’t protesting his firing?
Were you? If not, why should we?
Eric, you are making my point. Substitute, “dedicated segregationist” for “one of Hezbollah’s giants” (clearly implying there are more than one within Hezbollah) which in turn inferentially implies sympathy for Hezbollah, which has its own racist agenda, and you get to the same place, viewpoint based loss of job/standing/what-have-you. both viewpoints are value-laden, both controversial. You can believe one or both to be abhorrent (I believe both to be the case). If you think only one is abhorrent, then it may follow that firing the bad viewpoint is good and firing the good viewpoint is bad, but to me, it’s hypocrisy.
My point is that you don’t have to telescope far at all to find equivalent outrage across the spectrum. I’m not that broken up that a Hezbollah sympathizer lost her job, nor am I shaken up that Lott lost his. Good riddance to both of them. Fine to have fired Imus and too bad he got his job back. But spare me the business that it’s all focused on the left. It isn’t.
In that sense, this little piece of neo-conservative ideology has long since been mainstreamed.
True dat.
If Byrd’s sleazy, racist, pork barrelling, self-promoting persona is somehow so egregiously off-topic as to constitute trolling then let me roll out Trent Lott, who said something nice about Strom Thurmond and who lost his leadership position for having done so and, rightly so, in my opinion.
OK, at least the Lott / Nasr situations are structurally similar. Both involved people who expressed admiration for someone controversial, and who were then hounded from a position they held.
Nasr expressed admiration for Fadlallah because he stood for equality for women. He opposed clerical rule in Iran, and condemned the 9/11 attacks.
Lott expressed admiration for Thurmond because he ran for President in 1948 on a policy of segregation.
Hopefully the distinction is clear to you.
Eric, you are making my point. Substitute, “dedicated segregationist” for “one of Hezbollah’s giants” (clearly implying there are more than one within Hezbollah) which in turn inferentially implies sympathy for Hezbollah, which has its own racist agenda, and you get to the same place, viewpoint based loss of job/standing/what-have-you.
But you can’t substitute them because that is not what Nasr was saying at all.
She was praising certain stances of the Ayatollah’s that we ourselves would agree with.
And Hezbollah has many giants, and acknowledging that is acknowledging a simple fact, not making an endorsement. I don’t like the Nazis, but I don’t endorse them when I note that Goebbels was a giant in the Nazi movement – one of many.
PS: I’m not sure Hez has a racist agenda.
But spare me the business that it’s all focused on the left. It isn’t.
That’s straw. I didn’t say it was all focused on the left.
I’m not that broken up that a Hezbollah sympathizer lost her job
But that’s the thing: she’s not a Hez sympathizer, and her statement did not prove such.
And for the record, yes, Byrd was a racist and a KKK leader in his community when he was a young man in the 40’s. He disavowed his relationship with the KKK soon after, but he also fillibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and voted against the Voting Rights Act if 1965.
He did vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and claimed that his participation in his church had moderated his views. Being the cynical fellow I am, I suspect calculation about his own political future played at least as large a role in his “change of heart”.
Byrd was an active racist and segregationist, and opposed civil rights legislation until some combination of political calculation and/or personal epiphany led him to change his mind, at least while voting.
And yeah, Kennedy drove his car off a bridge, killed a young woman in the process, and in an act of profound cowardice failed to report the accident until long after any chance of rescue was long gone.
Reprehensible, all of it.
Shall I go on? Have I left anyone out?
I fail to see the connection to Nasr.
If the progressive left were as principled as it claims the right is not, my comment would have been greeted with, “yeah, we missed that one, he was a douche bag of the worst kind and no one called him out.”
Well, personally I wished that Byrd would have resigned long ago; not because I sat in judgement on whether he truly repented or not, just bc some things are ugly enough that, while they can be forgiven, they cannot really be forgotten. Better to have no Senators who were formerly in the KKK. Or, who currently give speeches to the CCC or interviews to American Rennaisance.
then let me roll out Trent Lott, who said something nice about Strom Thurmond and who lost his leadership position for having done so and, rightly so, in my opinion. Bet there weren’t any howls of protest when that happened here or anywhere else on the left.
No, because there is a huge, huge difference between someone who does something repugant as a young man and then repents versus someone who is repugnant as a young man and then keeps those viewpoints. Lott’s hanging out with the CCC etc were an ongoing lifetime flirtation with the racist far-right. And I love the sad attempt to minimize here: “said something nice about Strom Thurmond”. Thurmond was a Senator. Presumably all manner of people said nice things about him. But not very many Senators said they wished his Segregationist campaign had been successful.
They are not comperable. Had Byrd kept informal association with racists and then said that he wished that segregationists had prevailed back in the day, then you would have a point.
The thought police are not uniformly on the right, hypocrisy is not limited to non-progressives and nor is it limited to just this thin slice of double-standardness, i.e. someone getting canned for saying something nice about a Hezbollah member.
Ballsy enough for you, CW?
And now the crux. What you have done is the exact opposite of ballsy. It is cowardice. Faced with a difficult discussion about the history of terrorism in Israel’s past and the moral ambiguity of comdemning anyone who has ever associated with Hisbollah in any capacity as evil while embracing Israel, you choose the lowest possible road: an inaccurate, irrelevant tu quoque. A limp paen to the existence of double-standards on both sides of the aisle.
Really, you could’ve just skipped to the next thread. But something made you have to comment- couldn’t just pass it by. But at the same time, you apparently just couldn’t bring yourself to comment on the actual subject of the thread in any meaningful sense.
Lott lost his leadership position to the only group that could take it away from him: the Senate Republican caucus. Coulter was fired by NRO, an organization that shares her viewpoint for the most part (and that wasn’t her day job). Same with Edie Hill and Fox News. I’m not sure how you can call it “viewpoint-based firing” when people with your viewpoint are the ones firing you.
Wait, maybe MACtexas, who I’m sure is a nice guy, meant to write “would mentioning the recently departed Sen Byrd be GERMAN? (not ‘germane’)”
Well, I guess it’s marginally more German than germane, so yes.
Of course, mentioning that Himmler was an unsuccessful chicken farmer before commencing his second career would be German, too, but not germane.
Or did I just open another avenue for argument?
Auf wiedersehen!
McK, your goal here appears to be to point out to all of us liberals how hypocritical we are.
As opposed to, for example, saying something substantive about the moral complexity of expressing admiration for someone who had some relationship with a group of people we consider to be bad guys.
Most people are hypocritical about something or other. So, no worries. I’m sure I’ll wear that hat soon enough.
If that’s your goal, however, IMHO you’re arguing from a really bad example.
Maybe try again another time.
“Have I left anyone out?”
Howard Cosell? Fellow sports broadcaster Rush Limbaugh? Mel Gibson (still not fired-darn!)
Yeah, Limbaugh is a good example. And really, I guess I don’t agree with Greenwald’s assertion- people get fired for “viewpoints” all of the time. I assume that he’s segregating “viewpoint” as something reasonable and the crap Rush says as something unreasonable, and therefore justified his firing.
That’s where the real question lies: what is permissible speech and what is impermissible speech, for a public speaker to stay employed? Recognizing that there are shifting boundaries eg Olbermann says a lot of stuff that would (and should) get an NBC news anchor fired.
But here we’ve got a pretty stark divide: people can respect the Irgun without fear of losing their jobs, and you can be pretty sure that when Ariel Sharon croaks, it won’t be a firing offense for folks in the media to say that they respected him either.
nice derailment, McKTX
McK, your goal here appears to be to point out to all of us liberals how hypocritical we are.
I believe I have stated repeatedly that hypocrisy runs the gamut. I find this particular exercise, i.e. Eric’s post, overblown. The weight of sentiment here is that nuance is the theme of the day and a real injustice has been done, this time. To me, this is no different than any other gored ox anywhere along the spectrum. Countless hours are burned up daily with conniption fits–watch Hannity if you have the stomach–and everyone believes theirs is different from everyone else’s. And they are happy to tell you what that difference is.
And really, I guess I don’t agree with Greenwald’s assertion- people get fired for “viewpoints” all of the time. I assume that he’s segregating “viewpoint” as something reasonable and the crap Rush says as something unreasonable, and therefore justified his firing.
That’s where the real question lies: what is permissible speech and what is impermissible speech, for a public speaker to stay employed? Recognizing that there are shifting boundaries eg Olbermann says a lot of stuff that would (and should) get an NBC news anchor fired.
Exactly. What is permissible speech and what is not? Producing the razor thin line of hypocrisy and double standards. It is no answer to say that Lott was farther out of line than Nasr (subjective judgment call–Thurmond never advocated suicide bombing) or that McKinney doesn’t really understand the subtext of Nasr’s statement (Hezbollah Giant is value-neutral). People who want to make their living in the public eye–this is a voluntary decision–need to maintain their private views private or expect to face the wrath of someone who sits on the other side of a controversy.
The weight of sentiment here is that nuance is the theme of the day
No.
The weight of sentiment is that you can wax nostalgic about somebody in the Irgun and you’ll be applauded, but if you make a positive comment – for whatever reason – about someone with a connection to Hezbollah you’ll be driven out of your job.
This seems unfair to some folks.
To me, this is no different than any other gored ox anywhere along the spectrum.
Substantial differences between Nasr’s case and the examples you offered have been presented, and ignored by you.
watch Hannity if you have the stomach
Not gonna happen. The man is a belligerent idiot.
This is not a subjective judgment call for anyone who understands the facts in both cases and is not an avowed racist. I’m a bit weary of the contortions necessary to believe you’re arguing in good faith here, but for the benefit of anyone who is still confused I’ll explain again the distinction that has been explained to you no less than three times in this thread.
Nasr expressed admiration for Fadlallah’s progressive views on women’s rights in the ME and his efforts to delegitimize violence towards women in Islam.
Lott expressed the view that the country would be better off–that “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years”–if Thurmond’s segregationist campaign had succeeded.
Both are expressions of admiration for controversial figures who have done both good and harm in their lives.
That is where the similarity ends, and your repeated attempts to conflate them grow tiresome.
While arguable, this is entirely beside the point.
The point is not that public figures should be free from scrutiny or consequences for the views they express.
The point is that said scrutiny and consequences should be applied fairly and consistently, and they are not.
You have expended a great deal of energy asserting that this is not so in the face of many examples, without providing any credible counterexamples of your own. The vast majority of your comments in this thread have been composed of little other than logical fallacies and distractions that completely ignore the responses that rebut your assertions.
Enough trolling. If you’re not going to engage in good faith, quit wasting everyone’s time.
Hannity
Ack, he doesn’t have the courage of his conniptions. He once praised Alan Colmes and patted him on the head on the air. FOX didn’t fire him for that breach. He’s a smug putz.
If I ever meet Hannity, he’s going to have trouble keeping his coiffure intact.
“Thurmond never advocated suicide bombings.”
He just ran out of time. He’d have gotten to it eventually. He was too busy advocating segregation while practicing miscegnation.
What is permissible speech and what is not? Producing the razor thin line of hypocrisy and double standards.
Or, is it too much to ask that we substitute reasoned discourse and exploration of the various situations? There will always be people willing to look for a political edge in every misstatement, misparse, misquote, etc, but that doesn’t make this behavior mandatory, or representative of what the best of either liberals or conservatives have to offer.
Really, the root of this thread isn’t about hypocrisy anyway IMO. It’s about Israel, and how we can never hope to have a reasonable discussion about Israel when whole chapters of history are not open for discussion, when any individual or group not complying with Israeli interests is labeled anti-Semitic. It’s overton’s window dragged so far out of the center that we can’t even discuss facts.
And, as russell said, this particular example seems pretty egregious. After all, Lott was removed by the GOP because segregation is seen by a broad base of our society as repugnant. Here, the reaction seems much more knee-jerk- she said something nice about someone affiliated with Hezbollah, and no amount of nuance could save her from that.
otoh, if there’s some nuance to Lott’s history of flirtation with racist groups that makes him somehow less odious, Id be open to hearing it.
People who want to make their living in the public eye–this is a voluntary decision–need to maintain their private views private or expect to face the wrath of someone who sits on the other side of a controversy.
On the contrary, I expect those people to be able to express opinions in a broad area of tolerance. The higher up they go, the more they need to avoid extreme positions.
The question is still: what is outside of the mainstream? And, should it be considered such?
Thanks to McTx, we dodged the bullet of actually discussing the political positions of Hezbollah! God forbid we actually learn something new on a thread…
I think this is why I hate trolls so much. It is not that they have an issue or 7 that seems to really set them off, it’s that they want to make sure that no one else learns anything, because of their prejudices. If you want to remain pig-ignorant, that’s your call, but don’t inflict it on the rest of us.
He just ran out of time. He’d have gotten to it eventually
Nah, those old-school segregationists were sure as hell down with bombing, but suicide, not so much.
And for McK’s sake, yeah, I’d say the same about Robert C Byrd. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.
You don’t “make up for” the stupid stuff you do, you just hopefully knock it off and do something else going forward.
“Nasr expressed admiration for Fadlallah’s progressive views on women’s rights in the ME and his efforts to delegitimize violence towards women in Islam.”
The problem is, in her initial statement, she didn’t.
Though to be fair, twitter doesn’t exactly excel at nuance.
It would be almost like, after his death, praising Strom Thurmond’s bid for the presidency by saying that if more people had voted for him we wouldn’t have as many problems that we do today. And then explaining that of course you didn’t support his segregationism, but rather you liked his political philosophy in other areas.
Now, we could in theory decry stupid soundbites, but that doesn’t seem like where you want to go with this.
Sebastian, if Nasr had praised Ariel Sharon she would not have lost her job, even if she hadn’t spelled out whatever good thing it was he might have done that was praiseworthy. Presumably if pressed she would say the withdrawal from Gaza (overrated IMO, but nevermind) and not his involvement in various war crimes, but her job would not have been at stake. That’s the double standard.
Do you seriously find that credible? I mean, do you honestly believe that that is what Lott meant? Or is this a hypothetical sort of “almost like”?
If that’s what you honestly believe, well, okay–but I gave you more credit than that.
No, she didn’t. But as you go on to note, Twitter isn’t suited to nuance; it does bite-sized thoughts. Which is exactly why one-off comments on Twitter really shouldn’t be used as the basis for ending, say, a 20-year distinguished career without so much as a token effort to find out the intent and views behind the comment.
Compare and contrast this with, say, Erick Erickson. Apparently you can do groundbreaking and well-respected work covering the complexities of the Middle East for 20 years and lose your job over a misinterpreted comment expressing admiration for an otherwise unworthy person’s efforts on women’s rights–but calling a Supreme Court justice a goat-fscking child molester is just fine as long as you’re a Republican blogger.
I rest my case.
“Do you seriously find that credible? I mean, do you honestly believe that that is what Lott meant? Or is this a hypothetical sort of “almost like”?”
Do you honestly think that Lott meant: “I wish we had 30 of segregation?” I don’t think so.
McKinney: If we are talking double standards, would mentioning the recently departed Senator Byrd be germane?
Absolutely. Racist scumsucking SOBs who loved to cosy up to the nasty racist bastards who left the Democratic Party when it started supporting civil rights for all, used to love to condemn Senator Byrd for, in his youth, being just like them… and then thinking better of it.
Same double standard. Byrd couldn’t be forgiven for not turning Republican.
Moving back to the original post: It’s some kind of world conservatives inhabit where you are not allowed to express sadness when someone you respected dies, because he was an enemy of the state. It’s another example of how modern conservativism is basically fascism.
Sebastian: Do you honestly think that Lott meant: “I wish we had 30 of segregation?” I don’t think so.
Yes, but you have no particular reason for thinking so other than that you’re a modern conservative and Trent Lott was one of your leaders. Fascism is a wonderful instrument for suppressing freedom of thought.
In the case of Lott I think his statement was less a genuine wish for ongoing segregation (can’t exlude it though) but a case of backfiring pandering on the occasion of Thurmond’s birthday. I think he knew that he was among fellow racists and thought that this required praise for the high priest of that worldview they were celebrating that day.
Thus he went over the top and violated the rule that being a racist digestive rear exit is okay for a high-ranking politician as long as it is not in the open (i.e. on mainstream radio or television).
I have my doubts that he would still lose his job today given the loathsome nutjobs that now are rising up like rockets in the GOP. Sharron Angle has still a fair chance to beat Harry Reid and tries to hide (some of) her statements from the not-foaming-at-the-mouth only because it cuts into her lead. I assume after the election it will be back to full steam without having to fear consequences.
Do you honestly think that Lott meant: “I wish we had 30 of segregation?” I don’t think so.
Well, good for you.
Strom Thurmond ran for president in 1948 because of segregation. Period. It was the alpha and omega of his campaign.
“I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”
Now, to suggest that Trent Lott, speaking to a roomful of avowed racists, meant to praise some other part of Strom Thurmond’s 1948 platform, but not the racist part, would be laughable if it weren’t so grotesque.
I was going to write “You’re better than this, Sebastian” — but at this point I’ve pretty much concluded that you’re not.
Sebastian, if Nasr had praised Ariel Sharon she would not have lost her job
Thank you.
It’s curious to me how this thread has turned into a discussion of the imaginary universe of things Trent Lott might have been referring to when he mentioned the “troubles” we would not have had, had Strom Thurmond been elected President.
So completely on point.
There is, as Donald J points out, no problem praising Sharon, a man found culpable by his own countrymen in the Shatila massacre.
No problem with Livini waxing nostagic about her folks’ time in the Irgun, an explicitly terrorist organization.
Nelson Mandela, leader of Umkhonto we Sizwe, which engaged in bombings of civilian targets and the torture and assassination of prisoners it held, is a hero. I’d be surprised if we didn’t have a stamp with his picture on it.
We continue to give asylum to Luis Posada Carriles, a man who murdered 73 innocent Cubans when he blew their plane out of the air.
And, of course, we can all live with the long and illustrious Senatorial careers of Robert C Byrd, Strom Thurmond, and a host of others who, in their youth, belonged to or supported violent segregationalist terrorist organizations like the KKK.
Hezbollah is a Shia Islamist political organization and militia in Lebanon. They began as an armed resistance to Israeli occupation of areas in southern Lebanon, and have since become a significant political and social force in that country. To my knowledge, they have little to no history of being involved in actions outside of Lebanon.
In this country, we’re unable to distinguish between an organization like Hezbollah, and an organization like Al Qaeda.
We are more than capable of making highly nuanced (that word again) distinctions between the motives and activities of people and organizations involved in political violence who are not Muslim and/or hostile toward Israel, but if a Muslim is involved, all shades of grey fade to black and white.
Especially black.
The takeaway for everyone in this case should be that anything you write on Twitter might as well be posted directly to the Jumbotron in Times Square.
Russell–
Hezbollah has been accused of a couple of terrorist bombings aimed at the Israeli embassy and at a Jewish center in Argentina in the 90’s. (Argentina isn’t exactly a stranger to homegrown murderous anti-semites, of course). They deny involvement.
link
“Now, to suggest that Trent Lott, speaking to a roomful of avowed racists”
Really? Was he speaking to Democrats at a gay pride parade in California on the topic of Mexican immigration or something? Because that is a similar type of avowed…
“And, of course, we can all live with the long and illustrious Senatorial careers of Robert C Byrd, Strom Thurmond, and a host of others who, in their youth, belonged to or supported violent segregationalist terrorist organizations like the KKK.”
