Irish, 1986. I have what's possibly a false memory of watching television footage of the Berlin Wall coming down in '89 (but I could have seen that footage later), and I remember seeing news coverage of the end of the first Gulf war. (I also vaguely remember some national politics from '90-94 or so, but politicians never really interested me.)
My earliest memories are slippery things. I'm not sure how much I recall, vs. invented. But I have very definite memories from age three or thereabouts, involving playschool (and from age four, Montessori preschool).
The first political event I remember understanding enough to have an opinion on, otoh, is from 1997.
CRV:
You're operating under a series of, charitably speaking, misguided assumptions. Iraq is not the first foreign adventure the US has engaged in over the past half century or so: it's merely the one with the least amount of justification relative to its death toll.
(Before 1990, at least, the US government had the excuse of 'The Russians are coming!' but whether the US's aggressive military stance during the Cold War was entirely warranted is a question I'll leave to historians.)
Torture is torture, regardless of degree. It serves no useful function in the gathering of information: its sole function is the projection of power by either the individual torturer or the institution involved - in this case the state - and its outcome is to silence both agency and dissent. (I recommend the first section of Elaine Scarry's "The Body in Pain" for a thorough, if slightly outdated, examination of the psychology involved.)
You, yourself, are being simplistic by pretending that to point out the faults of the US is both to fail to criticise the faults of other undemocratic regimes, and to fail to recognise the US's occasional better points. It's not an either/or proposition, and to pretend that it is... That's intellectually dishonest, at the very least.
Do free, democratic, Western nations have the "right" to go in and knock off despots, dictators, strongmen, and other autocrats, most of them in the Third World, as we see fit?
I'd like to draw your attention to something called the just war doctrine, which has been around since Constantine. For a war to be just (if one accepts that war ever is), it needs to have just cause, right intention, and proportion response, and also needs to be declared by a legitimate authority. In addition, it must be used as a last resort.
With Iraq, there was no just cause, nor right intention. Nor has the damage dealt to that nation been proportionate - one of the major points against it at this moment in time is how much damage has been caused for so little humanitarian gain - and of a certainty, it wasn't used as a last resort.
Intervention in a repressive state can only be morally justified when one is certain the humanitarian gains outweigh the cost. And in a nation like Iraq, which remained one whole, single nation state only through the repressive policies of its ruler, replacing the regime does not even begin to solve the problem. In fact, demonstrably, it can create a worse one, as centuries-old family, tribal, political, religious, ideological grievances have the breathing space to develop into widespread violence.
It's pretty much a truism, anywhere, that after every ideologically motivated revolution comes the civil war. (see Russia 1917-on, Ireland 1921-1922 for the examples that immediately come to my mind.)
The horror of Iraq is not that of the invasion, in case that's not clear. A properly handled invasion might have (I say might have) benefitted the Iraqi people. The horror of the invasion is that it created the perfect conditions for long-running civil war, sectarian conflict and ultimately, unless strong leaders emerge on all sides who desire compromise, or someone else intervenes, genocide.
The horror is not finite. It could go on for the next hundred years or longer - perhaps not at the same level of intensity, but certainly intense enough for its victims.
In short, the US had no moral right or platform from which to invade Iraq. But once they did, they compounded their sins by an incompetant, badly-organised and badly-administered occupation.
Other have pointed this out, but...
Just think of it this way: 650,000 unnecessarily dead people. Iraq's population might still be around 20 or 25 million people (not that anyone's taking very accurate census records right now); that's roughly one person dead in every forty. Unless you're very lucky, that list includes 1 in 40 of your neighbours, your friends, your school graduating class, your family.
Doesn't sound like a lot, does it? But it adds up to a cost that by anyone's measure is far too high. And it's only going to rise, regardless of whether the US remains or leaves.
And you can add the human cost to the destruction of infrastructure, the exodus of the educated classes, the rise of extremism.
Are you still so certain that US interventionism is the lesser evil? Because really, seriously, it doesn't look that way to me.
CRV@ #26:
Many also argue that the U.S. has a moral duty to remain as World Police, lest the nastier nations of the world do as they please, unchecked.
It may have escaped your notice, but the U.S. is fast becoming one of the "nastier nations of the world". Your government
- engages in wars of foreign aggression
- kidnaps citizens of other nations (Canada, Italy, Germany among them) and holds them without trial
- condones torture (fecal matter by any other name)
- engages in widespread gerrymandering and voting fraud
- has the world's largest nuclear, biological and chemical arsenal, and is the world's only nation to ever have used nuclear weapons in anger.
Leaving aside allegations of widespread corruption in the legislature, please tell me how, exactly, the U.S. can possibly lay claim to any sort of moral high ground?
The U.N. may not be perfect, but at least they operate under a stringent system of checks and balances. Which is partly why they are very slow to move, when they move at all, but it also means that clusterfucks like the invasion of Iraq (a war which is manifestly a war of foreign aggression, even if one does not go so far as to call it a neocolonialist adventure) don't happen under their aegis.
sad kitteh wuz walkin
lonely liek cloudz
floatin over hillz
cloudz iz borin
hillz iz borin
Do not want!
hungry nao
i can has cheezburger?
no cheezburger here
iz daffodilz
they can has a flavor?
N
O hai
im in ur daffodilz
eatin ur poetz
they has a flavor
kthxbai!
I've been lurking in this thread for a while, but J Thomas has said something whose consequences I think need to be pointed out: we make a big panic call for every civilian vessel to stop dead in the water until we get it resolved, and we sink everything that doesn't, concluding that the end result of such a scenario is: And we're at war with iran.
If US ships sink anything that isn't Iranian -- and is it fair to say that all ships sunk from such a scenario would be Iranian? -- you're at war with more than just Iran, unless your government does some very fast talking. Things could become unpleasant, to say the least.
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