Thursday, July 08, 2004
Priorities
Earlier on I quoted with approval this comment:
But others make it their business to expose those who:
"...wish dearly to deflect the argument about the war from being a referendum on Bush to being a strict humanitarian concern with the fate of Iraqis."
Heaven forbid.
"...unlike most of the “anti-war” crowd, I didn’t regard Iraq as merely a pretext for carrying on domestic (British or US) political spats by other means. I can separate my dislike and contempt for Blair (and Cook, and Dubya, and indeed almost all other bourgeois politicians) from my judgement on Iraq: can you?"
But others make it their business to expose those who:
"...wish dearly to deflect the argument about the war from being a referendum on Bush to being a strict humanitarian concern with the fate of Iraqis."
Heaven forbid.
Comments:
<< Home
I think you should at least take care to engage with the whole argument. I emphatically am not suggesting that the fate of Iraqis should not be discussed. It is obviously central. But also central is the Bush administration's intentions for the world, amply discussed in PNAC documents and further examined in the National Security Strategy 2002. It does serious violence to the truth to separate one's appraisal of the Bush regime's ambitions from one's appraisal of the war. How on earth could you exact a serious analysis of the war if you didn't also permit some investigation into the "priorities" of those waging it?
Is it realistic to assume that the Bush administration has just spent over $100bn on a pure humanitarian exercise?
Do the baleful consequences of the war to date bear any relationship to US goals in Iraq and in the region?
Personally, I prefer the stance of the Iraqi Free Trade Unions who opposed both the war and the occupation, insisting that a campaign of international solidarity would have helped internal dissenters do the job of overthrowing Saddam for themselves. At least this does not abstract humanitarian concerns from the dense mesh of geopolitical considerations in which they are always-already embedded.
Post a Comment
Is it realistic to assume that the Bush administration has just spent over $100bn on a pure humanitarian exercise?
Do the baleful consequences of the war to date bear any relationship to US goals in Iraq and in the region?
Personally, I prefer the stance of the Iraqi Free Trade Unions who opposed both the war and the occupation, insisting that a campaign of international solidarity would have helped internal dissenters do the job of overthrowing Saddam for themselves. At least this does not abstract humanitarian concerns from the dense mesh of geopolitical considerations in which they are always-already embedded.
<< Home
