Slobodan Milosevic: Dead
CNN just announced it. Good goddamn riddence. I had been rooting for a painful, lingering illness, but, heck, I'll take just dead.
CNN just announced it. Good goddamn riddence. I had been rooting for a painful, lingering illness, but, heck, I'll take just dead.
posted by Winston Smith at
7:12 AM
17 Comments:
Lucky for us Saddam's not dead. We still have the chance to undo our mistake and put him back in power. No doubt we could round up his Ba'athist crew for a reunion. Those guys need a gig.
Status quo ante. Between the casualties of this so-called war and the contents of Saddam's mass graves, Iraq comes out about even. No harm, no foul.
Yes, Tom, I'm sure that if the electricity and water were on as often as they were under Saddam, not to mention the thousands of folks killed during and after the war who were non-combatants were alive, the POV you espouse would be a fact, but it isn't.
Instead of the organized killing and kidnaping of folks under Saddam, we have the 'free-enterprise' version of such things going on now.
Hurrah for our side!
Of course, if you could find anyone who is in favor of letting Saddam out of jail and giving him the reins of power again(which neither WS nor anyone else who posts here have done, so far as I know) you would have a point.
Your definition is interesting, like the definition of 'safe' from the beginning of The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Universe
Don't give a shit about electricity. Mussolini made the trains run on time. Get real.
Do the life & death metrics. I'm listening.
Yeah, unbelievable that that evil Clinton did a better job of improving the world than Our Hero And Unelected "President" Dubya... Maybe if he had done what he was supposed to do and actually attacked those responsible for 9/11, then rebuilt Afghanistan (like he promised), he wouldn't have fucked up the world so bad.
Or maybe if he'd have used the...god, what's it up to now? $246 billion? to go into the Congo or Sudan we could have actually accomplished something.
Try to understand this, Tom: nobody thinks Saddam was a good guy. But your boy Dubya is dumb as a sack of hammers, he wouldn't know the truth if it got his sister pregnant, and he fucked up. He spent $246 billion attacking the wrong people, destroying a country with no plan to rebuild, and screwing up the country so badly *that it's not evely clear that it's better than Saddam*.
THink about that, man: how badly do you have to screw up in order to leave doubt about whether you did right by removing *Saddam Hussein*???
Oh: and he lied us into a war and alienated the rest of the world, including our long-time allies in the process. Nice.
To review: no reasonable person supports Saddam. But no reasonabole person supports Bush, either. These are perfectly consistent positions.
To spin this back to Milosevik, I would *really* have liked to see a conviction before he died so I'm not cheering all that much.
Yeah, that's actually a good point, Aa.
What's the difference between what the US troops are doing in Iraq now and what Clinton had in mind by sending troops into Kosovo? Seems we're protecting the weak from the strong, trying to prevent a butcherous civil war.
I mean, really. Straighten me out here.
The difference is, Tom, that Clinton was sending troops into Kosovo to prevent a civil war from taking place, and we have done so with about the same casualty rate as the American forces had in the Battle of Manila from the Spanish-American War.
Iraq, on the other hand, was not on the brink of a civil war when we invaded, so the two cases aren't the same, unless you can give a reasonable explanation of how Clinton was not responsible for the outbreak of violence in Kosovo in the first place.
Let's go for the "You own man says so" example, as Jeff Greenfield puts it:
William F. Buckley Jr. has defined conservatism as "the politics of reality." Ideology is the enemy of conservatism because it edits, omits or ignores reality. George W. Bush is an ideologue.
Iraq is commonly said to be the centerpiece of Bush's presidency. The United States invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. But nearly three years after the invasion, no such weapons have been found. And evidence is mounting that the intelligence used to bolster the claims for Iraq's WMD was cherry-picked, politically pressured and, to use intelligence expert Thomas Powers' word, "fabricated."
Perhaps the real reason for the Iraq invasion, sold to Congress along with WMD, was a Wilsonian goal of making the world — or at least the Middle East — "safe for democracy." Bush hinted as much in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington a month before the invasion. "Human cultures can be vastly different," he said. "Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth."
An astounding statement. Flatly untrue. Refuted by history and experience. Did Mohamed Atta desire the same good things as his hostage passengers when he piloted his hijacked jetliner into one of the World Trade Center towers? Do Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds desire the same things today in Iraq?
Iraq is not going to be a beacon of democracy in the Middle East but, assuming a civil war is avoided, probably a Shiite-dominated theocracy leaning toward Iran. For this, the bill will be half a trillion dollars and tens of thousands dead and wounded.
Ideology.
As Buckley wrote in two recent columns, our Iraq policy "didn't work." The Bush centerpiece has been an astonishing flop.
Jeffrey Hart
I'm familiar with the prevailing arguments, but thank you. That wasn't the question I posed.
We still have the chance to undo our mistake
Nope. We could still undo one (deposing Saddam) of the two positive outcomes of the whole misadventure (the other being elections), but the breakage is permanent and we have to go on from where we are now.
