I just bailed from a discussion on a friend's blog about The War, after realizing yet again there are some subjects for which reasoned debate just doesn't cut it.
This guy with whom I was arguing was for it, and I was agin it, and never the twain shall meet.
I like to think of myself as open-minded and reasonable, but I have my beliefs and the ones that are the most deeply held are simply not going to be changed by somebody espousing the opposite view. I have come to realize that the folks on the other side cling to their beliefs, too -- wrongheaded as they are ...
It's always been amazing on some level that people can disagree with me on these things. I mean, I've considered these subjects in depth, collected information pro and con, and determined what, for me, seems the rational position. It's like there's a part of me that thinks, "Well, if folks have the same information I do and they approach it logically, they can't help but come to the same conclusions I have reached."
Wrong, bucko, not just No, but Uh Uh, ain't gonna happen, no way, no how!"
For the record, I think war in general is the height of mankind's group-stupidity, and that the war in Iraq was and is particularly boneheaded -- launched on lies, prosecuted as badly as it possibly could have been, and there never was a remote hope of "winning" it in any realistic sense of the word.
I couldn't and still cannot imagine how anybody could have been so short-sighted as to not realize how things have been done forever in the Middle East -- didn't anybody running the show realize that those folks who live in the sands carry grudges for seventeen generations? That they are still willing to kill each other over an argument their nine-times great-grandfathers had a thousand years ago? That God, family, tribe are primary, and everything after that is a shrug?
The belief that the U.S. Marines, Army, Navy, and Air Force and all those poor reservists -- were going to swagger in, kick ass, take names, and that the country would welcome them with flowers, and then convert to a Republican Democracy and live happily ever after was, to my mind, the height of arrogant, new-shurf-in-town cowboy stupidity.
It's not as if there weren't stadiums full of people saying this all along, but the Bush Administration had its own axe to grind, and nobody was listening.
Anybody who thinks the world is a safer place for these actions is not listening, either.
I can't imagine that history will look kindly upon Bush and company. I sure as hell don't.
We have sown the wind, and now, as Hosea tells us, we reap the whirlwind.
3 comments:
As to why our glorious leaders would be foolish enough to get us involved in urban/tribal/religous/guerilla warfare, consider this: they got where they are by having wealth, which seems to pretty much equate to political power in this country. But wealth does not equal wisdom, particularly when it's inherited wealth. And far too many of them come from a culture that at it's heart believes their wealth and power makes their ideas the only correct ideas. If you're taught this from birth, then you tend to ignore ideas from the "lower classes", i.e. people who have less money than you do. And a politician, at least the of the sort we find in our political class, will do almost anything other than admit making a mistake. For my part, I can see that war is sometimes the only alternative: some kinds of evil simply aren't tolerable and must be destroyed. But while fighting and dying for one's home, family and society is one thing---fighting and dying for a politician's ego (or for the profits of a politician's corporate masters) is another thing entirely.
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I suspect that if you look deeply enough into any of the conflicts where we were "fighting evil", and it was our survival on the line...you'd quickly discover it was all propaganda from some wealthy people to get poor people willing to die for them.
And before anyone mentions Hitler, let me point out we knew nothing about the concentration camps for the vast part of that war. The Allies fought Germany because her expansion was dangerous to their ambitions.
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