To this point, maybe we shouldn’t have.
“Hezbollah is a Shia Islamist political organization and militia in Lebanon. They began as an armed resistance to Israeli occupation of areas in southern Lebanon, and have since become a significant political and social force in that country. To my knowledge, they have little to no history of being involved in actions outside of Lebanon.”
Do you consider firing rockets into Israel action inside Lebanon? I think a pretty fair analysis of the problem from the Israeli side is: every time we have given up land for peace to the control of one of Shia groups that have been attacking us, they have used that land to attack us further. Hezbollah rockets from Lebanon into Israel is the classic case.
Really? Was he speaking to Democrats at a gay pride parade in California on the topic of Mexican immigration or something? Because that is a similar type of avowed…
What Uncle Kvetch said.
Again, it’s really kind of telling that conservatives cannot comprehend feeling sad when you hear of the death of someone you respected: cannot even apparently comprehend the concept of feeling respect for someone who was a political enemy.
think a pretty fair analysis of the problem blahblahZionistcrapblah is the classic case.
…what Uncle Kvetch said. Classic derail, like McKinney’s attempt. Let’s not talk about conservative character flaws or the injustice of sacking someone for saying she was sad that someone had died: let’s go “Byrd!” or “Israel!” (When Brett shows up, it’ll be “gun control!” or “the Clenis!”)
It would be almost like, after his death, praising Strom Thurmond’s bid for the presidency by saying that if more people had voted for him we wouldn’t have as many problems that we do today. And then explaining that of course you didn’t support his segregationism, but rather you liked his political philosophy in other areas.
If Trent Lott did not have a history of flirtation with racists, then I doubt that this would have created the firestorm that it did. What’s amazing isn’t that his statement toppled him (and remember, it was really more of a GOP power play than a surge of national outrage), it’s that he lasted as long as he did acting like that.
See, for example, here.
Trett Lott played the wrong note on his dogwhistle at the wrong time, and some GOP political opponents took advantage. I was going to say “if this reporter had a long history of saying anti-Semitic things and associating with anti-Semitic groups”, but then I realized how ridiculously unlikely that hypothetical sounded.
I think a pretty fair analysis of the problem from the Israeli side is…
I’m not interested in getting into a he said/she said about the Middle East. Nor was I attempting a defense of Hezbollah. Your objection, and Donald’s, to my characterization of Hezbollah as being involved only in Lebanon are noted.
I’d appreciate it if the Israelis and the various other parties in the region would get their sh*t together, recognize that nobody’s going anywhere, and learn to live with each other. Easy for me to say, no doubt, but I don’t see any other options.
‘Nuff said on that?
And with or without that sidebar, I think my overall point stands.
“I’d appreciate it if the Israelis and the various other parties in the region would get their sh*t together, recognize that nobody’s going anywhere, and learn to live with each other.”
Amen to that.
Easy for me to say, no doubt, but I don’t see any other options.”
Human beings always have the option to deny reality. They could decide to kill each other for generations until one side is exterminated or until they basically don’t remember why they are fighting. Groups have been choosing that option for thousands of years.
Sigh.
Here is the Israeli government’s list (presumably complete) of all Hezbollah violence against Israelis from 2000 until the 2006 war.
I haven’t looked yet to see if I can find a list of Israeli acts of violence against Lebanese or Hezbollah targets in that time period.
link
For the record, Hamas and Hezbollah have a much more nuanced notion, concerning the Zionist State of Israel, nation-state for Jews and “Jews”. Whether you or I believe them or not, they distinguish between the 2 ideas.
Destroying the Zionist State of Israel, does not mean extinguishing ALL Jews. That is to say that dismantling the ethno-religious European colony of Israel is not the same as purifying White blood from Jewish blood. This nuanced understanding is assumed in the rest of the world, except in the power broking circles of the United States. Because, in the end the notion of a One Nation, One man, one vote, is still popular in the middle-east.
Destroying Apartheid South Africa didn’t mean extinguishing Dutch-Calvinists, but it didn’t mean continuing to privilege the long suffering settlers, as well.
Really, the root of this thread isn’t about hypocrisy anyway IMO. It’s about Israel, and how we can never hope to have a reasonable discussion about Israel when whole chapters of history are not open for discussion, when any individual or group not complying with Israeli interests is labeled anti-Semitic. It’s overton’s window dragged so far out of the center that we can’t even discuss facts.
Really? Here’s the title: “On Octavia Nasr, Media Double Standards and the Absurdity of Neoconservatives”.
Seems German (or, germane) to me to comment on the double standard angle. If the discussion is about permissible discussions on Hezbollah/Israel dichotomy, then say so. I was focused on the Double Standard aspect, which runs throughout the post. I didn’t see where the post called for limiting the discussion of hypocrisy only to structurally similar examples. Hypocrites abound and complaints about them are often hypocritical in themselves, since they are usually one-sided. Imposing arbitrary limitations in replying to charges of hypocritical double standards preclude calling out the accuser who well might be among the worst of hypocrites, just not the kind of hypocrite being targeted at the moment.
Since I have a record of being syntactically challenged, let me say, first and foremost, I am not accusing Eric of hypocrisy, and his tempered and responsive replies are, in part, why he is anything but a hypocrite. My attempted point is that partisans usually only see their side of any question. Offense is taken at the drop of a hat and balance is almost never a valued commodity. That is the point i was trying to make.
ObWi is unusual–and very welcome–for it’s stated practice of airing and considering all sides. It’s why I come here. It promotes introspection. One of my sub-points is that arguing about who is a hypocrite is a waste of time. Carlton is right, if a bit intemperate, that the better discussion would be the substantive one of the Palestinian/Israeli situation. Intractable, but substantive.
Seems German (or, germane) to me to comment on the double standard angle. If the discussion is about permissible discussions on Hezbollah/Israel dichotomy, then say so. I was focused on the Double Standard aspect, which runs throughout the post. I didn’t see where the post called for limiting the discussion of hypocrisy only to structurally similar examples. Hypocrites abound and complaints about them are often hypocritical in themselves, since they are usually one-sided. Imposing arbitrary limitations in replying to charges of hypocritical double standards preclude calling out the accuser who well might be among the worst of hypocrites, just not the kind of hypocrite being targeted at the moment.
Sure. But did you really want to discuss the famous double standard American conservatives have where they miss no opportunity to condemn Senator Byrd for his racist past – while cheerfully embracing people who were equally horrifyingly racist in their youth, but had the saving grace (in conservative eyes) of remaining racist throughout their lives?
Because if you’d like to discuss the hypocrisy of conservative condemnations of Byrd, yes, that would be germane to the post.
Was that what you wanted to do, when you brought up Byrd’s name? I have to say, it wasn’t clear that you did.
I’ll go for the absurdity of neoconservatives, although I’m uncertain why they have influence with any media, much less enough to cause a dismissal for such a mild and differentiated comment.
I’m not familiar with Octavia Nasr’s reporting (I may have seen her once or twice over the period she was with CNN). I’m in the mountains of Utah now, and don’t get any network or pay TV, so I get only what I select over the Internets.
The neo-cons must go after those who commit a minor faux pas with such alacrity in order to deflect attention from the negative results their influence has helped create in our foreign policy.
I certainly hope that any future POTUS will be able to discern what foreign policy is required for our national interests and move us in a different direction from what it has been the last few decades. I almost never visit Eric’s posts on our foreign policy and military adventures because those areas are well beyond anything I could address knowledgeably with any specificity. Most here likely know that I would support making the tasks of our federally elected officials more manageable by reducing their workload and allowing them to focus on matters that are clearly their constitutional responsibility. Right now they try to do too much and don’t get much of anything right.
A note on McKinneyTexas and the Byrd discussion. I suspect it is true that, just as many of the neo-cons are former liberal Democrats who now support enough conservative issues that they become Republicans, the remnants of the formerly racist Democrats also have a more natural affinity to conservative positions on many domestic issues. No matter what the percentages are of either who are now viewed as conservative, all those who subscribe to conservative views (even those who never held racist or neo-con foreign policy views) are frequently painted with that brush by political opponents who find value in this.
I’m a person of mostly conservative views who does not endorse or directly support racist or neo-con foreign policy positions. But I am frequently assigned these attributes because I favor conservative positions or oppose progressive positions on political issues.
Really? Here’s the title: “On Octavia Nasr, Media Double Standards and the Absurdity of Neoconservatives”.
Seems German (or, germane) to me to comment on the double standard angle. If the discussion is about permissible discussions on Hezbollah/Israel dichotomy, then say so. I was focused on the Double Standard aspect, which runs throughout the post
See, here’s the thing: Just because you didn’t bold the other parts of the post title doesn’t mean they aren’t actually important.
liberal japonicus: “I think this is why I hate trolls so much. It is not that they have an issue or 7 that seems to really set them off, it’s that they want to make sure that no one else learns anything, because of their prejudices. If you want to remain pig-ignorant, that’s your call, but don’t inflict it on the rest of us.”
What’s with you and all the complaining all the time? You don’t like this, you don’t like that — you remind me of my shmendrik son-in-law, hocking everybody at the table when we go out to eat because he doesn’t like the silverware or the way the napkins are placed on the table. Trolling-smoolling… when we started the newsgroups that evolved into these kinds of blogging communities the only trolling that was unacceptable was when some schmuck from another newsgroup posted his address on the threads to lure people away.
What you’re objecting to as trolling is the normal give and take of posted conversations, which almost always flow in unexpected directions like jazz improvisations. It’s not some goddamn game of Canasta, with fixed rules where you get kicked out if you play your cards out of turn or you fart too much.
And another thing I’ve noticed about you is that you kvetch the loudest when it’s somebody voicing opinions you don’t like. Then you get up on your high-horse and bitch and moan to get them banned — just like those Chinese and Egyptian and Iranian noodniks who want to block access to websites because the content offends their sensibilities.
This is sort of a response to Good ole boy and McKinneyT, though I forget which part is a response to whom
–Actually, a lot of Nasr’s defenders don’t think much of her reporting. (I’d never heard of her before). Apparently she never says anything controversial, which means if she’s talking about the Mideast she’s probably keeping her head down and never saying anything worth listening to. The point here is that she said one nice thing about a Shiite religious figure with a mixed record (support for women’s rights, condemnation of some terrorist acts and support for others, altogether not that different from most Western politicians) and she’s fired. As I said earlier, if she’d said one line praising Sharon (who has a record of involvement in war crimes that goes back to Qibya in 1953) this wouldn’t have happened. It’s really a pretty straightforward example of bias.
There probably are double standards that we on the left don’t notice because they favor our beliefs but I don’t think the Byrd/Lott one was a good example, for all the reasons people have given.
My attempted point is that partisans usually only see their side of any question. Offense is taken at the drop of a hat and balance is almost never a valued commodity. That is the point i was trying to make.
And my point is that partisans also use tu quoque to obstruct serious debates at the drop of a hat. If you had some serious points to make about the issue actually being discussed, that would’ve been great. And, if in the course of that discussion you felt that an issue was being handled in a specific way because of a desired partisan political outcome, then maybe examples from the other side would’ve been useful.
Even if you’d started with another counterexample, and then discussed how it fit into some larger picture or critique of the original point, or took it off on some tangent, Id be cool with that to some extent.
But just ‘hey lefties, Senator Byrd, ha ha’, I am not cool with that.
Maybe you really did just want to make a general point of some kind. But I think you have to recognize that 1)just dropping the name without any attempt at commentary or context beyond ‘tu quoque’ did not work well, and 2)trying to turn every (uncomfortable?) debate into some meta-discussion about how we’re all hypocrites in one way or another is as useful as interrupting a doctor mid-diagnosis to proclaim that we’re all going to die someday.
Otherwise, it just looks really stupid.
Seconded. Although, he’s given us a clue- he’s got some obsession with being disciplined for having too much gas. That should narrow the list of suspects somewhat.
he’s given us a clue- he’s got some obsession with being disciplined for having too much gas. That should narrow the list of suspects somewhat.
Not to mention the obsession with portraying himself as one of the legendary founders of the internet….
That nails it right there as far as I’m concerned.
just like those Chinese and Egyptian and Iranian noodniks who want to block access to websites because the content offends their sensibilities
For the record, Egypt has relatively little of this behavior. From an HRW report:
Of course, your critique of LJ’s behavior is completely absurd, but I did want to clarify the record.
“Again, it’s really kind of telling that conservatives cannot comprehend feeling sad when you hear of the death of someone you respected: cannot even apparently comprehend the concept of feeling respect for someone who was a political enemy .”
I believe the widespread respect for Ted Kennedy disproves this. Conservatives certainly comprehend feeling bad at the death of someone you respected, and respecting a political enemy.
As for this post, at least one part of it is absurd. That neocons got her fired is ludicrous.
CNN fired her, objections came from various places, the actual content of the tweet provided no context. It was “clear” to anyone just reading the tweet that she respected and mourned the passing of a “Giant” of Hezbollah, a clear enemy of the US.
The problem with that was the part where(noted as an aside, in parentheses) he was on the US government list of terrorists. Any redeeming qualities or positions aside, he was, by definition, a terrorist and it is problematic for a news organization to have it’s Middle East expert mourning the death of a “listed” terrorist.
Neocon (and others) complaints could only have gotten her fired if her bosses thought the position they took could be popular, and they were probably right.
Or, maybe, they just agreed with the “neocons” from the start and considered it a firing offense.
It was “clear” to anyone just reading the tweet that she respected and mourned the passing of a “Giant” of Hezbollah, a clear enemy of the US.
Actually, Hezbollah is a clear enemy of Israel, for Middle-east specific reasons: trying to muddle “enemy of Israel” with “enemy of the US” is one major reason right there why the US is in trouble in the Middle East.
a clear enemy of the US
How So?
The problem with that was the part where(noted as an aside, in parentheses) he was on the US government list of terrorists. Any redeeming qualities or positions aside, he was, by definition, a terrorist and it is problematic for a news organization to have it’s Middle East expert mourning the death of a “listed” terrorist.
Interestingly, the US government has funded the MeK in recent years in order to subvert Iran. The MeK has been on the State Dept’s list for many years. Many neocon outlets and other media types have praised the MeK. None, zero, have been fired for it.
The problem with that was the part where(noted as an aside, in parentheses) he was on the US government list of terrorists. Any redeeming qualities or positions aside, he was, by definition, a terrorist
Curious use of “by definition” there. It’s almost like we should always trust the federal government to tell us the truth.
“The problem with that was the part where(noted as an aside, in parentheses) he was on the US government list of terrorists. Any redeeming qualities or positions aside, he was, by definition, a terrorist and it is problematic for a news organization to have it’s Middle East expert mourning the death of a “listed” terrorist.”
Well that just says it all, doesn’t it? When the government tells us what to think, the press should fall into line.
I just visited the Hezbollah website. Israel is mentioned only in quotes with the clear implication that it does not or should not exist. Is this where Jes, Carleton, DJ, Hogan, Eric all come down? Israel should not exist and the Hezbollah agenda should be America’s agenda?
The problem with that was the part where(noted as an aside, in parentheses) he was on the US government list of terrorists. Any redeeming qualities or positions aside, he was, by definition, a terrorist and it is problematic for a news organization to have it’s Middle East expert mourning the death of a “listed” terrorist.
Fadlallah held no position in Hizbollah, and had no operational connection to them. That was his statement, as well as Hizbollah’s, as well as (frex) Robert Baer’s.
His connection to Hizbollah generally appears to have been simply that he was a well known and authoratative Shia imam. His specific connection was to provide religious justification for suicide bombing.
It’s unclear to me that suicide bombs targeting military targets, or targeting occupying forces, qualify as terrorism.
The fact that the US has named Fadlallah as a terrorist does not make him one. Sadly, the US naming someone as a terrorist carries about as much weight as calling someone a “commie” did fifty years ago.
All of this is to the point, because your comment demonstrates Eric’s point.
If we arm them, train them, or support them, they’re not terrorists. If the “bad guys” do, they are.
And in Fadlallah’s case, even that is not relevant, because he committed no act of violence whatsoever. The worst thing you can say about him is that he provided religious justification for a tactic that we find wrong.
We’re in such a hurry to find enemies, no wonder we have such difficulty winning wars.
And yes, I am aware of Hizbollah’s history wrt our presence in Lebanon.
They didn’t want us in their country, so they tried to force us out. We’d do the same thing. Not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing, not saying we should or shouldn’t have been there, not saying I think suicide bombing is or is not a legitimate tactic in warfare or armed resistance.
Just saying that *none* of the above automatically equates to terrorism.
If you apply a word to things it doesn’t belong to, it loses it’s real meaning.
You’re not real good on nuance, are you McK? So I take it you are an enthusiastic proponent of apartheid-like policies, or of dropping white phosphorus on urban areas, and of ethnic cleansing in order to achieve the right demographic balance. What’s that? You didn’t say so? What’s that got to do with anything?
More on the Moderate Giant of Hezbollah, from Sullivan’s blog:
“Violence is not the solution,” al-Naqib wrote in his breakthrough 1998 treatise Practicing Semiviolence. “It is only approximately 19/20ths of the solution. We should not work toward the total annihilation of all who oppose us—just some of them. And perhaps it is best we practice occasional mercy for the innocent, such as the young, who can easily recuperate.”
In a 2003 interview with British newspaper The Guardian, al-Naqib said that the “decadent immorality of Western civilization must be almost, but not quite, wiped off the face of the earth.”
So, do Carleton, DJ, etc sign on to this? Is supporting someone like this just another form of acceptable viewpoints? Or is there some subtext here that, if properly appreciated, transforms al-Naqib into the Muslim Ghandi?
McKinneyTexas: Is this where Jes, Carleton, DJ, Hogan, Eric all come down?
Can’t speak for the others, McK, but: Israel is not the US: the US is not Israel. If Israel is the 51st State, then Hezbollah is a clear enemy of the US, but that’s not the case. That’s not a statement of belief: that’s just a fact.
The US can decide that all of Israel’s enemies are the US’s enemies, that Israel’s foreign policy will dictate the US’s foreign policy. But that would seem unwise even if Israel were the 51st State – the federal government of the US makes foreign policy, not a client nation or an ally.
I just visited the Hezbollah website. Israel is mentioned only in quotes with the clear implication that it does not or should not exist. Is this where Jes, Carleton, DJ, Hogan, Eric all come down? Israel should not exist and the Hezbollah agenda should be America’s agenda?
No, that is not where I stand. But that is almost entirely beside the point as to whether or not Nasr should have been sacked for saying what she did about Fadlallah.
So, do Carleton, DJ, etc sign on to this? Is supporting someone like this just another form of acceptable viewpoints? Or is there some subtext here that, if properly appreciated, transforms al-Naqib into the Muslim Ghandi?
Can you tell me what this has to do with the present discussion?