Of course, anyone can see that those positive outcomes are inextricably linked to many of the negative outcomes, but there it is - the world is gray. Funny thing is that it was obvious that the PNAC program was a foolish fantasy from the beginning. Just not obvious to anyone who mattered.
"Human cultures can be vastly different," [Bush] said. "Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth."
Idealism, mebbe. Ideology? Non, non.
If the purpose of quoting Buckley was not to throw shit at the wall to see what sticks, but to endorse his mainline- (paleo-?) conservative realpolitik, that would be interesting, because I'm so unused to Thomas Hobbes-type arguments about a society's need for order coming from my friends on the left. To speak their native language, I usually restrict myself to the vocabulary of moral vanity in conversations with them.
That's why my starting point on the Iraq War is never WMDs, but the very real possibility that Bill Clinton killed more Iraqis than has George W. Bush. Especially innocent ones.
If my friends on the left have now embraced realpolitik, I think we could find a neutral ground. Surely interventions in Sudan or Nigeria (watch out for that one) would be useless, because obviously not all humans want freedom or self-determination.
I'm only being half-sarcastic here, because "order" is half the classical liberal equation, liberty being the other half, and each fights for primacy. (Wise men seek to maximize each, with full recognition that they are often if not necessarily in conflict.)
If my friends on the West's left are behind this "order" thing, perhaps we all can negotiate an understanding. We can stop wringing our hands about supporting authoritarian autocracies, because the alternative, by consensus, is patently worse.
Of course, that would mean that Buckley has won, if the left chooses now to fall in behind him---standing athwart history and yelling "stop!"
There's certainly a difference of opinion between the idealism of the neocons and the realism of Buckley's generation. Bush is a revolutionary, if not a radical. And I mean that with only the slightest trace of sarcasm. One need only look at the draconian measures used (needed?) to quell the insurgency in the Phillipines after the Spanish-American War to know this ain't your great-granddaddy's American imperialism.
Oh, yeah---I hate crossposting from blogs, because they're just blogs.
But mebbe Bill Clinton created his own Islamicist viper pit in the ex-Yugoslavia, even with the best of intentions.
Mebbe it's not all about us, our sins, our crimes, our misjudgments. Mebbe we're just all useful idiots.
Actually, I was quoting Jeffrey Hart quoting Buckley.
But to endorse his mainline- (paleo-?) conservative realpolitik,
Whatever the road one takes to finally see reality, I applaud the traveller who does so.
Tom, so far you've dragged Clinton in via Kosovo, and now you're attempting to reduce the magnitude of the "Chimpy's Bogus WMD Adventure" by linking to an old article about the sanctions killing children, which I'm sure moved you deeply at the time the article and ones like it appeared in the press pre-9/11.
If my friends on the left have now embraced realpolitik
I cannot comment for everyone here, but there are a few of us who have embraced reality that Iraq is a total SNAFU due to the COWs' actions.
Your efforts to bring up other issues in order to construct a straw man of the left are amusing, but since you ask rhetorical questions to which no acceptable answers are possible and continue in your "Clinton-bad" mode that is so 2002, what else is new.
If my friends on the West's left are behind this "order" thing, perhaps we all can negotiate an understanding. We can stop wringing our hands about supporting authoritarian autocracies, because the alternative, by consensus, is patently worse.
If the alternative is chaos, yes. If the alternative is democratically-elected governments who aren't run for the benefit of the rich and powerful, not so much.
Of course, that would mean that Buckley has won, if the left chooses now to fall in behind him---standing athwart history and yelling "stop!"
As Buckley wrote in two recent columns, our Iraq policy "didn't work."
Agreeing with that doesn't place one in the chorus singing athwart history.
I do hope you don't strain yourself, moving the goalposts in this thread would be work enough for a rhetorical Hercules, let alone a mere mortal such as we all are here...........
No straw man. Looking for a principle. I don't detect one.
I'm sure the fault is mine. Or Bush's.
If it's just a question of principal, why not just stick to the realities of the current events, instead of dragging the Clenis in at every remote opportunity.
It seems a curious kind of principle to worry about Clintons' actions years after he's left office, and to swallow a quote about the human heart that sounds nice but upon logical analysis is really quite daft as well, if not outright Panglossian in outlook.
You read me as if I'm condemning Clinton. But I'm really not.
I use him to try to talk you down off your ledge of derangement about Bush.
My point is simple really---the world is fucked, the presidency is impossibly difficult, and often there are no great solutions. You muddle through the best you can. That describes Bush, but I think it also describes anybody who holds the presidency.
Oh yeah, and my other point is that it's not always necessarily about us. I'm by no means convinced that had the war been conducted more efficiently, that Iraq would be any better. Whenever Saddam fell, now or in 20 years, this power struggle was inevitable. Sometimes a situation just it is what it is.
You muddle through the best you can
We know where the WMD are............
As for 'curing' me of my "Bush derangement"(why aren't you concerned with WS and his derangement, he's the one who posts about it here constantly?), trying to go back to talk about Clinton constantly
shows an equal kind of madness, one that you don't have to be a doctor or even a specialist in cardiology in order to pronounce a correct diagnosis.
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