Re: OT:Why Graham Thinks US is Hated


"ScottW" <ScottW48@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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"ScottW" <ScottW48@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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[snip]>
BTW, I've done a bit of reading and..always need to do more...
but as I go through history with the vision of hinsight and look
at the options availabe, I'm often hard pressed to find
an option that will yield obviously better results, even in hindsight.

I had a discussion in this forum with Paul Packer, in which I think we
both concluded that while the invasion itself was justified by the threat
Saddam posed on a geopolitical scale, everything that followed was badly
bungled. It appears that the plan for the "new Iraq" was composed by a
Republican brain trust that simply had unrealistic expectations for the
evolution of a society hundreds of years behind the West. The Saudis gave
some advice, that was ironically the same given by Russia regarding
Afghanistan: buy the place. Buy your enemies; make them "friends"
according to their own standards.

and yet that seems shortsighted as well if the real goal is truly
representative democracy. Sure...we could have bought
Saddam's overthrow...but would his successors have
been an improvement.

Scott, you have a nice desire: representative democracy. If the
psychological makeup of the Iraqi people could support that, it would be a
fine goal. Suppose you were asked to play a board game that looked a little
like chess. You would find out how the pieces move: the knight 2 squares and
then 1, the bishop on diagonals, etc. You wouldn't try to play the game
unless you knew how each piece moved, would you?

Iraq is a country where the Shia march to shrines while flagellating
themselves until they bleed. Frequently, when they reach the destination of
their pilgrimages, they are massacred. Here, leaders would say, "Maybe it's
not such a good idea to march today. Let's wait until it's safer." This
doesn't occur to the Shia. They do their death marches 30 or so times a
year, the Sunnis massacre them, and then they repeat the process. Then the
next day they go nuke some Sunnis, whose insurgents think this is really
great, because it gives them the reason to do the same. Think of how many
lives would be saved if the pilgrimages were suspended. It never occurs to
the Iraqis. They are different. They never had a Renaissance. They never had
technology. They never even had the 20th century, except what their oil
money would buy.

They are different.

This is a country where 10000 people a month, give or take, are dying
without a clear understanding, to us, as we think about it. These are
different people, very different from the ones we know. And that's because
people are programmed from infancy to think in a certain way. The men who
fought in the American Civil War marched to certain death at Pickett's
Charge, and on many other occasions. Why? Because they didn't think like us.
They were programmed differently.

Perhaps it's morally OK to play chess with human beings if you have
sufficient moral justification. But you are assuming that if you give these
people the right chessboard, ie., the right structure, they will do what we
think is the right thing. But it's Klingon Chess. You can't induce people to
do the right thing if they have no concept of what the right thing is. The
pieces won't move the way you like.

You and Graham are at opposite poles, but you have one similarity. Your
devotion to your ideology gets in the way of figuring these things out. As
for myself, I am proud of only one thing: I was flexible enough to change my
mind. I am Jewish, and I would have loved to have Iraq recreated as a
nonhostile neighbor. I would love to have the things you want, to happen.
But as 10,000 Iraqis are dying each month, you are liable to fall victim to
that terrible immorality of Karl Marx: "The end justifies the means."

These people are killing each other at such a fantastic rate, that IMHO, the
only reasonable solution is to partition Iraq, to separate the killers. Over
a long time, some accomodation may emerge, or three separate nations. We are
not immune to responsibility for the deaths of Iraqis in their civil war,
nor are we totally responsible. But this is a river of blood, and it is
staining us just as Vietnam did.

And I forbid Graham to use this post for his own purposes. Graham is an
apologist for Islamic barbarism. Scott, we better not be apologists for
misguided good intentions. The road to Hell is paved with them.




.

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