Just to retrace steps:
1. Naqib is not Fadlallah, Fadllallah is Fadlallah.
2. Nasr did not say that she “supported” Naqib. Nor did she say that she “supported” Fadlallah.
3. Given #1 and #2, I’m not sure what your point is.
McKinney from Texas–
You do realize you are citing an article from the Onion? David Frum cited a real obituary in the Economist and then he claimed it was similar to a fake news article in the Onion, and you, oh most sapient of commenters, decided to cite that.
link
Here’s the David Frum piece (he’s guestblogging for Sullivan) that McK found citing the only real news source in America–
link
Really? Was he speaking to Democrats at a gay pride parade in California on the topic of Mexican immigration or something? Because that is a similar type of avowed…
Responding against my better judgment…
Sebastian, I have no idea what that response means. It looks like an attempt to be cute but I can’t even get a handle on what you’re suggesting.
Having said that, I’m going to own up to an error on my part: I was under the impression that Lott made his “we’re proud of it” remarks when speaking to the CCC or a similar group. This is not the case: he made them at a celebration of Thurmond’s 100th birthday. So no, he wasn’t speaking to “a roomful of avowed racists” (although given the fact that Thurmond, unlike Robert Byrd, never fully renounced his earlier overt racism, we can assume that there were at least a few “avowed” types in the room).
But of course this is utterly peripheral, and I’d like to try to get back to something more essential. You just commented on another thread that you feel like you don’t get to present your views here anymore without getting immediately pounced on. So I’m going to retract my claws and asking a simple question: If Trent Lott, when he said what he did, wasn’t referring to segregation, what do you think he was referring to? What other issue that was part of Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign might he have been referencing? Zoning laws? Veteran’s affairs? School construction bonds?
You don’t “think” Lott was expressing regret over desegregation, so I’m asking you…what “problems” was he suggesting we might not have had, if Strom Thurmond had won in 1948?
I can tell you off the bat that a simple response of “states’ rights” isn’t going to do it for me. The “states’ rights” on which Thurmond ran in 1948 meant one thing, and one thing only: the right to maintain Jim Crow in the South. You know it, I know it, everybody knows it. So please…let’s all give each other enough credit on that score.
I’m enjoying this. I just googled al Naqib and “Practicing Semiviolence” on the remote chance that the Onion article was based on reality. If it is, the Internet doesn’t seem to know about it.
link
McKinney: Is supporting someone like this just another form of acceptable viewpoints? Or is there some subtext here that, if properly appreciated, transforms al-Naqib into the Muslim [Gandhi]?
The United States government routinely, for a decade through both the Clinton and Bush Jr administrations, granted “someone like this” a visa to enter the United States and even invited him to the White House: I refer of course to the Irish terrorist Gerry Adams.
In 1994 the IRA were an active terrorist force in Northern Ireland and still a threat in Ireland and in mainland UK. The Brighton hotel bombing was only a decade in the past, at which the IRA had killed five people, permanently disabled several more, and only missed killing Margaret Thatcher, then PM, because she was a workaholic who was still up at 2:54 in the morning. But the US still let the terrorist in and played nice with him at your tea parties, even against the direct opposition of the UK government.
Why?
Because US foreign policy is not identical with UK foreign policy. Gerry Adams was an enemy of the UK and a terrorist. That didn’t make him an enemy of the US.
So, do Carleton, DJ, etc sign on to this? Is supporting someone like this just another form of acceptable viewpoints?
You know, it’s highly likely that if you sat down and thought about it for ten minutes, you’d come up with some controversial, problematic person, who you find admirable for some set of reasons.
Maybe Nat Turner. Maybe John Brown. Maybe Toussaint L’Overture, or Brigham Young, or Andrew Jackson, or Nathan Bedford Forrest, or Che Guevara, or Nelson Mandela, or Garibaldi.
Take ten minutes. You’ll think of someone.
I don’t hear anyone on this thread praising Hizbollah, or even Fadlallah. Or even Nasr, for that matter.
Nasr said she respected Fadlallah, and that she was sad to hear he had died. She didn’t say she agreed with everything he ever said, didn’t say she thought Israel should be wiped off the face of the earth, didn’t say she thought Hezbollah was a wonderful organization. Didn’t say any of that.
She said she admired Fadlallah, and was sad that he had died.
Subsequently, she made a fairly complete explanation of the reasons she admired him, and personally I find those reasons both plausible and hard to object to.
For all of that, she was fired.
If you make similar statements about *any number of people* who have supported or actively engaged in acts of political violence, but who don’t happen to be Muslim and/or opposed to the political state of Israel, you will not be fired. In fact, you might get your own TV show.
That’s the point.
Thanks.
Anyway, Mck, I’m about to write an expose for the Onion about how you guided the bolide into the Yucatan Peninsula some 65 million years ago and wiped out half the species on the planet. How can you live with yourself, man?
I’ve also looked up the real al-Naqib on wikipedia. They don’t have much and that they took from a CFR website, I think.
link
Here’s my question:
Who here thinks, in general, that it’s a good thing that reporters should be fired solely for stating sorrow at the death of (or admiration for) controversial figures for ambiguous or unclear reasons on twitter? Is that how an open society best operates?
In the specific case at hand, the tweet could have been read to imply a number of things. Some of them, if explicitly stated, may have been justification for firing. But Nasr never stated any of those termination-justifying things, and there were plenty of other possible reasons for Nasr’s actual tweet, such as the ones Nasr later stated, that I didn’t see as being justification for firing her. Does anyone disagree?
Was her tweet, in and of itself, with no follow up, justification for firing? Is this the short leash we should want for our journalists or isn’t it?
(Not to be beating around the bush, I’m pretty much asking Seb, McTex and Marty. And I don’t claim these are the only relevant questions. Maybe the neocon influence on her firing is questionable. Arguing that point doesn’t bother me so much. For me, the questions above are the make-or-break points of agreement or disagreement that will tell me if there’s any point in my continuing the discussion.)
this where Jes, Carleton, DJ, Hogan, Eric all come down? Israel should not exist and the Hezbollah agenda should be America’s agenda?
I’m the littlest billy-goat. Eat my brother instead!
“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business.”
What do you say, McK? Is supporting someone like this just another form of acceptable viewpoints?
“If Trent Lott, when he said what he did, wasn’t referring to segregation, what do you think he was referring to? What other issue that was part of Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign might he have been referencing? Zoning laws? Veteran’s affairs? School construction bonds?”
The winner of that contest was Truman, who campaigned on the far-reaching extension of FDRs policies. Lott pretty much made his career of opposing the extension of a whole basket of FDR policies, including especially some of the housing stuff that became such an ugly mess by the 70s (while under complete Democratic Party control). So it seems to me very likely he meant something about that.
Which may be a perfectly great reason not to like Lott, but isn’t the racist reason which I think we are talking about.
(Hell, I supported getting rid of Lott over that statement, *not* because I thought it was racist, but because I thought it was inappropriate and bad to be so careless.)
You do realize you are citing an article from the Onion? David Frum cited a real obituary in the Economist and then he claimed it was similar to a fake news article in the Onion, and you, oh most sapient of commenters, decided to cite that.
For better or for worse, no I didn’t. I clicked on all of the links and couldn’t make a connection. I though I was posting the real thing. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have posted. You are correct, I quoted satire as the real thing. I retract (which is what I do when I miss something).
That still leaves the larger piece of the Hezbollah website which I did read. It is clear Hezbollah stands for the elimination of Israel. Are you on board with that?
Russell–I am fairly sure that expressing admiration for Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Pol Pot, possibly Che, Castro, Chavez, etc. can get someone fired, depending on context. Kind of like expressing a favorable opinion of someone like Strom Thurmond. That was one of my original points. Of the foregoing, only two are Muslim. Your point that the proscribed area of allowed admiration is somehow limited to Islam is in error.
If Hezbollah limited its attacks to military targets, I would have a different view. They don’t.
Further, Israel is not above criticism. Separating fact from fiction, on both sides, is the first step in figuring out when and how to level criticism. I don’t support apartheid, indiscriminate bombing of civilians, etc. Nor do I support rocket attacks into civilian centers.
HSD–controversial is a highly elastic and subjective term. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, or at least it is so perceived by many people (including me, not that it matters much what I think). Controversial is a matter of degree. People are entitled to hold pretty much any opinion they wish. You probably would fire someone who believed, for example, that African Americans were intellectually inferior to Caucasians or who believed that women should subordinate themselves to men. I would do the same. These views are controversial, to say the least. People in public positions will be judged by the views they hold. Fair or not, that is life.
I refer of course to the Irish terrorist Gerry Adams.
A decision that many Americans, including me, thought was wrong, as wrong as allowing any other terrorist to have a place in our country.
DJ, I’ve regretted the meteor episode ever since and if I haven’t said so before, I’ll say it now.
Eric, name confusion is the product of trying do too much too fast. Thanks for the correction.
I’d still like a roll call vote on who is on board with the Hezbollah goal of eliminating the state of Israel and who is not. That is a good starting point in this debate. It’s a simple thing to do: “I am with/against Hezbollah” on the elimination of Israel as a sovereign state.”
The winner of that contest was Truman, who campaigned on the far-reaching extension of FDRs policies.
If it was just about opposing the extension of FDR’s policies, there was also a Republican running in that race, who opposed those policies as well. Why weren’t people like Trent Lott content to just vote Republican, if what really counted was getting the Democrats out of office?
(And if it was really FDR’s policies on “housing stuff” and the like that mattered most, why weren’t Southerners like Thurmond and Lott Republicans to begin with?)
“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show we mean business.”
What do you say, McK? Is supporting someone like this just another form of acceptable viewpoints?
I don’t know who said this. I certainly don’t subscribe to it. More to the point, I am not making a case for allowing vicious statements like this to pass without consequence. Just the opposite.
Lott pretty much made his career of opposing the extension of a whole basket of FDR policies
Yeah, look at the nasty mess the US got into after WWII. The 1950s were such a terrible, economically depressed time, what with the high taxation and welfare that so many white Americans benefited from.
(Hell, I supported getting rid of Lott over that statement, *not* because I thought it was racist, but because I thought it was inappropriate and bad to be so careless.)
Absolutely. Kind of took the lid of the snakes’ nest of racism in the Republican party, and reminded everyone that Republicans think all of this was bad stuff that shouldn’t ever have been allowed to happen. Very careless indeed of Trent Lott: Republicans are supposed to keep their racism under closer wraps rather than admit outright they think the US would be better if it were still segregated and the Civil Rights Act had failed to pass.
Actually, googling on FDR, I find many right-wing Americans are maniacally convinced the US would be better if it were still stuck in the 1930s. Roll on Great Depression II.
UK–ok, it was Jonah Goldberg. I found his quote on Google but couldn’t find the original statement, so I don’t have the context. If this is hyperbolic facetiousness or gallows humor, then we have a case of bad taste, again depending on context. If it’s a policy statement, then Goldberg would have no grounds to complain if he got axed.
Okay, McK, I take back the nasty thoughts I’ve had of you in the past hour. ( I was particularly touched by your repentance over the whole mass extinction thing.)
As for Israel, ideally I would like to see a one state solution with Palestinians allowed to return. I don’t quite see why someone born in Brooklyn gets to move to Israel and become a citizen when someone born in Haifa (or whose parents lived there) does not. Right now that’s a nonstarter with the Israelis and many Palestinians might not want to live with them any more than many Israelis want to live with Palestinians. So what I’ve said in the past is that I favor a two state solution along the 67 borders (though really I think the Palestinians deserve more than that, even with just a 2 state solution) and if the two sides can learn to get along and cross back and forth peacefully, who knows? They might decide to unify in a generation or two.
These days, though, I’m not terribly hopeful of a two state solution either. The Israelis have swallowed up so much of the land, for one thing. The one state solution is utopian right now. So I don’t know what’s realistic to hope for.
Hezbollah and Hamas are not very savory organizations IMO (I’d also say that about the Israeli government, frankly, as well as the PA). But they have to be part of the solution. And again, no American journalist would be fired if he or she praised Ariel Sharon or some other murderer on the Israeli side or if they praised some crackpot rightwing American who suggested ethnic cleansing as a solution to the Palestinian problem. That would be Mike Huckabee, btw.
Controversial is a matter of degree. People are entitled to hold pretty much any opinion they wish. You probably would fire someone who believed, for example, that African Americans were intellectually inferior to Caucasians or who believed that women should subordinate themselves to men.
McKTex,
I get that. I purposely put “ambiguous or unclear reasons” in my condition. I also noted that, in Nasr’s case, there were possible, unstated reasons for her tweet that would justify her firing. But, being only possible and unstated, and given that there were plenty of other possible reasons for that same tweet that wouldn’t justify her firing (IMO, at least), was her firing justified?
On your proposition regarding African-Americans and women, sure. But those would involve explicit and unambiguous statements of highly offensive and unacceptable opinions in the opinion of the employer. The question is, would the employers opinion be one you could agree with?
In the case you present, I would agree with the employer. That doesn’t mean I agree that Nasr should have been fired. She didn’t make comparable statements, IMO. Do you think she did, particularly in light of her follow up?
The point is, she never said anything advocating terrorism or the destruction of Israel. What she did say wasn’t even in a professional context, where the bar might be higher, where one might be expected to more fully consider potential inferences from one’s statements. But it was twitter.
So, regardless of the role of neocons or lack thereof in the firing and regardless of there being or not being some sort of double standard involved, do you think it was a good thing that Nasr was fired solely on the basis of her tweet? Would you like to see more of this sort of thing in an open society?
McK, the writer of those words was Jonah Goldberg, writing in the National Review Online, celebrating the fall of Baghdad in 2003. He referred to it as the “Ledeen Doctrine” after Michael Ledeen, although there doesn’t seem to be any record of Ledeen actually espousing this “doctrine” publicly.
Needless to say, the consequences of Goldberg writing these words approvingly were — apart from revulsion and ridicule from left-wing bloggers — nonexistent. He’s still at NRO and he has a column in the LA Times and is a regular on the cable news circuit.
And yet those words are, to my mind, utterly horrifying; without the slightest exaggeration, I consider them the words of a psychopath. It’s not even a justification of horrible violence and suffering as a last resort, as the only means to an end…it’s a celebration of violence and suffering (other people’s, of course) as ends in themselves. I have to wonder if Fadlallah ever even came close to that level of utter callousness.
I’m not trying to play tit-for-tat here, but I’ve been thinking about those words since this thread began. I think they provide some helpful perspective.
I’d still like a roll call vote on who is on board with the Hezbollah goal of eliminating the state of Israel and who is not. That is a good starting point in this debate. It’s a simple thing to do: “I am with/against Hezbollah” on the elimination of Israel as a sovereign state.”
On balance, I’m against the elimination of Israel as a sovereign state.
On balance, I’m also against barbarisms like genital mutilation (for either sex) and honor killings.
Now what?
–TP
Here’s the story on Huckabee proposing ethnic cleansing as a solution to the Palestinian problem. He’s not been drummed out of mainstream American life–
link
I’d still like a roll call vote on who is on board with the Hezbollah goal of eliminating the state of Israel and who is not.
Of course you would. Because “people shouldn’t lose their jobs just because they said something vaguely positive about anyone connected with Hezbollah” is so hard to distinguish from “drive the Israelis into the sea” that we need to stop everything else and sort that out (so that we can “start the debate,” whatever debate that might be). And it’s not at all inflammatory or trollish to ask people whether they’re really down with ethnic cleansing based on a discussion of media double standards; that’s just normal give and take.
Hey, I’m against randomly throwing sulfuric acid in the faces of preschool children. What about the rest of you? Hmmmmmm? Got anything to say about that?
I’d still like a roll call vote on who is on board with the Hezbollah goal of eliminating the state of Israel and who is not. That is a good starting point in this debate.
No McKinney, it by god is not. What it is, is a red herring.
Few if any folks here desire the elimination of the state of Israel.
And whether they do or don’t has nothing to do with whether a double standard applies to any discussion of anything to do with the Middle East in this country.
And for the record, your list of “controversial” figures is not my list. Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and Bin Laden are not really comparable to Fadlallah.
Which demonstrates, amazingly enough, the point.
McK: I don’t support apartheid, indiscriminate bombing of civilians, etc. Nor do I support rocket attacks into civilian centers.
Nor does Hezbollah. So you’ve got that in common with them. Does that make you a terrorist, because you oppose Israeli apartheid, Israeli indiscriminate bombing of civilians, and Israeli rocket attacks into civilian centers? (That’s very far from all Israel’s done to Lebanon, of course: I’d like to assume you’re also against massacres, torture, etc.)
McKinney, George W. Bush got himself appointed President, incompetently let 9/11 happen – British citizens were killed too – took the UK with him to war in Afghanistan (and British soldiers are still being killed there), lied the US and the UK into war with Iraq, set up concentration camps where prisoners of war and kidnap victims – some of them British citizens or British residents – were tortured by US soldiers, and did many other evil things – far worse in his relatively short period in office than Fadlallah did in his lifetime. Bush had more opportunities to do more evil, and used his opportunities.
Let’s say George W. Bush goes biking drunk – again – and this time the Secret Service agent who’s supposed to save him before he hurts himself or anyone else, misses the save. Bush has a broken neck. He’s dead.
I can tell you that no one who worked for a major news organization in the UK would be sacked for saying they were sad to hear Bush was dead. (Nor, I’m guessing, would they be sacked for saying they weren’t sad, though there are enough right-wing news organisations in the UK that I wouldn’t bet on that.)
Hell, who was sacked for saying they were sad to hear Jerry Falwell was dead, that crappy little creep who blamed 9/11 on the gays and the ACLU and feminism?
Though conservatives plainly have no comprehension of this simple human thing, it is possible to be sad because someone is dead, even if they were your political opponent.
DJ—I was way overdue in owing up to the meteor thing.
I do not see moral equivalence between Israel and Hammas/Hezbollah. I have no solution for the mess over there and I do thank you for your clear and cogent reply as well as for the absolution (for the moment, I realize this isn’t a lifetime pass). As for Sharon being a murderer, a couple of questions: When/what was the act of murder? Who praised him for it? As for Huckabee, I read the link downthread. I don’t think Huckabee was calling for ethnic cleansing in the Balkan sense, but let’s expand the definition somewhat and include the forced relocation of people. Let’s also leave aside that no sane person or country is calling for this as a solution to the Israeli/Palestinian issue. Huckabee has his late Sunday evening time slot at Fox News because, well, someone had to fill it and I suppose he was available. The thing about Fox News is that a person can say whatever they want if it fits the narrative. That’s the First Amendment. We fire people like Huckabee by not listening to them. That’s the best we can do.
HSD,
I purposely put “ambiguous or unclear reasons” in my condition. I also noted that, in Nasr’s case, there were possible, unstated reasons for her tweet that would justify her firing.
* * *
do you think it was a good thing that Nasr was fired solely on the basis of her tweet? Would you like to see more of this sort of thing in an open society?
Fair Point and I should have caught that. No, generally speaking, I don’t. As someone who frequently steps on his private parts even after having supposedly re-read and proofed his comments and still can get my intent out the way I mean it, I fully understand the misstatement. Which is why I appreciate being called out. My view is that second chances should be the default position. This is my view across the board, which leads me to UK’s comments re: Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg is a pundit, one of many who routinely employ gallows humor, sarcasm and hyperbole to make their points. They seldom mean what they say literally when doing so. I couldn’t find the original Goldberg text, just the snippet that UK finds so troubling. Context is important, particularly when analyzing a statement like this and even more so considering it was made by a pundit of the Goldberg type (think Ted Rall for another example).
