From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Thu Aug 23 2007 - 16:24:50 EDT
What makes the second Iraq war so spectacular, apart from being deeply tragic, is that first the official reasons given for going to war were false, then we had the "history will absolve us" argument (in which case, you just have to wait before the war eventually might prove itself as a just one), and now the "last-ditch" argument has become, that if Coalition forces withdrew, things would be so much worse. Mr Bush just upped the rhetoric as follows: (...) The struggle has been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it's a struggle for civilization. We fight for a free way of life against a new barbarism -- an ideology whose followers have killed thousands on American soil, and seek to kill again on even a greater scale. (...) Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. (...)Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like "boat people," "re-education camps," and "killing fields." (...) If we were to abandon the Iraqi people, the terrorists would be emboldened, and use their victory to gain new recruits. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/08/20070822-3.html In reality, as Ben Kiernan among others showed convincingly with his research, "Pol Pot's revolution would not have won power without U.S. economic and military destabilisation of Cambodia". Indeed US carpet bombing of Cambodia "was probably the most significant factor in Pol Pot's rise" as a peasant leader (The Pol Pot Regime,1996, p. 16). It was in fact the Vietnamese army which, after the fall of Saigon, liberated Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge terror. In Mr Bush's grandiose rewrite of history, all this is effaced. When I previously referred to the "struggle against barbarism" in a post, that was an interpretation of a mind-set which evaluated policy results in terms of the number of Taliban killed. Now Mr Bush talks about "struggle against barbarism", literally. But how is this to be reconciled with the fact that, in reality, the total amount of warfare in the world actually declined drastically through the 1990s and early years of the 20th century? In reality, if you have an army of a million people with a budget that consumes nearly half of the all world's military spending, there has to be a justification for this business - there has to be an enemy somewhere. If there doesn't exist one, it has to be invented. If the "leader of the free world" can talk such outrageous bunkum, it's very scary stuff indeed I think. The very least one might expect of a political leader is that he takes an objective view of things. Incredibly, Mr Bush also claimed recently "I will use the veto to keep your taxes low and to keep federal spending under control." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/08/AR2007080802468.html?sub=AR Who can believe that? Normblog, maybe. Jurriaan
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