[1567] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: Election 2004
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Presley H Cannady)
Tue Oct 19 22:42:20 2004
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 22:40:17 -0400
From: Presley H Cannady <revprez@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <1098198299.41752d1ba368e@web.mail.umich.edu>
First, let's get this out in the open.
http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/naes/2004_03_military-data_10-15_report.pdf
So for all you Mooreniks out there entertaining fantasies of the military vote
breaking against Bush, the dream is over.
Anyway.
Quoting "Shayna H. Hirshfield" <shaynahh@umich.edu>:
> You might find the following article from the New York Times interesting.
> The first thought that comes to my mind after reading the article you sent is
> of my grandparents and many other older folks with whom I've talked in the
> last year from across the board - people who were alive and politically aware
> during WWII - who consistently say that what they see in the current US
> administration reminds them of the Nazi buildup prior to WWII, and is
> consequently one of the scariest regimes they have ever seen.
Any specific, meaningful parallels?
> Yes, steadfastness is important. So is freedom. Denying freedom and liberty
> has never worked to make a populace safer - witness Japanese internment
camps
> and COINTELPRO - yet that is exactly has been done, in the most insidious of
> ways, through the Patriot Act.
You cannot say that the Japanese interment camps or COINTELPRO did nothing to
enhance American security. We can argue whether certain counterintelligence
policies are more effective than others, but at minimum both COINTELPRO and
internment hindered the enemy's ability to recruit in country and commit acts
of espianoge.
> The author of the article you sent refers to a "nation that tamed a
> frontier;" surely that person is talking about the "conquest" of this
> continent, when genocide was committed flagrantly against scores of nations
> who had been living here for centuries.
You're exaggerating. The American wars against Indian nations yielded nothing
compared to the atrocities committed by European imperialists a full century
before. And whether or not we judge historical figures by present day values,
the fact remains that the United States successfully pacified a turbulent west
and brought civilization and prosperity to our part of the continent.
> What a thing to glorify!
It is. The American war against various Indian tribes were far more humane than
comparable conflicts in Africa, Asia and Europe.
> Doing
> "great things" and bringing democracy to the Middle East... surely we've
> tried this before, in Iran, in Latin America... we don't exactly have a good
> track record with that, and we're not building one now.
Actually, we do have a good track record. Within the past twenty years the US
has assisted the growth of democracy and free market capitalism in over a
hundred countries. We can disagree over whether it was wise to support one
authoritarian interest over another in some specific place at some particular
time, but it betrays a lack of seriousness to dismiss the very real, two-decade
long global march towards democracy.
> On the contrary, we
> are creating even more chaos for people who were already suffering.
Based on what indicators? Even the Brookings Iraq Index indicates that the
Iraqi people are suffering no more than they were before the war and doing a
little bit better.
> (I am not so myopic as to say that Saddam was a good leader, but come on, was
> it our duty to oust him on such a thin justification?)
Thin justification? The Duelfer Report has conclusively demonstrated Iraqi
capacity to develop WMD in short order and the intentions to do so once the
sanctions regime collapsed. That and the world has Iran in an ideal strategic
strangle hold, boxed in between 150,000 US and Coalition troops in the west,
another 11,000 in the east, Russia and the Persian Gulf.
> 1,082 American soldiers have
> already died in Iraq last I checked, and we're only marginally - dubiously -
> closer to peace than we were when the "official" war ended over a year ago.
Marginally? Dubiously? Political transition did occur. Preparations for
January elections are proceeding. The Iraqi armed services have sufficient
strength presently to participate in SASO. The only thing dubious I see here
are characterizations belittling the enormous amount of progress made in such a
strategically vital region at such an historically low cost.
> Does this speak to our being on the right path? Hardly. Cheney himself,
> under the first President Bush, said that we would be stupid to attack Iraq
> for a number of reasons.
He did not say it would be stupid to attack Iraq.
> Every justification that has been offered by this
> administration - retaliation, WMDs, etc - has been shot down.
Really? How so? Before the war the quibbling over stockpiles amounted to a
debate over a few hundred tons of material--about as much as the Duelfer report
indicate Iraq could produce in a matter of days or weeks; a capability the
UNMOVIC inspectors had suspected but could not uncover precisely because they
couldn't control the environment in which Iraqi scientists were interviewed.
The 9/11 commission found Hussein's contacts with Bin Laden sufficiently
compelling to include in their final report, and the Senate Intelligence
Committee concluded that the IC had reasonably assessed Hussein's relationship
with al Qaeda as it pertains to the provision of sancturary and training in the
handling and use of non-conventional weapons.
When you get down to it, every reason for war the Administration laid out was
borne out in the post-war assessment. The question is over a matter of
emphasis, and even then the difference of opinion is, by any objective
standard, small and inconsequential.
> The vast majority of scholars of the Middle East said at the outset of this
> war that we should not do it that it was a doomed venture, that we had no
> idea what we were getting into.
I don't know about that. Was there a poll? And besides, how many Middle East
scholars are also strategic analysts and/or warfighters? Why should I care
what somebody like Juan Cole, a man who's made a career out of arriving at
wrong conclusion about Islamic societies and has no special expertise in
strategic studies, thinks about the Coalition mission in Iraq?
> Yet we went ahead, like the shoot-from-the-hip cowboy does,
You know, the whole cowboy metaphor is getting old, especially since the cowboy
usually gets the job done with Miller time to spare.
> not thinking of consequences or "right", and
> now we are in a huge mess.
What do you mean by "not thinking of the consequences or 'right?' "
> And the death tolls continue to rise.
Poetic, but weak on substance.
Rev Prez
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