The larger point, and one I was trying to make way upthread, is that partisans across the board are too quick to seize upon an adversary’s words, usually either out of context or spoken off the cuff, and then demand either summary execution or the kind of post comment groveling that, to me, only a sadist would wish on another. What passes for modern discourse is replete with these flare-ups. They are tiresome. ObWi is where I hang, so it’s where I complain when I see it.
TP, Now what?
Now, nothing. You answered straight up. I know the context of future discussions. It was a straightforward question.
Hogan, many in fact do ascribe the drive the Israelis into the sea plan as being a Hezbollah goal. And, for this reason, saying something nice about Hezbollah, like saying something nice about Stalinism, tends to produce a negative response. That doesn’t give Israel a pass, but it isn’t nothing either.
And, for this reason, saying something nice about Hezbollah
Just to be clear, again, Nasr did not say anything nice about Hez. She said that she was saddened by Fadlallah’s death, and that she respected him.
As for Sharon being a murderer, a couple of questions: When/what was the act of murder? Who praised him for it?
“Who praised him for it” is an interesting framing of the issue.
Again, Fadlallah holds some opinions and beliefs that I strongly disagree with. Ostensibly, that goes for Nasr too. She did not anywhere praise him for those beliefs. She said that she respected him and was saddened by his death. Her clarification, fwiw, tries to differentiate the parts she respects and the parts she doesn’t.
So, the proper analogy to Sharon would not be someone praising his alleged war crimes, but merely stating that they respect him, and are saddened by his death at the relevant time.
Obviously, nobody would lose their job for saying that. The alleged war crimes in question are the civilian massacres at Sabra and Shatila.
Here’s the kicker though: Even if someone said “I respect Sharon particularly for his actions at Sabra and Shatila” that person would not lose their job. And that would be far more odious than anything Nasr tweeted.
Also, McTex, here is the full Jonah article.
Russell
No McKinney, it by god is not. What it is, is a red herring.
Few if any folks here desire the elimination of the state of Israel.
Well, if the issue is whether it is ok, or not, to fire someone who supports Hezbollah, then it’s not a red herring. Eliminating the state of Israel is Hezbollah’s declared goal. They’ve been given a number of opportunities to back off of that position and they won’t do it. Supporting Hezbollah implies support of that goal. Further, it helps to understand the background of this online discussions if the context is within or without the continued existence of Israel.
And for the record, your list of “controversial” figures is not my list. Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and Bin Laden are not really comparable to Fadlallah.
It depends on how you parse the list of where it crosses from controversial to beyond the pale. It’s all subjective as hell. My ‘beyond the pale’ line, if the speaker actually intends what is said (the subject of another comment upthread), is fairly tightly drawn.
We are talking about several different things here, among which are: is support for Hezbollah a valid firing offense? In my view, yes. Did Nasr misspeak or was she taken out of context? If yes, then firing was too much.
Supporting Hezbollah implies support of that goal.
But she didn’t say anything in support of Hez! And I disagree that it should be a firing offense. I’m not a fan of certain of Hez’s policies, but I’m not a fan of certain of Sharon’s or Bibi’s, yet I’d not like to see reporters fired for saying that they respect leaders of Likud or Hez.
Or Huckabee even.
is support for Hezbollah a valid firing offense?
See above.
Sharon’s first known association with a large number of innocent victims was at Qibya in 1953. I believe he was associated with some more brutality after that and before 1982. He pushed for the invasion of Lebanon and going all the way to Beirut in 1982, where he was responsible for aerial and artillery bombardments that killed thousands of civilians. Then came the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, where he sent Christian Phalangist militia into two refugee camps–the Phalangists had already demonstrated their willingness to butcher civilians by the thousands, so it is impossible to imagine Sharon didn’t know what was likely to happen. The IDF killed thousands of civilians during the Second Intifada, part of which happened under Sharon.
I don’t know that anyone has praised Sharon for his murders, though there have no doubt been quite a few who have praised him in general. The late William Safire was a big fan and he was a columnist for the NYT. But Nasr wasn’t fired for praising Hezbollah for its terrorism.
As for moral equivalence, I think murders are pretty much morally equivalent. I’ve never thought except in a purely cynical sense that we ought to rate the odiousness of a crime according to how much we might prefer a given society or side on other grounds.
McTX: Now, nothing. You answered straight up. I know the context of future discussions.
Well, as long as you got something out of it, I’m happy to have been of service.
BTW, I just have to know: what’s this “meteor” thing you have going with DJ?
–TP
Hogan, many in fact do ascribe the drive the Israelis into the sea plan as being a Hezbollah goal And, for this reason, saying something nice about Hezbollah, like saying something nice about Stalinism, tends to produce a negative response.
Yes, I know; this is not my first time at the rodeo, so to speak. Do you think that negative response is usually rational? Do you think it promotes free discussion? Do you think anyone who mentions Stalin’s key role in defeating Hitler, or even just calls him “a giant of Bolshevism,” should be taken as endorsing the Ukraine famine and the purges? Would you like some ever-present boilerplate footnote for any time I say something positive about a “controversial figure”? (“The above should not be taken to imply approval of every one of Controversial Figure’s actions; specifically disapproved actions include but are not limited to violations of the United Nations Human Rights Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the US Constitution, Title 18 of the Pennsylvania Code and Robert’s Rules of Order, where applicable. The above should also not be taken as an overall positive evaluation of Controversial Figure’s moral character, relationship history, or treatment of employees or other subordinates. All judgments are tentative pending the possible future discovery of new information about Controversial Figure.”)
“BTW, I just have to know: what’s this “meteor” thing you have going with DJ?”
I accused him of killing the dinosaurs upthread. It seemed like the thing to do at the time. Since he’s admitted it, I’ve got no problem with him.
McKinneyTexas: Well, if the issue is whether it is ok, or not, to fire someone who supports Hezbollah, then it’s not a red herring.
But that’s a red herring.
The tweet for which Octavia Nasr was fired wasn’t about supporting Hezbollah. It was about being sad that someone had died – someone who was an early supporter of Hezbollah, and a later critic of Hezbollah, and who was widely thought of as a spiritual guide by many in Hezbollah.
Earlier in this thread Marty claimed “I believe the widespread respect for Ted Kennedy disproves this. Conservatives certainly comprehend feeling bad at the death of someone you respected, and respecting a political enemy.”
But you appear to disagree with Marty. For you, every Republican who claimed to respect Ted Kennedy and to feel sad when he died, was actually a Democratic Party supporter?
Or were you just trying to derail the discussion, again?
I accused him of killing the dinosaurs upthread. It seemed like the thing to do at the time. Since he’s admitted it, I’ve got no problem with him.
I am not taking any questions on Neanderthals either. Ancient history, context, etc.
Which may be a perfectly great reason not to like Lott, but isn’t the racist reason which I think we are talking about.
Again, without Lott’s history of association with overt racists, I think this wouldn’t have hurt him. But he did have that history, and I don’t think we can have this discussion without acknowledging that. Or debating it, at least.
Without that context, it could easily have been a clumsy statement. With that context, it seems very much the dogwhistle.
The thing about Fox News is that a person can say whatever they want if it fits the narrative.
QED
And it’s not specific to Fox. But QED just the same.
Lazy Neanderthals, sneaking in here and stealing our good Cro-Magnon jobs. Extinction was too good for them.
I just visited the Hezbollah website. Israel is mentioned only in quotes with the clear implication that it does not or should not exist. Is this where Jes, Carleton, DJ, Hogan, Eric all come down? Israel should not exist and the Hezbollah agenda should be America’s agenda?
Has it really come to this? The trite assertion that defending someone’s freedom to speak (not in a first amendment sense, in a broader sense) is tantamount to endorsing their speech?
For better or for worse, no I didn’t. I clicked on all of the links and couldn’t make a connection. I though I was posting the real thing. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have posted. You are correct, I quoted satire as the real thing. I retract (which is what I do when I miss something).
When you’re citing the Onion’s parodies indirectly, then you need to do more than apologize. You need to consider why your worldview is so screwed up that you’re able to buy hyperbolic parody as fact.
I don’t know who said this. I certainly don’t subscribe to it.
Ah, but by your standards you don’t need to subscribe to it. You need to support someone who expressed admiration for someone who is also liked by the person who said that. That is what you consider enough evidence to ask whether you support something, apparently.
Expressing admiration for Ariel Sharon is tantamount to supporting the positions of the most extreme settler groups who admire Sharon.
Expressing admiration for George Bush is tantamount to supporting the positions of the most extreme militia groups who voted for him.
Well, if the issue is whether it is ok, or not, to fire someone who supports Hezbollah, then it’s not a red herring
Does your slipping from her actual statement to this total fabrication not cause you some concern for your mental state? She “supports Hezbollah”?
I don’t think Huckabee was calling for ethnic cleansing in the Balkan sense, but let’s expand the definition somewhat and include the forced relocation of people.
Forced relocation is actually a war crime. And ethnic cleansing does not only mean genocide, it is also used to describe forced relocation (as occurred in the Balkans).
So now, you’ve defended someone who was advocating for a crime against humanity. I must ask, with my tongue in my cheek, why do you support war crimes? I don’t see how we can continue to have a discussion until we clear up this disturbing position of yours.
When you’re citing the Onion’s parodies indirectly, then you need to do more than apologize. You need to consider why your worldview is so screwed up that you’re able to buy hyperbolic parody as fact.
I think this is a bit unfair. I have cited discredited pieces before – even laughably so. Confirmation bias affects us all, and it came via what appeared like a reputable source.
Does your slipping from her actual statement to this total fabrication not cause you some concern for your mental state?
CW: Let’s try to do better than this on the civility front. I love your comments, but this one is probably not going to improve the tone of the discussion.
I, on the other hand, was under the impression he found it at Andrew Sullivan’s.
Oh. Civility. I should try harder at that.
I accused him of killing the dinosaurs upthread. It seemed like the thing to do at the time. Since he’s admitted it, I’ve got no problem with him.
Exactly. Not that I’m confirming or denying any involvement, or knowledge, whatsoever.
er, Lazy Neanderthals, sneaking in here and stealing our good Cro-Magnon jobs. Extinction was too good for them.
That’s what that last comment referred to.
CW: Let’s try to do better than this on the civility front. I love your comments, but this one is probably not going to improve the tone of the discussion.
Yeah, well, I was just asked repeatedly whether or not Im a supporter of Hezbollah. You should’ve seen my off-the-cuff response, this is positively Emily Post…
I’m the last to claim some form of zen-like self-restraint, but still…
I, on the other hand, was under the impression he found it at Andrew Sullivan’s.
ba-da-boom!
What the world needs is a rim-shot emoticon.
What the world needs is a rim-shot emoticon.
What Obsidian Wings needs is an open thread in which to develop such an emoticon.
Also, to discuss McKT’s responsibility for the dinosaur-extinction.
I myself wish to confess to wiping out the dodo. I’m sorry: it was saving the coelacanth that did it.
%
Thank you, jes, for reminding me to look up the long version of “you shouldn’t mess with the time/space continuum, and I’ll tell you why”:
*****
“If the Universe came to an end every time there was some uncertainty about what had happened in it, it would never have got beyond the first picosecond. And many of course don’t. It’s like a human body, you see. A few cuts and bruises here and there don’t hurt it. Not even major surgery if it’s done properly. Paradoxes are just the scar tissue. Time and space heal themselves up around them and people simply remember a version of events which makes as much sense as they require it to make.
“That isn’t to say that if you get involved in a paradox a few things won’t strike you as being very odd, but if you’ve got through life without that already happening to you, then I don’t know which Universe you’ve been living in, but it isn’t this one.”
“Well, if that’s the case,” said Richard, “why were you so fierce about not doing anything to save the dodo?”
Reg sighed. “You don’t understand at all. The dodo wouldn’t have died if I hadn’t worked so hard to save the coelacanth.”
“The coelacanth? The prehistoric fish? But how could one possibly affect the other?”
“Ah. Now there you’re asking. The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis. Not only is the continuum like a human body, it is also very like a piece of badly put up wallpaper. Push down a bubble somewhere, another one pops up somewhere else. There are no more dodos because of my interference. In the end I imposed the rule on myself because I simply couldn’t bear it any more. The only thing that really gets hurt when you try and change time is yourself.”
*****
Seems apropos, somehow.
I don’t think Israel should be destroyed.
But I do think it is hilarious that you’re upset by that. I mean, If the US suffered even a tenth of what Lebanon suffered at Israeli hands, we would probably annihilate a few million people in revenge.
I mean, some rich Saudi guy killed 3000 Americans and we invaded two countries, neither of which was Saudi Arabia. In the country that really had nothing at all to do with the attacks, we started a war that annihilated well over a million human beings and produced three or four million refugees. And we don’t really care about that as a people. People in Lebanon dream of only having suffered a few thousand deaths and the loss of a few large buildings due to Israeli attacks — in reality they’ve suffered a lot worse. If Americans suffered all that, I doubt we would limit ourselves to annihilating only one country; I imagine we’d keep killing until we purged at least half a dozen nations, no matter how tenuous the relationship was.
The point is: Americans believe that they’re entitled to do anything they want to people who kill Americans. That includes killing any number of innocent people. And now you’re lecturing Hezbollah on how awful it is that they make bold speeches about eliminating Israel after Israel eliminated a fair number of Lebanese people and destroyed a good sized chunk of their society.
Do you see why I find your comment so funny? Do you appreciate the lack of self-awareness that you display?
Eric, thanks. CW’s chastisement, like Jes’, is occassionally a bit overwrought. I don’t take offense, nor do I take their views lightly. In and among the flame there is usually something to think about, even if my views don’t change.
CW, way upthread, you gently nudged me for going off-topic, noting, Faced with a difficult discussion about the history of terrorism in Israel’s past and the moral ambiguity of comdemning anyone who has ever associated with Hisbollah in any capacity as evil while embracing Israel . . .”. This difficult decision is a subset of the larger debate which can only be had in one of two contexts: elimination or accommodation of Israel’s continued existence. My sense is that most, but not all, here debate Israel’s shortcomings in the latter context. But, it’s good to know where people stand fundamentally. A debate in the latter context is possible, in the former, not so much.
Also, again thanks to Eric for finding the original Goldberg piece. Goldberg said, much later in his article,
But there will be plenty of time later to dissect and debate every argument, good and bad, for toppling Saddam. For now let’s fall back on the Ledeen Doctrine. The United States needs to go to war with Iraq because it needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense.
Even then, as a supporter of the invasion, I would never have subscribed to this incredibly shallow argument which, taken literally (how otherwise?) is exactly as awful as UK says it is. So much for the defense of hyperbole. FWIW, I was a WMD/atrocity-based advocate of invading Iraq. So much for my crystal ball.
it was saving the coelacanth that did it.
And I, for one thank you. Served with a side of snail darter, hard to beat.
Turb, Americans believe that they’re entitled to do anything they want to people who kill Americans.
Focusing solely on this sentence, and leaving aside quibbles (“anything they want”), there is something here worth exploring. I do agree that we are far quicker to shoot in self defense than to recognize the self defense rights of others. I also agree that the Saudi’s have a lot to answer for, the leadership and the extremist mullahs that is.
If I had the time, I’d like to do a project where we find chickens and eggs in the ‘who fired the first shot, extended the first olive branch’ chronology in the Israel/Palestinian mess. I don’t. I really don’t have time for all of this going back and forth, it’s just that I enjoy it considerably.
I do think the US has it in its power to fix, or begin to fix, the problem. A big part of that will be some very serious Israeli arm twisting. The condition precedent, though, is all parties’ stated agreement to Israel’s right to exist in more or less its present form, i.e. a Jewish state. Borders are negotiable, existence is not.
Even then, as a supporter of the invasion, I would never have subscribed to this incredibly shallow argument which, taken literally (how otherwise?) is exactly as awful as UK says it is.
For what it’s worth, McK, this particular brand of awfulness was in no way limited to self-identified conservatives in the early 00’s. Thomas Friedman’s famous “explanation” for the invasion of Iraq is really no less repugnant, and he’s generally considered to be left-of-center. The “liberal hawks” could be every bit as callous about the war as their conservative counterparts.
I do agree that we are far quicker to shoot in self defense than to recognize the self defense rights of others.
I am sincerely glad. I think that literally puts you in the top 10% of Americans.
Now, can you connect that to Hezbullah’s stated desire for the destruction of Israel? I mean, if you think that Americans in Hezbullah’s shoes would also demand the elimination of Israel, doesn’t your criticism ring a little hollow? Or have you consistently worked to stop American military violence around the world?
Since you were an advocate of the Iraq war, I’m guessing the answer is “no” but I am curious to see how you square the circle.
Thomas Friedman’s famous “explanation” for the invasion of Iraq is really no less repugnant, and he’s generally considered to be left-of-center. The “liberal hawks” could be every bit as callous about the war as their conservative counterparts.
Seconded.
I do think the US has it in its power to fix, or begin to fix, the problem.
No, it doesn’t, McKinney. Partly because workable fixes to the problem are not discussable in the US mainstream, and partly because of Israel-is-the-51st-state attitude that allows Marty, for example, to declare that Hezbollah is “a clear enemy of the US” because Hezbollah is an enemy of Israel.
But partly, simply, because the US doesn’t have the experience or the knowledge to broker a deal between Israelis and Palestinians that would be acceptable to both sides. The US could, if it were content to follow, provide the economic clout to ensure workable solutions were adopted. But the US tried to meddle in the Irish conflict, with decidedly more neutrality and goodwill to both sides, for many years – without achieving anything useful.
I mean, if you think that Americans in Hezbullah’s shoes would also demand the elimination of Israel, doesn’t your criticism ring a little hollow?
American has fought its share of wars. Only one involved the declared intent to eliminate its opponent, and that was our Civil War. There is self-defense, which Hezbollah (in my view) goes far beyond, and there is Hez’ declared view of eliminating Israel’s existence. That leaves nothing for negotiation, no room for accommodation and it puts Israel squarely in the corner of defending itself anytime it moves, with or without provocation, against its sworn enemy.
The “liberal hawks” could be every bit as callous about the war as their conservative counterparts.
Back in the day, i.e. pre-invasion of Iraq, there was the issue of WMD, Saddam’s demonstrated horror, his funding of suicide bombers, his attacks on neighbors, etc. All of which were colorable arguments for war. People could, in good faith, support deposing Saddam without intending the consequences that actually ensued and without intending or desiring some form of empire (I will go even further off topic in a bit to explain where I am today on the Iraqi invasion). I recall vaguely reading what Friedman had to say. I say vaguely because I can seldom finish anything the man writes. I find him tedious and egocentric in the extreme.
Way OT–was the Iraqi invasion worth the candle? If time stopped today, no not at all. If the calculus is measured first in lives and second, in the quality of those lives, now and future generations, then the answer ranges from no to unknowable to maybe and perhaps even yes. WWII was necessary, but it lead to nuclear weapons, the cold war and all that followed. Was one worth the other? Not if the cold war had gone hot and escalated. But it didn’t and so WWII was the “Good War”.
Thirty or fifty years from now, there could be a cause and effect relationship between Saddam’s overthrow and ultimate peace in the mid east. The operative word is could. The trend seems to be going the other way. We, the US, had one shot at a mid-east intervention to try to make things right (if that was ever possible, but we now know it wasn’t/isn’t/won’t be). We very likely won’t go back, no matter how bad things get over there unless Israel is existentially threatened. Even then, how long we’d stay is open to question. We’ve blown whatever credibility we had and it will be left to others or to no one to sort out future conflicts there. That is the trend. It could change and the invasion could, in hindsight, be justified. Now, not so much.
Partly because workable fixes to the problem are not discussable in the US mainstream
I need to distinguish between the futility of the US doing anyone any good in the mid-East outside the discrete Palestinian/Israeli situation. The former is a non-starter the latter theoretically do-able.
Jes, I think you misperceive prevailing views in the US regarding Israel. Today, I can see where the 51st state thing seems to have legs. It’s partly because of the fundamentalist view of a slice of our body politic and partly because the Israelis are seen as the victims of the same kind of terrorism that we’ve experienced. Underneath all of this is a deep wellspring of goodwill for Israel, going back to the Holocaust and continuing through four wars of survival. That said, many Americans also understand that the Palestinians have fair grievances. If, by some miracle, Hamas/Hezbollah and the rest were to declare a three year moratorium on violence and stand behind that, views here would shift. Israel would be under substantial pressure to make things right, roll back the settlements, demilitarize to a noticeable extent, etc. The US does have the ability to aid in a the peace process if both sides will lay down their arms. Israel does a much better PR job than does Hamas/Hezbollah. They need to upgrade or the fighting will never stop.
CW, way upthread, you gently nudged me for going off-topic, noting, Faced with a difficult discussion about the history of terrorism in Israel’s past and the moral ambiguity of comdemning anyone who has ever associated with Hisbollah in any capacity as evil while embracing Israel . . .”. This difficult decision is a subset of the larger debate which can only be had in one of two contexts: elimination or accommodation of Israel’s continued existence. My sense is that most, but not all, here debate Israel’s shortcomings in the latter context. But, it’s good to know where people stand fundamentally. A debate in the latter context is possible, in the former, not so much.
My sense is that you wouldn’t advocate, say, the genocide of the Palestinian people. And since that’s a pretty repugnant position to hold, I wouldn’t ask you to clear yourself of that opinion unless you said something that seemed to support it.
What you did IMO was like asking some guests if they ever touch children inappropriately. After all, you wouldn’t want them in your home if they do, and there’s no harm or implied accusation in just asking, right?
Also, it totally (and, I think, predictably) got in the way of the useful conversation that you say you wanted to have.
Let my clarify my remark that you quoted as kicking this off- some individuals with Red Cross/Red Crescent have given medical aid to members of Hezbollah. Some moderate Arab politicians have talked with Hezbollah, or perhaps even cooperated on a non-anti-Israeli area of common interest. Some merchants have sold members of Hezbollah a jeep, or a canteen. That is what I meant by condemning anyone who has ever associated with Hisbollah in any capacity as evil.
Borders are negotiable, existence is not.
Not so fast, McKinney. I for one am willing to go far down the road of supporting the existence of Israel. But not-negotiable is too far.
Israel the plucky democratic Jewish homeland willing to share Palestine with an Arab state is one thing. Israel the nutjob theocracy whose borders are non-negotiable because God gave all of Palestine to the ancient Hebrews is another. Existence of the former is not negotiable. Of the latter, not so much.
It’s up to the Israelis which Israel they care to be. Then we can revisit the “non-negotiable” question.
–TP
Back in the day, i.e. pre-invasion of Iraq, there was the issue of WMD, Saddam’s demonstrated horror, his funding of suicide bombers, his attacks on neighbors, etc. All of which were colorable arguments for war.
See, I don’t think any of those were colorable arguments for war.
1. Saddam horrors: He used gas on the Kurds many years before the invasion, 1988 to be exact. And brutally put down an uprising of the Shiites circa Gulf War I. Otherwise, he was a fairly brutal despot, but not unlike some of our “allies.” So, no, that would not be a casus belli – even colorable.
2. Saddam and suicide bombers: He didn’t actually “fund bombers” as much as offer money to those that committed such attacks on Israel. Nevertheless, how would that be a casus bellie for the United States of America?
3. Attacks on Neighbors: In the early 1980s, with much encouragement, funding and armaments provided by the USA, Saddam attacked Iran. It would be absurd to use this as a casus belli. In the early 1990s, he invaded Kuwait, and his military was decimated. He was poor and militarily crippled. Under what pretense would prior decades+ old attacks on his neighbors be a casus belli? Presumably, if he were foolish enough to attack again, we could invade then. Why preempt?
4. WMD: The intel at the time suggested that Saddam had some left over, decaying chem and biological agents, with limited ability to weaponize either. Certainly not weaponized to the standards of a terrorist attack. Intel also was pretty definitive that Saddam and al-Qaeda were antagonistic because the latter’s core mission was to overthrow secular/apostate leaders like Saddam.
How was that a casus belli?
I don’t think any of that adds up.
WWII was necessary, but it lead to nuclear weapons, the cold war and all that followed. Was one worth the other? Not if the cold war had gone hot and escalated. But it didn’t and so WWII was the “Good War”.
Yes, but the alternative to WWII for us would have likely been invasion, occupation and colonization by Japan and/or Germany – which would not have been a picnic. So that should enter the calculus.
Whereas, on the other hand, the non-invasion of Iraq would have resulted in…not really much in terms of negatives for us. Iraq itself would have suffered under Saddam, but then Iraq has suffered much worse under our invasion.
CW–I have the picture. My take would be that good people can and do render collateral services to Hezbollah and they do so in good faith. My second take is that rendering any service to Hezbollah in support of its avowed goal is evil.
jesurgislac: “George W. Bush got himself appointed President”
I believed the Yanks elected him, my dear.
“Nor do I support rocket attacks into civilian centers.
-Nor does Hezbollah.”
Methinks you’re a wee misinformed on that too… they’ve recently released a list of ‘military targets’ they threaten to bomb in retaliation to any military action Israel takes against them — many of those targets in highly populated areas.
And this may be a wee-bit understated as well:
“and partly because of Israel-is-the-51st-state attitude that allows Marty, for example, to declare that Hezbollah is “a clear enemy of the US” because Hezbollah is an enemy of Israel.”
Hezbollah has reiterated openly and frequently it considers the U.S. its enemy, not only because the United States is an ally of Israel, but because they, Hezbollah, considers the U.S. an imperialist nation engaged in ‘savage capitalism’ against Arab peoples, and against leftist movements in Latin American countries, all of whom they encourage to rise up against the US by any means possible.
And as a point of reference for the topic under discussion up-thread, there was/is an almost identical controversy over Fadallah’s death on our side of the Atlantic.
Britain’s ambassador to Lebanon, an honourable but somewhat addled woman named Frances Guy, posted a praising obituary of the Grand Ayatollah on her official internet blogsite, attracting immediate criticism from many quarters. Upon which, the Foreign Office, “after mature consideration” quickly removed it.
LINK HERE
AND HERE
CW: That is what I meant by condemning anyone who has ever associated with Hisbollah in any capacity as evil.
I don’t believe I’m as sanguine about those associations as you are.
Would your perspective change on the Red Cross/Red Crescent workers or jeep-sellers or canteen sharers if they also offered support and encouragement to continue suicide bombings?
Would your perspective change on the Red Cross/Red Crescent workers or jeep-sellers or canteen sharers if they also offered support and encouragement to continue suicide bombings?
Not really sure how that’s relevant. Im not particularly interested in judging the exact degree of evil of every person tangentially involved in the entire Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
The purpose behind the original quote was to suggest that both sides have committed and continue to commit immoral acts. One side is permitted to have it’s ugly history hidden from discussion. The other side is not permitted to be mentioned except in the context of a condemnation towards them and everyone who has ever uttered a good word on their behalf or lent them a cup of sugar.
Those sorts of limitations are not conducive to a reasonable discussion. They are conducive to demonization of one side to the point that mourning someone admired by them is grounds for barring from polite society.
My second take is that rendering any service to Hezbollah in support of its avowed goal is evil.
Are there any Israeli actions or goals that you would put under a similar ban? For example, are settlers or those who support them evil? Because they seem to be operating, at least practically, on similar terms- denying the ability of the Palestinian people to exercise free choice and have a state. Every settler who is placed in the West Bank is another human obstacle to a free Palestine and an end to the stupidity of the conflict.
[nb “evil” isn’t the word I would use, just wondering if it applies to Israelis as well in similar circumstances].
Would your perspective change on the Red Cross/Red Crescent workers or jeep-sellers or canteen sharers if they also offered support and encouragement to continue suicide bombings?
Not really sure how that’s relevant. Im not particularly interested in judging the exact degree of evil of every person tangentially involved in the entire Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
The purpose behind the original quote was to suggest that both sides have committed and continue to commit immoral acts. One side is permitted to have it’s ugly history hidden from discussion. The other side is not permitted to be mentioned except in the context of a condemnation towards them and everyone who has ever uttered a good word on their behalf or lent them a cup of sugar.
Those sorts of limitations are not conducive to a reasonable discussion. They are conducive to demonization of one side to the point that mourning someone admired by them is grounds for barring from polite society.
My second take is that rendering any service to Hezbollah in support of its avowed goal is evil.
Are there any Israeli actions or goals that you would put under a similar ban? For example, are settlers or those who support them evil? Because they seem to be operating, at least practically, on similar terms- denying the ability of the Palestinian people to exercise free choice and have a state. Every settler who is placed in the West Bank is another human obstacle to a free Palestine and an end to the stupidity of the conflict.
[nb “evil” isn’t the word I would use, just wondering if it applies to Israelis as well in similar circumstances].
McKinney: Jes, I think you misperceive prevailing views in the US regarding Israel.
And yet, I didn’t see you pointing out to Marty that he was wrong to identify Hezbollah as a “clear enemy of the US”.
If, by some miracle, Hamas/Hezbollah and the rest were to declare a three year moratorium on violence and stand behind that, views here would shift
But there’s no notion that Israel should declare a three year moratorium on violence and stand by that? During the three years duing which “Hamas/Hezbollah and the rest” should remain non-violent, Israelis should continue being allowed to slaughter Palestinians without any disapproval from the US for two years 364 days?
Methinks you’re a wee misinformed on that too…
No, you are. Hezbollah disapprove of Israeli attacks on civilians. Unlike you, they don’t believe in passive sit-back-and-let-them-kill-us for 2 years 364 days.
Back in the day, i.e. pre-invasion of Iraq, there was the issue of WMD, Saddam’s demonstrated horror, his funding of suicide bombers, his attacks on neighbors, etc. All of which were colorable arguments for war.
Wait, aren’t you in favor of total pacifism and non-violence for at least three years when under attack?
Or is that just for the brown folks?
CW–I think the settlers are problematical, but I am not versed in the detail. What I find evil about Hezbollah is their uncompromising declaration that the Jews should be driven into the sea. That isn’t war, it’s genocide. It’s very hard for me to get past that and try to see what other merit various Hezbollah subsidiary issues might have. If the dichotomy is Israelis are trespassing on Palestinian land vs. Hezbollah wants to drive all Israeli Jews into the sea, I am struggling to find equivalence. Trespassing is bad, granted, but genocide? How do you compare these two?
It’s three minutes to midnight where I am and I have only just realised – too late! – that I have embarrassingly muddled the openly-bigoted Growler Bloke with the slightly-more-civilised McKinneyTexas.
Sorry, McKT.
If, by some miracle, Hamas/Hezbollah and the rest were to declare a three year moratorium on violence and stand behind that, views here would shift
Sure, Id love for the Palestinians to adopt the principles of MLK and Gandhi. Id also love for the Israelis to stop planting human obstacles to peace in the West Bank, practicing collective punishment, and waging economic warfare on the Palestinian people.
Again, there are two sides here. Both have done bad things. Both adhere to unsustainable policies. I agree with your condemnations of one side, but I wonder why you cannot muster at least a critical examination of the other.
American has fought its share of wars. Only one involved the declared intent to eliminate its opponent, and that was our Civil War.
So, how many of those wars involved America losing and suffering enormous losses before a much more powerful foe who appeared poised to continue randomly killing Americans for the indefinite future? Because that’s the reality of Lebanon regarding Israeli military action. If Lebanon won lots of wars and had the most powerful military on Earth, then I’d think Hizbullah’s attitude towards Israel would sociopathic. But their history is nothing like ours. They’ve suffered enormously. Israel is much much more powerful militarily and will remain so for the indefinite future.
This is all besides the point though. America started a war that annihilated a million human beings. For nothing. We’re closing in fast on 20% of the Holocaust. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? That fact that we consider Arabs and Muslims to be so beneath our contempt that we don’t feel the need to say “we going to obliterate your nation” while killing hundreds of thousands of them seems besides the point.
There is self-defense, which Hezbollah (in my view) goes far beyond, and there is Hez’ declared view of eliminating Israel’s existence. That leaves nothing for negotiation, no room for accommodation and it puts Israel squarely in the corner of defending itself anytime it moves, with or without provocation, against its sworn enemy.
People who lose wars and have little power tend to adopt maximalist rhetorical positions. In part, because that’s all they have. Winners and rich people have the luxury of rhetorical moderation.
there was the issue of WMD
Use of the term WMD is nothing but deception and propaganda. WMD means nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. No one with a brain believed that Iraq had nuclear weapons or a nuclear weapons capability. It was absurd even then. And chemical weapons are less effective than conventional weapons, so there’s no reason to care about them. There was never any evidence that Iraq was involved in bio weapons. That was always a fantasy. So we have a tissue of lies that you believed because….well I guess you wanted to believe it. War is a force that gives us meaning and all that.
Saddam’s demonstrated horror
We’ve paid off dictators doing that and worse, so I don’t think that was it. Moreover, we were paying him quite handsomely during the heydey of his horrors, so I’m pretty sure this was not a significant factor at all.
his funding of suicide bombers
Do you know who is funding suicide bombers right now? The US government. What do you think the Anbar Awakening was all about? I’ll tell you: we found groups of people that were attacking American soldiers (including some using suicide bombing) and we started giving them tons of cash. Many of those groups almost certainly used that cash to pay off suicide bomber families. In fact, I’d bet that the US government has paid more cash to suicide bomber families in Iraq than Hussein ever did in Palestine. So, does this mean that Iraqis can invade the US and start killing Americans randomly?
People could, in good faith, support deposing Saddam without intending the consequences that actually ensued and without intending or desiring some form of empire (I will go even further off topic in a bit to explain where I am today on the Iraqi invasion).
We had a government run by Bush and Cheney. We had a Central Command run by the idiot Franks. And we’re Americans, which means we’re totally frakking ignorant when it comes to understanding foreigners. There was no way we could have done this without bringing about the deaths of vast numbers of people. To will an invasion in 2003 was to will the deaths of vast numbers of people. This is depraved indifference. Reckless disregard for human life. Except not really because Americans don’t think that Iraqis are human.
I recall vaguely reading what Friedman had to say. I say vaguely because I can seldom finish anything the man writes. I find him tedious and egocentric in the extreme.
On this point, we are in complete agreement. It amazes me that anyone is willing to publish his work. Boggles the mind.
Methinks you’re a wee misinformed on that too… they’ve recently released a list of ‘military targets’ they threaten to bomb in retaliation to any military action Israel takes against them — many of those targets in highly populated areas.
Ive seen this behavior on the part of Palestinian groups (ie having military units or structures near civilians) as “using human shields”.
Just by way of pointing out, once again, that virtually any behavior in this ugly situation can be comfortably condemned by one side if they’re willing to apply a double standard.
the slightly-more-civilised McKinneyTexas.
I am warmed through and through. Go get some sleep. You are clearly going soft.
But there’s no notion that Israel should declare a three year moratorium on violence and stand by that?
If Hamas/Hezbollah stood down and Israel didn’t reciprocate, many Americans would have a major change of heart. Major.
I agree with your condemnations of one side, but I wonder why you cannot muster at least a critical examination of the other.
My take, generally, is that the Israeli’s are more reactive. I don’t quarrel with self defense. That said, I do think the settlers are problematical and an incitement. The Gaza occupation/isolation is troubling too. I sense that, if there were a stand down on the Palestinian side first, our ability to pressure, and pressure heavily, Israel would be much greater. Again, if the avowed purpose is to drive “the Jews” into the sea, telling the Jews to chill out, hold back, etc. seems a a tough sell.
America started a war that annihilated a million human beings. For nothing. We’re closing in fast on 20% of the Holocaust. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?
I think the numbers you cite upthread are in dispute. Further, we didn’t start a war ‘for nothing.’ Finally, the US did not intend nor desire what actually happened in Iraq, even if you and I disagree on the extent of casualties, displaced persons etc. And of course the suffering means something to me. It means a lot. I wish to hell there’d been another way, another much better outcome, I wish for many things that didn’t happen. And I now know that the neocon fantasy of liberal democracy springing up in a fragmented society like Iraq’s was and is frighteningly stupid. At the risk of being even more trite than usual, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and most of us that went along with the invasion had good intentions.
And if we really thought so little of Arabs or Muslims, would we give two s**ts what Saddam was doing to his people? Or any other damn thing as long as we weren’t involved?
WMD is nothing but deception and propaganda
This is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Post 9-11, with the overwhelming consensus everywhere but the peripheries, left and right, that Saddam had chemical weapons and was working on getting a nuclear capacity, the risk seemed–then–unacceptable. Saddam wasn’t immortal. His sons were his likely successors. Having those two come into power with chemical weapons and who-knows-what-else might have been developed was not a comforting thought–at the time.
This is depraved indifference. Reckless disregard for human life. Except not really because Americans don’t think that Iraqis are human.
Well, you may be a bit overwrought here. Which is why your position is such a tough sell outside this very small corner of the world. Toned way, way down, I might agree that Americans in general don’t seem to have the level of concern that they should with disproportionate casualties when and if they perceive themselves under attack.
On this point, we are in complete agreement.
If you were in Houston, perhaps we’d meet, have a drink and toast the common ground that any two people can find if only they look long enough. I am not being sarcastic. Friedman is a total douche bag.
that Saddam had chemical weapons and was working on getting a nuclear capacity, the risk seemed
Stop. Explain to me right now why chemical weapons are worse than conventional munitions.
I understand why a 500 pound conventional explosive bomb is bad. I don’t understand why a 500 pound pound loaded with Sarin or VX is worse. The Sarin/VX weapon is more expensive, harder to handle, will degrade over time, and doesn’t have as big an explosive punch or as much shrapnel. So why exactly should anyone care?
Chemical weapons are what stupid nations purchase.
McKT: the overwhelming consensus everywhere but the peripheries, left and right, that Saddam had chemical weapons and was working on getting a nuclear capacity
UNMOVIC report from March 2003
“In the period during which it performed inspection and monitoring in Iraq,
UNMOVIC did not find evidence of the continuation or resumption of programmes
of weapons of mass destruction or significant quantities of proscribed items from
before the adoption of resolution 687 (1991).”
Chemical weapons aren’t stupid. They are effective at several specific things, like denying territory, channelizing an attacker, degrading an enemies ability to fight (primarily through requiring protective measures), and the effects can last significantly longer than a conventional bomb.
If a bomb went off downtown, it would be safe to go there as soon as the area was swept for other bombs. Cleaning up the residue from a chemical weapon to the point that it is safe for human habitation can take much longer.
Chemical weapons in the desert tend to be less useful, as the UV rays of the sun destroy the chemical, winds disperse, etc, but they are still a smart weapon for a country that wants to deter attacks (because the attacker would need much more available force to succeed given the reduced effectiveness).
I think they are generally considered “worse” than conventional munitions because they are completely indiscriminate, hard to control, and likely to leave lasting devastating effects long after the military purpose was accomplished.
“My take, generally, is that the Israeli’s are more reactive. I don’t quarrel with self defense.”
It’s not self defense when you steal other people’s land and then have to shoot them when they react badly.
And which are Israel’s four existential wars? 1948 was existential for both Palestinians and Israelis–the Palestinians lost and Israel expelled 700,000 Palestinians. 1956 was Israel teaming up with Britain and France to attack Egypt. 1967 was not self-defense in the eyes of some historians, including Israeli. The ordinary Israeli was terrified, but from what I’ve read the Israeli leadership wasn’t scared at all–for them Nasser’s posturing (he didn’t intend to go to war because for one thing he was bogged down in a war in Yemen) was an opportunity. Shlomo Ben Ami in his history says that Rabin was trying to provoke a war with Syria. 1973 was an attack by the Arabs, though Israel could have had peace with Egypt before but weren’t interested. It scared Israel very badly, but Sadat wasn’t trying to invade Israel–he was trying to take back a portion of the Sinai and Syria was trying to recover the Golan Heights.
The various wars with Lebanon (78, 82, 2006 along with numerous atrocities on both sides) were not existential. 2009 wasn’t either, and if someone mentions Sderot, there were far more deaths inflicted by Israel before the war and the ceasefire was broken by Israel in November 2008.
I count one existential war.
UNMOVIC
Funny how that’s just disappeared eh? Instead we get the “everyone thought Saddam had WMD” lie repeated. Much like the “Bush kept us safe after 9/11” lie.
Feh.
My take, generally, is that the Israeli’s are more reactive. I don’t quarrel with self defense.
I remember hearing that a lot during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but I think that in any conflict this long and engaged this closely, there will always be some past provocation to look to. Each side sees itself as reacting to the other rather than inciting, at least in terms of justification.
I guarantee that any particular act of violence by either side could be ‘justified’ by pointing backwards in time. So each side’s view of events looks like:
their provocation-our response-their provocation-our response-ad infinitum.
I’m going to correct myself on 67–some of Israel’s leaders were also fearful. But it wasn’t really an existential war–Nasser was bluffing.
They are effective at several specific things, like denying territory, channelizing an attacker, degrading an enemies ability to fight (primarily through requiring protective measures)
All of that might be relevant when considering Iraqi Army combat with the US Army, but no one has ever worried much about that matchup. The WMD concern was about Iraqi chemical weapons being used in the US. And in that context, the traditional military uses fail. Will the Iraqi Army fire artillery shells loaded with Sarin in New York? Perhaps the Iraqi Air Force will fly bombers from LAX and drop some 500 pound bombs loaded with VX over LA?
and the effects can last significantly longer than a conventional bomb.
Given that these chemicals decompose in the presence of air and sunlight, “significantly longer” need not be very significant at all. Especially when we can easily flood an area with chemicals that degrade these toxins even faster. That’s not necessarily true on a battlefield, but we’re not talking about battlefield uses anyway: we’re talking about use in the US.
If a bomb went off downtown, it would be safe to go there as soon as the area was swept for other bombs. Cleaning up the residue from a chemical weapon to the point that it is safe for human habitation can take much longer.
As I recall, the Japanese public transit system was not actually crippled for months after the Sarin gas attacks. So I don’t think this is correct.
All of that might be relevant when considering Iraqi Army combat with the US Army, but no one has ever worried much about that matchup.
We worried about it a lot. We expected 30,000 casualties from chemical weapons. Bush I said we would respond with nukes, and Saddam folded. But they were a huge worry.
We worried about it a lot.
Of course. Once you decide to go to war, you should worry about it. But it is not a justification for going to war; that suggests completely circular logic: we have to fight a war with Iraq because Iraq has chemical weapons and chemical weapons pose a grave danger to American military forces invading Iraq….
When government officials were talking up Iraqi WMD, they were not trying to justify the war by highlighting the danger Iraq posed to US Army units operating in Iraq. They were trying to highlight the danger Iraq posed to American civilians in the US. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”: Americans don’t care about mushroom clouds over Iraq; they care about mushroom clouds over the US.
Of course. Once you decide to go to war, you should worry about it. But it is not a justification for going to war; that suggests completely circular logic: we have to fight a war with Iraq because Iraq has chemical weapons and chemical weapons pose a grave danger to American military forces invading Iraq….
Your argument was that chemical weapons were for “stupid” countries. I don’t think so. They were and are useful to deter aggression, and were are useful for an attacker. Plus, your response seems to be about the latest war, while I referred to Bush I, and the Gulf War.
As I recall, the Japanese public transit system was not actually crippled for months after the Sarin gas attacks. So I don’t think this is correct.
I don’t think they used a bomb, plus it was in a contained area with generally hard material that can be cleaned.
On Monday March 20, 1995, five members of Aum Shinrikyo launched a chemical attack on the Tokyo Metro, one of the world’s busiest commuter transport systems, at the peak of the morning rush hour. The chemical agent used, liquid sarin, was contained in plastic bags which each team then wrapped in newspaper. Each perpetrator carried two packets of sarin totaling approximately 900 millilitres of sarin, except Yasuo Hayashi, who carried three bags. Aum originally planned to spread the sarin as an aerosol but did not follow through with it. A single drop of sarin the size of a pinhead can kill an adult.
Carrying their packets of sarin and umbrellas with sharpened tips, the perpetrators boarded their appointed trains. At prearranged stations, the sarin packets were dropped and punctured several times with the sharpened tip of the umbrellas. The men then got off the train and exited the station to meet his accomplice with a car. By leaving the punctured packets on the floor, the sarin was allowed to leak out into the train car and stations. This sarin affected passengers, subway workers, and those who came into contact with them. Sarin’s low vapor pressure (2.9mmHg) and high boiling point makes it difficult to vaporize at ambient temperature, so very little evaporated to become an inhalant hazard. Sarin evaporates nearly 10 times more slowly than water.
Pretty sure a 500 pound bomb carries more and spreads more at higher temperature and vaporization than packets poked by an umbrella.
McKinneyTexas: And if we really thought so little of Arabs or Muslims, would we give two s**ts what Saddam was doing to his people? Or any other damn thing as long as we weren’t involved?
If the US gave two s**ts about Arabs and/or Muslims, would there need to be a List Project
If the US gave two s**ts about Muslims, why would immigrant Muslims have been targetted, post-9/11, for abuse, discrimination, and expulsion because of their religion? No other group of immigrants was targeted in this way by the US government.
Further, given the US’s past history of supporting Saddam and failing to support uprising against Saddam, trying to claim now that of course the US cared about Arabs and Muslims because, when it suited the US, they toppled Saddam Hussein, is chutzpah of the parricide who threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan.
Different types of mustard can last for months and are difficult to treat except with very aggressive chemicals. That could be a problem in inhabited areas. Nerve gas is in comparision highly unstable, especially if impure (as the Japanese stuff was).
—
Praising Sharon is not a sure bet anymore at least in religious circles. There is the opinion that his stroke was God’s punishment for retreating from Gaza.
—-
Parts of the settler movement commit acts on a regular base that the Bible unequivocally demands the death penalty for, most notoriously the destruction of fruit trees (a favorite tactic against Palestinians, if (threats of) downright murder seems inopportune at the moment). Those acts are on occasion committed in the presence of Israeli authorities that refuse to do anything against it).
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It would be far more effective to attack a train carrying poisonous chemicals through Washington DC than trying to smuggle chemical weapons into the US. I read estimates that a single (railway) tank car with chlorine would lead to 10000 casualities in the first half hour. Graffitti sprayers have no problem tagging those trains during passage, so it should not be impossible for dedicated terrorists.
I actually expected that on 9/12 trains would be derailed, on 9/13 ferry boats attacked* etc. It was totally predictable that the administration would concentrate purely on air traffic directly after 9/11, exposing other targets.
*later at least in case of the Staten Island ferries security measures were added but that took time and left wide open a window of opportunity directly after 9/11
This is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Post 9-11, with the overwhelming consensus everywhere but the peripheries, left and right, that Saddam had chemical weapons and was working on getting a nuclear capacity, the risk seemed–then–unacceptable. Saddam wasn’t immortal. His sons were his likely successors. Having those two come into power with chemical weapons and who-knows-what-else might have been developed was not a comforting thought–at the time.
Actually, the consensus was that he had no nuclear program.
And chemical weapons are meaningless in most contexts, other than to repel aggressors. Meaning, unless we planned on attacking Saddam or his sons, chem weapons would not pose a threat.
And if we really thought so little of Arabs or Muslims, would we give two s**ts what Saddam was doing to his people? Or any other damn thing as long as we weren’t involved?
You do realize that we were supporting Saddam with money, dual use items and arms during his war with Iran (in which he used chem weapons on Iranians) and during which time he used chem weapons on the Kurds.
We didn’t give a damn then, during the tenure of Ronald Reagan, who dispatched Rumsfeld to Baghdad to assure Saddam that, while the US might condemn the gassing of the Kurds publicly, we still considered him an ally and would continue to support his aggression against Iran.
The Bush administration did not care what Saddam did to his people. If we cared, we wouldn’t be supporting other brutal dictators.
Not only do we not invade those other dictatorships, we don’t sanction them. Hell, we don’t even reduce aid, which numbers in the billions each year for some.
“Concern” for the suffering Iraqis was just a pretense, a facade to goad Americans into supporting a cynical bit of self-serving imperialism.
If, by some miracle, Hamas/Hezbollah and the rest were to declare a three year moratorium on violence and stand behind that, views here would shift.
Hamas and Hezbollah could declare a moratorium on violence initiated by Hamas and Hezbollah. Which would be fine if they were the only players on the Palestinian side. The trouble is that there are other smaller players who think Hamas is a bunch of soft bourgeois sellouts, and they would have no compunction about initiating violence in spite of (or even because of) an H/H ceasefire. And I think you’ll find most Americans won’t make fine distinctions and will be happy to accept the argument that any Palestinian violence is the responsibility of H/H and justifies any Israeli countermeasures against any Palestinians anywhere.
And if we really thought so little of Arabs or Muslims, would we give two s**ts what Saddam was doing to his people?
Ten years, crappy country, throw against wall. When we weren’t in the mood to throw that particular crappy country against the wall, we really didn’t give two **ts about what Saddam did to his or anyone else’s people. We pretended to because we decided it was his turn.
Actually, the consensus was that he had no nuclear program.
In fairness, there were certainly people arguing that Saddam had a nuclear program. It was based on lies and the pimping of defectors encouraged to provide the ‘right’ intel, but it was out there.
What’s always puzzled me about this is the lack of outrage- eg Condi Rice outright lied when she said the aluminum tubes had no possible use but a nuclear program, when DOE, State, and the CIA were all telling here they were for a conventional missle system. Many people were ostensibly taken in by this- why are the only people who want to burn her in effigy the ones who didn’t believe her in the first place?
And I think you’ll find most Americans won’t make fine distinctions and will be happy to accept the argument that any Palestinian violence is the responsibility of H/H and justifies any Israeli countermeasures against any Palestinians anywhere.
Further, extremist settler violence will continue, as will the settlements themselves.
As a result, it seems likely that those fringe groups would grow more powerful and H/H weaker over time, as they persisted with a cease-fire in the face of constant aggression.
I mean, it’d be wonderful. But I don’t see it as the most promising path to peace. Holding it up as the only way forward is being in a bar fight and telling the other guy you’ll stop punching him in the face five minutes after he stops punching you in the face.
I think a serious road forward would have to involve small, trust-building steps, and near the beginning of that would have to be each side unpopularly defying it’s own radical elements and clamping down on them. Im not sure if I see that happening in the near future- what I see now is are Palestinians committed to stubbornness and Israelis committed to kicking the can down the road.
In fairness, there were certainly people arguing that Saddam had a nuclear program. It was based on lies and the pimping of defectors encouraged to provide the ‘right’ intel, but it was out there.
I agree. There was a lot of deception, lies and misinformation about nukes in the mix (yellowcake, alluminum tubes, mushroom clouds, etc). As well as ties to al-Qaeda. Those were the big selling points of the war in terms of scaring an already post-9/11 frightened public into thinking this war was not only justifiable, but necessary.
But the NIE on Iraq was pretty pessimistic about nukes. And that is the consensus of our intel agencies. And the inspectors on the ground found nothing even resembling a nuke program, let alone weapon.
McK: This is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Post 9-11, with the overwhelming consensus everywhere but the peripheries, left and right, that Saddam had chemical weapons and was working on getting a nuclear capacity, the risk seemed–then–unacceptable.
It is amazing what the power of propaganda can do. You’re an intelligent and conscientious person, McKinney. Yet you repeat, as if it were a truth universally accepted, a lie that was accepted only by Fox News viewers and Bush acolytes at the time of the Iraq invasion.
There was no “overwhelming consensus” that Saddam had chemical weapons. The UN inspectors who had been ejected from Iraq by Bill Clinton’s military action, were allowed back in – and when it became apparent that they were going to discover no just cause for war, Bush terminated the inspection and did what he’d planned to do by June 2002 at latest – invaded anyway.
and was working on getting a nuclear capacity
There was no evidence for this whatsoever. Good Lord, McKinney, what do you think the whole mess about outing a covert CIA agent because her husband had written an op-ed in NYT was about? You surely couldn’t have missed the investigation: didn’t it occur to you to go back and look at what the cause of the Bush administration’s illegal revenge was?
the risk seemed–then–unacceptable.
To everyone else in the world but the Bush administration and Fox News and the Americans they’d convinced that the government’s lying propaganda was true.
Iraq’s neighbors – none of whom loved Iraq! – did not support the war nor regard Saddam Hussein as a threat. Bush’s meiosis about Saddam “supporting suicide bombers” was gross and deliberate miscommunication:
When Saddam invaded Kuwait and was bombing Israel, the Palestinians celebrated, simply enough – they had no love for Israel or for the US, and were glad to see someone take on the monster giant that bullies other nations into cowed support of Israel. You need not agree with this attitude to find it understandable.
This made the Palestinians in general unpopular in the Middle East, since none of Iraq’s neighbors have any love for Saddam.
Since then, Saddam Hussein had shown an “up yours” attitude by paying death benefits to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
Saddam had no love for terrorists in general: al-Qaeda had no foothold in the part of Iraq that was under Saddam’s authority (pre-invasion, al-Qaeda operated only in the Kurdish region). There was nothing less likely that Saddam would have helped al-Qaeda: and if he died, his sons would have been caught up in a civil war that might have left Iraq in any state at all, but at worst, would have looked rather like the state the US invasion has left it in.
None of this is a “lefty eye of the beholder” opinion, McKinney. It’s just the straightforward facts that you were kept ignorant of by Fox News and by Bush propaganda, and which you had – evidently! – no interest in seeking out for yourself. Better-informed people opposed the invasion because the Bush justifications for it were obvious lies – if you took the trouble to research the facts.
You’re ignorant, not stupid. But you will be stupid if you cling to lies rather than let better-informed people relieve your ignorance.
> “What I find evil about Hezbollah is their uncompromising declaration that the Jews should be driven into the sea. That isn’t war, it’s genocide.”
I can’t believe no one has called McKinneyTexas on this statement yet. It has the rare distinction of being ridiculous in two completely separate ways:
a) If driving a people out of a country is genocide, then how can you have any sympathy at all for a country founded on driving out the vast majority of its Palestinian population in 1948, much less claiming that its existence should be non-negotiable?
b) What “uncompromising declaration that the Jews should be driven into the sea”? If you’re trying to claim that Hezbollah want to kill them all, then you’re wrong. If you mean this as a hyperbolic way of saying that they want Jewish immigrants to Palestine to be expelled back to their countries of origin – well, I happen to disagree with that, but it’s no more evil than wanting to expel illegal immigrants from any other country, and it’s certainly not genocidal.
Passerby: I can’t believe no one has called McKinneyTexas on this statement yet.
Because, like proposing an end to Israeli apartheid and a single-state solution, your comment is not discussable in the US – it is so far outside American perceptions as to sound extremist, even though it reflects reality.
It’s like McKinney, with apparent seriousness, suggesting that Hezbollah and Hamas should just not return Israeli violence against their communities for three years in order for American public opinion to change.
It’s true that if the US reaction to 9/11 had been to refrain from violent attack on civilians for at least three years, public opinion (well, mine at least, but I’m part of the public, no?) would have overwhelmingly changed for the better.
But since McKinneyTexas has consistently argued that violent attacks on Afghans were the only possible response to a terrorist attack on the US so it’s really hard to take his advocacy of non-violent resistence as anything but indifference to Arabs and Muslims being slaughtered far away where he doesn’t have to watch.
Seriously, McKinney, no Afghan was responsible for 9/11, the government of Afghanistan did not plan 9/11 nor could it have prevented 9/11. Yet you have argued seriously that the proper response to al-Qaeda was for the US to attack Afghanistan – in which attacks, we know, within six months, at least 3000 civilians were killed.
Given you support such violence against civilians for an attack on the US, how can you possibly argue that Hezbollah and Hamas are wrong for supporting violence against civilians for attacks on their people? They’re thinking as you think – they’re coming to the conclusion you came to. Except they are at least attacking the country whose government’s military attacked them: you simply supported violence against civilians who were living in the same country as Osama bin Laden.
It is curious (and equally non-discussable) that although it has been known since 1940 at earliest that when the enemy bombs civilian areas, the civilians become more patriotic, more determined not to be beaten – that the net effect is to increase civilian morale.
Yet for seventy years military power across the world has been devoted to following the Nazi example of attacking civilians in an effort to defeat a country by breaking civilian morale.
Why complain, if you support this military strategy, that non-military groups have adopted it too? Sure it doesn’t work. Sure it’s immoral and inethical and a thousand ways of wrong.
But it doesn’t become right – or work – just because it’s being done by your country’s military against a faceless brown foe. Any more than it’s right, or it works, when the survivors turn round and do it to you.
A general reply on the WMD thing–it wasn’t just Bush/Cheney/Fox pounding that drum. Bill Clinton, Jay Rockefeller, Richard Gephardt (who denies that he was misled and says he evaluated the evidence independently) and many others. Rockefeller said, “”There has been some debate over how ‘imminent’ a threat Iraq poses. I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent threat, but I also believe that after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated. It is in the nature of these weapons, and the way they are targeted against civilian populations, that documented capability and demonstrated intent may be the only warning we get. To insist on further evidence could put some of our fellow Americans at risk. Can we afford to take that chance? We cannot!”
The House vote was 297-133, the senate 77-23. It wasn’t a con and no credible evidence or rationale exists for why Bush/Cheney would “lie” the country into a war knowing they would be found out.
They were wrong, we all know that, but that was not the belief at the time. Most of what there is above is a partisan take on the issue, rejecting contradictory views and taking only what most aids the position. It’s fine to be right. I concede that point, but rewriting history is a different thing.
A general reply on the WMD thing–it wasn’t just Bush/Cheney/Fox pounding that drum. Bill Clinton, Jay Rockefeller, Richard Gephardt (who denies that he was misled and says he evaluated the evidence independently) and many others.
McTex: Dems can be warmongers too.
Regardless, though, your reply highlights the misleading nature of the term “WMD” – which lumps nukes in with chem and bio, even though the three are very different in terms of threat.
Clinton and Gephardt didn’t say Iraq had nukes, they said Iraq had some WMD. But chem and bio agents are not very threatening to a non-invading force, and sure not the “mushroom cloud” “yellow cake” “alluminum tubes” fearmongering put on by the Bush team.
Nor did those gentlement play up the al-Qaeda connection. Because there was none.
Remember: even if Saddam had WMD, what did that mean to us? The way they made it seem threatening was to suggest that Saddam would give his WMD to his sworn enemies, al-Qaeda.
The House vote was 297-133, the senate 77-23.
Yeah, but are you really suggesting that politicians were either:
1. Not afraid of looking soft and being demonized for voting against it – considering that, to this day, anyone opposed to that war is portrayed as “unserious”? And those that voted against it faced a barrage of campaign ads about it.
2. Not swayed by the massive lobbying arm of AIPAC and the defense industry, both of which pushed hard for this war?
Those aren’t cons, they are political gamesmanship. The “con” was on the American people.
It wasn’t a con and no credible evidence or rationale exists for why Bush/Cheney would “lie” the country into a war knowing they would be found out.
McTex: PNAC (of which Cheney, Rummy, Armitage and Wolfowitz were members) wrote a treatise in the 1990s about why we should invade Iraq. Then they wrote an official letter to Pres Clinton urging him to attack.
Nowhere in the PNAC letter or paper were references to al-Qaeda or WMD.
During the very first defense principals meeting in the Bush administration (many months before 9/11) they discussed invading Iraq. During that meeting, there were no references to al-Qaeda or WMD.
When 9/11 happened, on that very day, Bush was asking Dick Clarke to find a connection to Iraq, and Rumsfeld was advising that our intel agencies do the same. Why?
Many Bush admin officials wanted to invade Iraq for a long time, and not because of WMD or al-Qaeda. More about oil and American hegemony in the region, as well as Israeli concerns.
They lied and exaggerated about the WMD/al-Qaeda threat because they figured that they would find some chemical and biological weapons, and that they could then talk up the “WMD” find – despite the fact that the term is so misleading because of the disparity in lethality of nukes and chem & bio.
And they figured that after we invaded, and things went so well with the flowers and the candies, that no one would question the rationale. After all, mission accomplished and all that.
It’s only when the war started going south that people REALLY started looking hard at the case for invading.
It’s fine to be right. I concede that point, but rewriting history is a different thing.
Interestingly, nothing that I’ve written in this comment, or on this thread, is anything but a part of the historical record.
It wasn’t a con
yes, it was.
the evidence presented to the public was utterly insufficient to justify the hype it received. the lack of credible evidence for everything they claimed was as plain as day. they knew it. i knew it. millions of other people knew it. there were no WMDs – that was plainly obvious. there were no alQ connections – also obvious. and we (the disbelievers) sat here in stunned disbelief as the rest of you chest-thumped and brow-beat and pearl-clutched and then you waved your flags and marched off to a glorious, quick, cheap, pay-for-itself, little war.
you got conned. we didn’t.
no credible evidence or rationale exists for why Bush/Cheney would “lie” the country into a war knowing they would be found out
there are plenty of reasons why Bush would do it, even if the evidence for WMD/alQ was weak: the chance that he could be right – that they’d find something buried out there – , the neo-con nation-building / region xform schemes, oil, the “Ledeen doctrine”, wars poll well, etc..
and, what happened when it turned out there was nothing there? nothing. the rationale turned to “flypaper”. then it turned to “preventing a civil war”. then to nation building. then to “can’t leave now, the place is a mess”. nobody involved has ever been held accountable. what’s the downside ? none.
Another note on “conned”:
McTex, how many Americans thought, at the time, that Saddam was responsible for 9/11?
How many Americans STILL think that?
Why do you suppose they think that?
One more follow up on WMD:
There were actual UN inspectors on the ground in Iraq for months before the invasion. They were traveling to each and every site that US intel told them to go to to find the WMD.
They found nothing. Zero. Nada. At our intel agencies’ hottest leads.
But Bush, instead of questioning the WMD rationale, or giving them more time to uncover WMD, pulled them out prematurely, and then invaded.
Odd that.
The House vote was 297-133, the senate 77-23.
That vote took place in October 2002. We invaded in March 2003. UNMOVIC was in Iraq beginning in November 2002 until March 2003 when they were forced to leave because they were actively undermining Bush’s supposed cause for WAR! What might the vote have been if UNMOVIC had been allowed to complete its job and still found nothing?
Alas, we’ll never know.
It wasn’t a con and no credible evidence or rationale exists for why Bush/Cheney would “lie” the country into a war knowing they would be found out.
Well, if you want a rationale, McKinney, try this: you are determined not to believe that Bush and Cheney lied the US into war with Iraq. You’re not unique in your determination to be stupid about this.
You have the same access to the information that I had when I knew Bush and Cheney were lying the US into war. But this information is impossible for you to output, for whatever reason. So you are committed to not taking in the information that Bush and Cheney lied the US into war: you need (for whatever reason) to be stupid about it.
And (for whatever reason) there are millions just like you who need to be just as stupid as you. And that’s what Bush and Cheney were counting on. And they were right to do so: it worked. You and millions like you can’t bring yourselves to take in the information that would force you to change the narrative.
Perhaps it is the enormity of it: like conceding that the Commander in Chief of the US military has ordered US soldiers to torture prisoners, the mainstream media in the US had to decide: who was going to be the first among to admit that Bush and Cheney et al were committing monstrous crimes, that they deserved to be impeached?
Jes,
Can you please try to comment without the insults? Be they “ignorance” “stupidity” or “dumbness”?
Please.
It wasn’t a con and no credible evidence or rationale exists for why Bush/Cheney would “lie” the country into a war knowing they would be found out.
That seems like a bad way to approach the question- using an indirect logical approach when there’s plain evidence avaialble.
For example, Condi Rice certainly made false statements about the tubes. Now, whether she was trying to manipulate the public for their own good, lying about something she thought represented an underlying truth (ie she thought Saddam was trying to get nukes but knew she didn’t have the proof she needed). Or, perhaps, she was misled by other people.
But I cant see the utility of saying eg “No president would endanger his position by fooling around with an intern, ergo the Lewinsky incident did not occur” when there are facts at hand.
Why did they do it? We can speculate of course: they thought they would find WMDs even though they couldnt prove they were there. Or they thought that the good effects of the war (IMO ‘friendly strongman’ was the endgame) would wash concerns about the causus belli away. Or perhaps they just didn’t think past the end of the patriotic fever that war always brings.
But we can’t let the questions of why obscure the facts that it did occur- many statements or implications were made to the American people that were not true, based either on speculation, flimsy evidence, or outright falsehood.
Yes, what CW said.
Eric, the lengthy quote from Stars in my pockets like grains of sand on the process of stupidity was intended to indicate that I wasn’t using “being stupid” as an insult but as identifying the process by which McKinney, and all the others who have in principle access to the same information that the rest of us have, refrain from taking in that information and continue to assert that Bush and Cheney did not lie the US into war.
Still, you have used those words repeatedly on this thread, and they corrode the tone of civility – even if you are saying someone is only ignorant and not stupid, or stupid in shared company, or within a whisker of being stupid.
I guess you can quibble about the meaning of “lie”, and argue that the Bushites were self-deluded to the extent that the believed their own WMD propaganda and hence weren’t lying. But there’s no denying the fact that on at least three occasions after July 2003, Bush claimed that he had to go to war because “[Saddam] wouldn’t let [inspectors] in”. The truth just didn’t matter to these people.
Why did they do it? We can speculate of course: … perhaps they just didn’t think past the end of the patriotic fever that war always brings.
Oh, I’m sure they thought past the patriotic fever all right. Imagine it: after a splendid little war, Dubya cruises to re-election on patriotic fever, with tons of political capital to spend. Spend on what? Privatizing SS, killing the death tax forever, getting rid of cap gains taxes — in short, making this country fit for rich people to live in again. Iraq was always about who “wins” over here, not who wins “over there”.
Before you call me crazy, remember that after patriotic fever squeaked him back into office Dubya said in so many words that he had political capital to spend, and he started working on his little list right away. Alas for him, his war was visibly becoming neither little nor splendid, so his political capital ran out before he even got to first base.
But the dream lives on: the GOP’s never-ending quest to untax everything except wages and undo the New Deal is not dead. There’s always hope that the next dose of patriotic fever will do the trick.
–TP
is anything but a part of the historical record.
Part, yes, but not all. I am not talking about warmongers, I am talking about people like Rockefeller and Gephardt said, pointblank, “we’ve looked at the evidence, it is there and we need to act on it.” The point here is that it wasn’t just Bush/Cheney et al lobbying to invade or making these claims, it was many other people, people who today still believed that the evidence showed the existence of WMD (no nukes, but efforts and intent to acquire same). That is part of the record too. Yes, there were neocons who didn’t need any reason other than Saddam’s existence, but if it wasn’t for 9-11 and Saddam’s proven possession of WMD (he used them on his own people), the neocons would have been outliers running their mouths on Hannity & Colmes.
And, FWIW, not finding WMD isn’t evidence they don’t exist, it’s only evidence that they don’t exist where inspectors looked. Having previously actually used chemical weapons, the idea that Saddam had unilaterally disarmed was simply not credible.
To put it differently, if there had been even modest stockpiles of WMD, would anyone here have a different view of that invasion? I think not. The bias here is “the Iraqi invasion was an awful idea, no matter what.” The absence of WMD just gives the argument resonance.
The bias here is “the Iraqi invasion was an awful idea, no matter what.”
The bias here is any invasion is an awful idea. Which is not a bad bias to have.
” I am talking about people like Rockefeller and Gephardt said, pointblank, “we’ve looked at the evidence, it is there and we need to act on it.””
They were stupid or lying. That’s the thing about Democratic politicians–by and large, many of them really are spineless or worse. In the post 9/11 environment it was easier to go along with the Bush Administration than to say that they were lying us into a war. And take your own scenario–what if the invasion occurred and a small stockpile of chemical weapons had turned up? The fact that the Bush Administration had little real evidence for anything of the sort didn’t mean one could rule out the possibility. You’re right that I would still say that the invasion wasn’t worth it and was based on deception and lies, but no politician could survive being portrayed as the peacenik who had been suckered by Saddam. I think the Democrats made a rational (despicable, but rational) calculation that it is much better to be wrong with the mainstream than right with the dirty effing hippies, especially when there was a chance that some cache of chemical weapons could have been put forward as “proof” that Saddam had been a threat.
BTW, that calculation, better to be wrong with the right people than right with the wrong people, also explains the sort of press coverage we got then.
And, FWIW, not finding WMD isn’t evidence they don’t exist
Failing to find WMDs where the main proponent of their existence says they should be, is at least evidence of their existence. Maybe you meant “proof”, but isn’t the burden of proof on the warmongers in this instance? And doesn’t the fact that their rhetoric forayed into the absurd – “We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons” – and that they kicked the inspectors out to start their war, indicate that they didn’t actually believe what they were saying about WMD?
Having previously actually used chemical weapons, the idea that Saddam had unilaterally disarmed was simply not credible.
And yet, that incredible notion actually turned out to be true.
To put it differently, if there had been even modest stockpiles of WMD, would anyone here have a different view of that invasion? I think not.
This is why the distinction between chemical and nuclear weapons is so important. Through the 90s most people thought Saddam kept a chemical weapons capability. But that is irrelevant to any significant threat he could pose to the US.
Had we found some mustard gas manufacturing or the like, Im sure that many would call the war justified, but it would still be exactly as foolish.
This is why the nuclear threat had to be pimped so extensively, and why WMD was adopted as a wholesale category to describe both sets of weapons. “We know he has WMDs, and we can’t afford to have a nuclear Saddam” sort of thing.
McKinney: The point here is that it wasn’t just Bush/Cheney et al lobbying to invade or making these claims
You do know that both Gephardt and Rockefeller acknowledged by 2006 that they had been conned by the Bush administration’s lies?
They looked at the “evidence” that the Bush administration provided them, and they voted as the Bush administration wanted them to. And the evidence was, as you appear unable to take in, lies.
A similiar situation occurred in the UK: Blair’s administration, aware from the summer of 2002 that Bush intended to invade Iraq, wanted to get the House of Commons to vote to go to war, and compiled a dossier of “evidence” that Saddam Hussein was a threat. It included claims that Iraq could launch a missile attack on the UK at 15 minutes notice. One MP, who voted for the Iraq war, said straightforwardly afterwards that he had decided to vote for the war precisely because of that assertion in the dossier: it did not occur to him at the time that the Blair administration was lying to him to get his vote on a matter of national defense.
The evidence that Blair lied the UK into war with Iraq because he thought he needed to keep in with the US is just as clear as the evidence that Bush and Cheney lied the US into war with Iraq. Do you have the same difficulty accepting evidence that Tony Blair lied as you do that George W. Bush lied? Is it just US politicians your “process” rejects?
And, FWIW, not finding WMD isn’t evidence they don’t exist, it’s only evidence that they don’t exist where inspectors looked.
The infrastructure needed to produce chemical and biological weapons successfully is not as easily concealed. Further, again, you do not appear to be able to take in the information available to you at the time and since that Bush told the inspectors to leave when he wanted to invade – and later, lied, claiming that Saddam had made the inspectors leave.
Having previously actually used chemical weapons, the idea that Saddam had unilaterally disarmed was simply not credible.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
You do know that both Gephardt and Rockefeller acknowledged by 2006 that they had been conned by the Bush administration’s lies?
Rockefeller was on the Senate Intelligence committee. He was taken in by something Bush said? Sure. Look, anyone after the fact who claims to have been taken in by Bush has instant credibility in this quarter because it fits the narrative. All roads lead to Bush.
If Gephardt has recanted, then it was after I watch him on television specifically deny that he had been taken in, watched him specifically state that he looked at the intelligence and formed his own conclusion and watched him state that, had he to do it over again, he would have done it the same way. After ’04, the price for admission for any Democratic wannabee was to claim they’s been taken in. Not believable then, not believable now. Just typical political opportunism, which the progressive left takes as true, mainly because it justifies their own unshakable belief that they, and pretty much only they, understand the world as it was, as it is and as it will be.
All roads lead to Bush.
Or, as another President of the United States put it, the buck stops here. Those were the days, eh?
I am talking about people like Rockefeller and Gephardt said, pointblank, “we’ve looked at the evidence, it is there and we need to act on it.
I’m not exactly sure why you find the notion that Democrats, too, are often craven politicians and/or warmongers so outlandish, and act as if the mere existence of Democratic support for a given policy should be the adjudicator of wisdom or veracity.
It was a big political liability to oppose that war. Hell, even after the consensus is that it was a collosal mistake, those that opposed the war are treated WORSE than those that supported it in terms of credibility on foreign policy!
Why would a politician oppose that war when so many powerful economic interests, and the great weight of the political calculus, were pushing in one direction?
Having previously actually used chemical weapons, the idea that Saddam had unilaterally disarmed was simply not credible.
Of course, it was “credible.” It was also true. Further, given the limited threat posed to us by chem weapons, it was also irrelevant whether he had some chem weapons lying around. Which, again, is why the whole “WMD” rationale was so flawed.
To put it differently, if there had been even modest stockpiles of WMD, would anyone here have a different view of that invasion? I think not. The bias here is “the Iraqi invasion was an awful idea, no matter what.” The absence of WMD just gives the argument resonance.
I opposed the Iraq invasion even when I thought that Saddam likely had some old chem weapons lying around because I predicted it would be a costly, bloody mess with no clear resolution in our favor, and, more importantly, there was no good reason to invade!
If they had found some old chem weapons lying around that would not have changed my mind.
Let me put it to you: If they had found some old chem weapons lying around, would YOU argue today that the invasion was worth it?
What about some old chemical weapons would justify the invasion or somehow make the enormous costs in lives lost worth it?
Hundreds of thousands, if not a million, Iraqis are dead because of events set in motion because of the invasion. Babies. Infants. Women. Men. Children. All turned to charred and bloody mess.
You’re telling me that such unthinkable suffering, such heartache, such tragedy would somehow be justified because Saddam had some decaying mustard gas shells rusting away in an old armory?
Why?
, mainly because it justifies their own unshakable belief that they, and pretty much only they, understand the world as it was, as it is and as it will be.
But again, McKinney: those of us who opposed the war and pointed out that Bush and Cheney and Blair were telling lies, were right.
We were right to oppose the war: we correctly identified the lies Bush, Cheney, et al were telling to get the US and the UK into war – and your petulant you think you’re so smart! riposte comes across, frankly, as childish whining about the grown-ups, compared to (for example) John Cole.
In your model of the US Presidency, Bush has “The Buck Stops Anywhere But Here” on his desk.
Rockefeller was on the Senate Intelligence committee. He was taken in by something Bush said? Sure. Look, anyone after the fact who claims to have been taken in by Bush has instant credibility in this quarter because it fits the narrative
And you appear to oppose it solely on this basis. Whereas, once again, I suggest we examine facts rather than determining whether things are true based on how they fit into narratives.
When I say that people were taken in by the administration, I don’t mean that they just heard Bush say ‘Saddam is dangerous, WMDs, mushroom cloud’ and went off to vote.
Consider Curveball– an intelligence source flawed even to casual inspection. The Germans who were working him become convinced that he was a serial liar fleeing Iraq after some petty thefts, and no parts of his story were ever collaborated (many parts were shown to be fabrications). Nevertheless, this ‘intel’ was presented as factual information to Congress and to the UN, without the background that it was almost certainly false. Gen. Powell’s presentation to the UN was based on part on this garbage intel.
Or take al-Libi; it’s not that Bush said that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda operatives “in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.” (10/14/2002), but that the CIA (and the Egpytians) tortured al-Libi until he provided this ‘intel’, which was then relayed to Congress as factual.
Word.
Look, anyone after the fact who claims to have been taken in by Bush has instant credibility in this quarter because it fits the narrative
Even with CW’s point aside, what does this mean? That they knew they were being lied to and voted for the war anyway? That would certainly make them political cowards. But,if so, it doesn’t change the fact that they were being lied to. WTF is your point, McTex? That the Bush admin didn’t actually push extremely hard for this war and lie all over the place in doing so? There are now mountains of evidence supporting this, but you’re somehow worried about the unknowables of the inner workings of the minds of Democrats in congress at the time of the AUMF vote. If they did know they were being lied to, eff them too for voting for the war. Okay?
I mean, right.
There were documented lies, that they knew were lies, that they told. And they manipulated the intel with those lies.
So, either the Dems were fooled or politically cynical. Neither one justifies an invasion.
This is not a narrative I usually spend time on, but…..
For years, not the conytroversial october to march, Saddam had been playing cat and mouse with the UN and inspectors. Alternatively acting like he was developing(or buying) nuclear capability to maintain his place of influence and then casually denying it. His hubris in the game he was playing convinced (despite Eric’s assertions) almost all western intelligence agencies he was a threat.
I agree that in their search for the smoking gun they stretched, perhaps lies, more likely the best examples they thought would make their point.
The assumption that waiting several more months for another round of blocked and limited inspections to be completed would change the assessment of these intelligence agencies developed over ten years is just not as importanat a point as continually presented.
The decision was between “after ten years why not wait five more months again” and “what do we think will be accomplished in five months after ten years”?
The second seemed reasonable to me at the time, and still does, for that particular decision point.
Intelligence fail certainly, but not specific or unique to Blair and Bush, the only thing they did different than the other Western countriess was decide to address the threat militarily. They didn’t uniquely believe there was a threat.
For years, not the conytroversial october to march, Saddam had been playing cat and mouse with the UN and inspectors.
And during that period of years, at what points did Hussein present an immediate existential threat to the US?
…the only thing they did different than the other Western countriess was decide to address the threat militarily.
Even if I take this at face value, am I supposed to think this is a minor distinction? the only thing, like “oh, that’s all?”
Alternatively acting like he was developing(or buying) nuclear capability to maintain his place of influence and then casually denying it. His hubris in the game he was playing convinced (despite Eric’s assertions) almost all western intelligence agencies he was a threat.
Do you have a citation or a link to support the assertion that almost all western intell agencies said that Saddam had nukes or was a nuclear threat?
Or a “threat” in general? “Threat” to what after all? To whom? In what way?
I’m all ears.
As for my citation, I am referring to the two most recent pre-invasion NIE’s on Iraq. Both concluded that he had no nuclear weapons, and no active weapons program.
But you say there was a consensus otherwise?
The assumption that waiting several more months for another round of blocked and limited inspections to be completed would change the assessment of these intelligence agencies developed over ten years is just not as importanat a point as continually presented.
What does this mean? The inspectors were on the ground, not limited. Not blocked.
And anyone in the intel biz, or roughly familiar with intel, will tell you that it is guesswork, and highly dubious. Actual on the ground confirmation trumps intel 99.999999% of the time. You have this exactly backwards.
The decision was between “after ten years why not wait five more months again” and “what do we think will be accomplished in five months after ten years”?
The second seemed reasonable to me at the time, and still does, for that particular decision point.
This is, perhaps, the most curious thing you’ve written in this comment.
Why was war a fait accompli? Why were the only decisions: invade Iraq now, or wait a bit and then invade Iraq?
Saddam was not a threat. The invasion was not necessary under any timeline. Inspectors were on the ground in Iraq, and Bush pulled them out so that he could invade.
It was a mindless, ghastly mistake at the time. No less so in retrospect.
Marty: The assumption that waiting several more months for another round of blocked and limited inspections to be completed would change the assessment of these intelligence agencies developed over ten years is just not as importanat a point as continually presented.
Huh. Anyone would think the news that Dick Cheney was ordering CIA reports to be rewritten to pump up the threat from Iraq to justify war, never got to you. Hm.
The assessment from intelligence agencies prior to the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq (made, according to at least one report, on the evening of September 11 2001: certainly decided on by summer 2002), was that Iraq presented no threat.
The Bush administration appears to have neither agreed with the intelligence agencies nor wanted to wait for the weapons inspections to confirm the unedited views of their own intelligence services: they just wanted to invade Iraq.
The decision was between “after ten years why not wait five more months again” and “what do we think will be accomplished in five months after ten years”?
The decision was whether or not it was worth starting a war with Iraq over – what? The claims that Saddam was a threat to the US were lies.
They didn’t uniquely believe there was a threat.
Whatever Bush knew, and McKinney clearly doesn’t believe he should take responsibility for the untruths he repeated, Blair didn’t believe Iraq was a threat: he did believe that the US was determined to go to war with Iraq, and that a unilateral war by the US without UN approval would be bad for the world. Not for nothing, Blair’s nickname became Bliar.
Putin in 2002:Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners as yet.
Jacques Chirac in early 2003:But I repeat that every possibility offered by the present resolution must be explored, that there are a lot of them and they still leave us with a lot of leeway when it comes to ways of achieving the objective of eliminating any weapons of mass destruction which may exist in Iraq. I’d like nevertheless to note that, as things stand at the moment, I have, to my knowledge, no indisputable proof in this sphere.
cite
The assumption that waiting several more months for another round of blocked and limited inspections to be completed would change the assessment of these intelligence agencies developed over ten years is just not as importanat a point as continually presented.
Inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq at the request of the US in 1998. When they returned before the war, they didn’t find anything. El-Baradei in 2003: On the assumption that Iraq will continue to provide us evidence, we should be able to come to a conclusion that Iraq has no nuclear weapon, which is progress.
So no- not everyone believed that Iraq had nukes or was working to obtain them. The inspections were working in the sense that they were gathering evidence.
They were *not* working in the sense that they were not providing any evidence of Iraqi WMDs. So they were pulled before they could reach a firm conclusion (or, rather, they were pulled and any conclusions that they had reached weren’t brought up often).
I agree that in their search for the smoking gun they stretched, perhaps lies, more likely the best examples they thought would make their point.
More likely, documented falsehoods, such as Rice’s claim that the aluminum tubes were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs”.
It’s not an example, it’s a lie. I don’t know why you shirk from calling it such.
Regarding the consensus, this is from a post I wrote back in 2006:
The State Department’s intelligence agency (INR), even under Bush administration pressure, concluded in the NIE that “[t]he activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons.” INR added: “Lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, INR is unwilling to speculate that such an effort began soon after the departure of UN inspectors.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) concurred in this judgment, concluding that there was “no indication of resumed nuclear activities . . . nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities.”
In this context, this assertion was made by Vice President Cheney:
“[W]e believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons” [March 2003]
And President Bush:
“The regime has the scientists and facilities to build nuclear weapons and is seeking the materials required to do so.” [October 2002]
Several days later, President Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein “is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.” [October 2002]
“Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof – the smoking gun – that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” [October 7, 2002]
And Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, with perhaps the most egregious example:
“We said they had a nuclear program. That was never any debate.” [July 13, 2003]
In September 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) issued a report that concluded: “There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons or where Iraq has – or will – establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities.” The report also observed that “[a] substantial amount of Iraq’s chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998 as a result of Operation Desert Storm and UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) actions.” While the report assessed that Iraq “probably” retained some “CW agents,” it warned that “we lack any direct information.”
The United Nations echoed the DIA’s assessment. Regardless of the doubts and uncertainties, the Bush administration took an unequivocal tone:
Vice President Cheney asserted:
“We know they have biological and chemical weapons.” [March 17, 2003]
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” [August 26, 2002]
Donald Rumsfeld stated:
“He has at this moment stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.” [Sept 18, 2002]
Which made this apparent denial by Paul Wolfowitz appear disingenuous to say the least:
“We never said there were stockpiles.” [Interview with Howard Arenstein, CBS Radio Mar. 16, 2004].
From a post by Joe Cirincione at Arms Control Wonk:
In late 2002, inspectors went back in. We started getting new intelligence. Dozens of inspectors went to hundreds of sites. The inspectors visited the former nuclear facilities at which US satellites detected suspicious actives.
These guys are the Nuclear CSI. They could now look under the roofs, swipe for radiological traces, interview technicians, audit accounts. They found the facilities in a worse state of repair than when the had left.
There was absolutely no evidence of any renewed nuclear activity. The same for chemical and biological programs. We could now make new, more accurate estimates based on this new intelligence.
In other words, it was never a choice between war and nothing; between taking action and trusting Saddam. We had in place the most coercive inspection regime ever imposed on an independent nation. And it was working. Saddam was in an iron box, surrounded by thousands of troops, his political base deteriorating. David Kay said later that Saddam’s regime was in “a death spiral.” The concerns expressed at the time of the difficulties in keeping troops in the area through the summer to allow inspections to continue seem ludicrous in light of the 2500 US troops killed, 15,000 maimed and $300 billion squandered.
That was back in 2006 when there were “only” 2500 US troops killed (not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqis) and the cost was “only” $300 billion.
I know no one is forcing me to read this stuff, but I really wish we didn’t have to rehash and re-live this crap. It’s so depressing. (Thanks, Marty)
I know it’s hard for you, HSH, but I think it’s necessary.
It’s like chewing tinfoil with a mouthful of fillings, for me, but worse things have happened.
Sorry HSH, I don’t like it any better than you. As I said i usually avoid it like the plague and will from now on. The alternate narratives are firmly established and neither makes the war ok.
What narratives? I’m quoting fact. Dispute the facts, avoid the narrative. Let’s deal in only fact.
I’m not the one fixing the intel around the narrative – to paraphrase the Downing Street memo.
Well Eric, as my last note on this issue, I said that there were no Western intelligence agencies that didn’t consider Hussein a threat and you quoted Putin (not really a Western power) saying he didn’t have a smoking gun.
Kind of fitting facts around a narrative to me.
I actually didn’t quote Putin. And the person quoting Putin also quoted Chirac. France is certainly a part of the West.
As for me, I quoted, oddly enough, US intelligence agencies and the IAEA!
Namely, the DIA and INR on the US side.
I also asked you for a cite to any intelligence agencies concluding that Saddam was “a threat” as that statement is entirely without context, and thus possibly meaningless in a discussion about proper casus belli.
Well, he was a threat to the popularity of the moustache, I think. Maybe that’s what Marty means.
“I also asked you for a cite to any intelligence agencies concluding that Saddam was “a threat” as that statement is entirely without context, and thus possibly meaningless in a discussion about proper casus belli.”
Your quotes support my narrative as well as yours. Which is my point. The assumption that the French, the IAEA or the DIA were providing an opinion on the imminence of the threat reflects their belief that he was, in fact, a threat. As did continued UN sanctions, etc.
You interpret
as supporting yours, I certainly interpret it as supporting an unequivocable assumption that there still existed a threat.
Well Eric, as my last note on this issue, I said that there were no Western intelligence agencies that didn’t consider Hussein a threat and you quoted Putin (not really a Western power) saying he didn’t have a smoking gun.
That was me. I also quoted Jacques Chirac. He is French. France is a Western power.
Your quotes support my narrative as well as yours. Which is my point. The assumption that the French, the IAEA or the DIA were providing an opinion on the imminence of the threat reflects their belief that he was, in fact, a threat. As did continued UN sanctions, etc.
Huh?
They were not opining on the imminence of a “threat.”
They were opining on the Iraq regime’s possession of WMD.
The two are not synonymous. The inspections, likewise, were about WMD, not Saddam’s status as a “threat.”
The “threat” issue is a separate discussion. Again: threat to whom? In what way? Would the threat be ameliorated by a war? Would that be worth it or justifiable?
I’ve often thought that one of the deftest political maneuvers by the Bush administration was turning the Iraq war decision into a question of whether or not Iraq had WMD. At that point, all they had to do was find any old WMD and, presumably under some bizarre curtailment of the debate, the war would be justified. Like McTex suggested upthread.
What was maddening to me at the time was the fact that, even if Iraq did have some decaying, outdated chem or bio weapons, so what?
How does that in any way make the decision to invade either strategically wise or morally justifiable? Under what plausible theory?
That’s the crucial quetion that gets obscured by discussions about WMD intel – and the term “WMD” itself, as nukes are so different from chem and bio in general. Layers of obfuscation and misdirection.
hsh: I know no one is forcing me to read this stuff, but I really wish we didn’t have to rehash and re-live this crap. It’s so depressing.
I think it’s worthwhile and it’s a good reminder that the facts about what happened at the time are still not widely accepted.
I think it’s also important to recognize that the argument that, say, a consensus existed at the time is likely to be an accurate and good-faith rendition of that person’s experience. My experience was that no such consensus actually existed but that the idea that it did was heavily, heavily pushed in all forms of media, that were virtually slavering at the mouth at the prospect of getting to cover a really cool war in which they’d get to tag along with the soldiers and wear flak jackets and watch stuff being blown up. (I love watching stuff getting blown up, so I understand the sentiment, but I prefer that the things being blown up not be people.)
Anyway, they saw it one way, we saw it another. How was it actually? Well, the perceived consensus did not actually exist among informed experts. The perception filtered through the media that it existed was a false one. I think the evidence for that is sound. Not only was there not a real consensus, but those who were skeptical were proved to be right. The evidence for that is sound too.
Accepting that does not require one to abandon the perception that a consensus existed at the time, although it should challenge someone to think about how they evaluate and assess important information about the world around them when it comes to life and death decisions of this sort.
“That’s the crucial quetion that gets obscured by discussions about WMD intel – and the term “WMD” itself, as nukes are so different from chem and bio in general. Layers of obfuscation and misdirection.”
Setting aside the “some decaying, outdated chem or bio weapons” description designed to specifically support the narrative. The ability to use those weapons on their neighbors or Israel (remember those ridiculous SCUD tests?) was considered at the time a serious enough threat to the US to consider military action.
Yes, we had supported Saddam in his war with Iran, a purely political reaction to the hostage crisis, but his ability to substantially destabilize the Middle East more broadly was considered a significant, if not existential, threat to the US.
I would be completely dishonest if i didn’t point out that there were two factors that impacted the decision that get under- discussed.
First, the stability of the region to ensure the flow of oil was a real criteria IMO, never publicly stated but almost universally accepted.
Second, Bush was inclined to correct the mistake of his father in not taking out Saddam when he was there, and then not supporting the “insurgents” adequately.
So in assessing the narratives it is no surprise that the existence of a threat carried more weight in the decision making process than the extent of the threat or the ability to verify it.
…although it should challenge someone to think about how they evaluate and assess important information about the world around them when it comes to life and death decisions of this sort.
I’d start by wondering why so many of our allies weren’t among the Coalition of the Willing. Then again, they were all in agreement with regard to the threat, since they had anything at all to say about the level of the threat. (I mean, how can you even have a level of threat with out a threat? The logic is so simple, right?) It’s weird, though, that, even with the US leading the charge, they didn’t find the war to be a good idea. Just plain weird, I mean, given the consensus, of course, which is what makes it weird, after all. Feh.
Setting aside the “some decaying, outdated chem or bio weapons” description designed to specifically support the narrative.
No, that was actually in reference to the intel on the state of his chem and bio programs. See, ie, the INR and DIA citations above. See, also, the NIE. The consensus on chem and bio agents was that he had leftover pieces, remnants from over a decade earlier. Decaying.
The ability to use those weapons on their neighbors or Israel (remember those ridiculous SCUD tests?) was considered at the time a serious enough threat to the US to consider military action.
Considered by who? And why?
Saddam had used gas on the Kurds in the 1980s in a brutal attempt to control a restive population intent on breaking away. It was barbaric, but the incident was also 15 years old at the time of the invasion. His attacks on Israel were in response to Gulf War I, which was a decade ago.
Why after all that time had elapsed without an attack on any neighbor of any kind was that threat suddenly deemed so pressing, so imminent that a massive invasion was necessary?
Odd.
Yes, we had supported Saddam in his war with Iran, a purely political reaction to the hostage crisis, but his ability to substantially destabilize the Middle East more broadly was considered a significant, if not existential, threat to the US.
Again, he had not taken any destabilizing action in over a decade. Why the sudden sense of urgency?
That peculiarity should stand out to any observer. It did for me at the time. Something wasn’t right.
First, the stability of the region to ensure the flow of oil was a real criteria IMO, never publicly stated but almost universally accepted.
Well, oil was the biggest factor, but not in the way you describe necessarily. But in your defense, we haven’t really probed that topic.
Second, Bush was inclined to correct the mistake of his father in not taking out Saddam when he was there, and then not supporting the “insurgents” adequately.
Interesting. In retrospect, the father’s “mistake” looks like the right decision, whereas the corrective action looks every bit the “mistake.” But I’ll concede that Bush might have had a bit of a personal vendetta/neurotic obsession with Iraq. Of course, that does little to bolster the case for war, or for the credibility of the threat.
But I’ll concede that Bush might have had a bit of a personal vendetta/neurotic obsession with Iraq.
It was a twofer for W: he got to depose Saddam, when daddy didn’t, and he got re-elected, when daddy didn’t. He now has big-swinging dick rights in the Bush family, something he had never had in his lifetime.
Fnck Saddam, we’re taking him out! Him and a couple thousand U.S. troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, fnck yeah!
It’s funny, but I have this vague memory of the US and UK establishing and maintaining absolute air superiority over about half the nation of Iraq from about 1991 on.
Half of Hussein’s own national airspace was absolutely off limits to him, and the US and the UK could and did attack and destroy targets anywhere within Iraq, no fly zone or not, at will.
From 1991 on.
Did that really happen? Or was it all just a dream I had?
Marty cites the “threat” that Hussein posed. Left unanswered are questions like:
What kind of threat?
To whom?
How serious and/or credible is the threat?
Are there measures short of warfare that can be taken to mitigate that threat?
It’s correct to say that we did not have an accurate and current assessment of what weapon systems Hussein possessed at the time of the invasion.
It’s also correct to say that Hussein would have been hard pressed to present a serious threat to anyone in the region, let alone across a continent or an ocean.
Setting aside the “some decaying, outdated chem or bio weapons” description designed to specifically support the narrative.
What is this reliance on narrative to determine truth value? If Saddam had a hidden factory producing a large supply of chemical and biological weapons, that would be a different factual situation than if he had a small decaying supply of leftover mustard gas from the Iran-Iraq war.
You seem to be viewing the situation as one where different viewpoints are necessarily valid, and proceeding from that assumption to the conclusion that therefore facts which support one position are merely ‘perceptions of that narrative’.
Im finding it difficult to debate against that- I want to raise facts and then discuss them, not raise facts and then have them dismissed as narrative fictions.
Im finding it difficult to debate against that- I want to raise facts and then discuss them, not raise facts and then have them dismissed as narrative fictions.
REminds me of this.
It is simply not reasonable to think Bush I made a mistake re: the Gulf War in not deposing and occupying. We were right at the end of the Cold War. Russia could go either way. Our allies were explicit. And we know what occupation looks like: it is ugly.
You seem to be viewing the situation as one where different viewpoints are necessarily valid, and proceeding from that assumption to the conclusion that therefore facts which support one position are merely ‘perceptions of that narrative’.
I wouldn’t have pegged Marty as one of those postmodern relativist types, but here we are.