A re-worked post...
[This is a re-worked version of something I posted on another blog. References in it to "members of this board" do not refer to participants in *THIS* blog. On that particular board, there are a lot of fairly reasonable people on both sides of the issue, and two rabble rousers, both serious neo-conservatives by ideology. Please don't think I'm saying that the other side doesn't engage in similar stupid arguing, this was targetted at the board in question, but I liked the post enough to post it here. --Liam]
I love the circular logic of certain members of this board. Imagine we're talking about a broken bike lying in the middle of the road after having been ridden over a jump that the bike was clearly insufficient to handle.
Adult: I told you not to ride your bike over that jump.
Child: So what's your plan to fix the situation.
A: Well, first, let's get the bike out of the road.
C: But that doesn't solve the problem, the bike is still broken. Besides, the last two cars that ran over it kind of straightened out the bent tires.
A: You shouldn't have broken it. How do you think we should fix it?
C: I love you adults, you slam us children for not having a plan to fix it, but you don't have one either.
It's not reasonable to take an action someone else said was a bad idea, then have no plan to get out, and then deride the other side for not having a plan to get you out of a situation they said you should never have been in.
Understand, there *IS* no good plan. We went in with invalid reasons, improper planning, and no exit strategy. We have made a mess of things, fomented Civil War (or at least exacerbated it). We have set up a situation from which no one has a viable endgame or exit strategy, but somehow those who put us there think that it is hypocritical of thos who said we should never have been there (for these and other reasons) to now not have an exit strategy.
If you decide to pour glue on your floor without having the supplies necessary to clean it up, you can't be upset because *I* didn't have the foresight to have the supplies to clean it up, when I told you before you started that it wasn't a good idea to pour glue on your floor without the supplies to clean it up.
Liam.
posted by Liam at 5/26/2005 08:34:00 AM
5 Comments:
So do I understand you are saying that the Sadam regime was better than birthing a representative government?
Thursday, May 26, 2005 11:39:00 AM
What I'm saying is...
1) We do not have a very good track record. Remember that we originally helped Saddam come to power. We also originally helped train bin Laden, when he was fighting Russia. So far, that "representative government" doesn't look to be doing any better than the one in Afghanistan, which appears poised to fall into civil war.
2) Whether Saddan needed to be taken down or not should not have been our call to make. It was our call to make if he posed a direct threat to the U.S. or had taken action against us directly. He had not, and so it should have been a consensus effort if we determined his was one of the governments which had to go. (This isn't to say I support the U.S. government reporting to a World Government, I don't. I'll explain more in another comment).
3) But the point of this one was that on the board on which this response was originally posted, there are two people fanning flames, and one of their favorite tactics is to say "How can you hold it against Bush for not having a plan when you don't have one, either?" And so my response is that the person who STARTS a course of action should have a plan to complete it. The person who advises AGAINST a course of action isn't responsible for having a plan to get out of it, because not being able to come up with such a plan may be one of the reasons they were against initiating the action in the first place.
I just find it frustrating. Whether you agree with me or not that we shouldn't be in Iraq (or at least, not under the set of circumstances we went), it's not fair to say that those against the Iraq war are hypocrites because they can't think of a solution to a problem they advised against HAVING.
(By the way, just so everyone knows I'm not anti-war in general, I still support our war in Afghanistan. We went in for the right reasons, we should have been there. I just feel we should have spent more effort there, concentrated on finishing the job (as well as finding ObL) before running off and starting unrelated wars.)
Liam.
Thursday, May 26, 2005 12:02:00 PM
Just to be clear, my feelings on the US vs a World Government are as follows:
I look at the world like a big neighborhood, and the countries like the households in that neighborhood.
I think the U.S. should be relatively autonomous within it's own borders. But the upshot of that is that I believe other countries should be relatively autonomous within theirs, and it feels hypocritical to say any differently.
If the head of one neighborhood household is perceived to be a threat to the world by ONE other household, that doesn't give that other household the right to take matters into their own hands, gangland style. That is how I view Iraq.
Now, if my next door neighbor starts directly attacking me (vandalizing my house or car, attacking myself, my family, my pets etc on my property, throwing his garbage on my lawn, etc), then I'm within my rights to confront the neighbor myself. This is Afghanistan.
That's my view on "World Government". It's not a matter of needing world approval, it's a matter of if we want to consider ourselves autonomous from the opinions of other individual nations, then we should give the same respect to other nations we don't agree with, and it should take an agreement between the great majority of the other nations of the world before we can say there's sufficient cause to violate that autonomy in pursuit of one cause or another.
I'm tired, I hope I've said that clearly.
Liam.
Thursday, May 26, 2005 12:10:00 PM
So you are saying no?
Thursday, May 26, 2005 11:55:00 PM
I don't believe the Saddam regime was a good thing, no. I also don't believe we've yet proven that we've successfully birthed a representative government.
And regardless, I don't believe taking out a government we simply don't like is something a country should do unilaterally.
If there's proof of a definite intent-to-attack or other reason to believe our country is at risk, or if there's an attack on this country to which we choose to respond, those are valid reasons to go to war (in my opinion). Which is why Afghanistan was perfectly valid, there was a proven link between the Taliban and bin Laden, and they were hiding him and refusing to turn him over or even try him themselves for the crimes against the U.S.
But we shouldn't have gone unilaterally into Iraq any more than we should go into Darfur or ... sorry, I just lost the name of the former Soviet Republic that's in the news lately ...
We should go into these places, because someone needs to stand up for the downtrodden. But we should do it as part of a larger coalition, or at least with the agreement and approval of a majority of other countries. Again, the neighborhood analogy. If we do it with the approval of the other houses in the neighborhood, then we know we're doing something right. If we do it by ourselves, it's just us vs. them, and who's to say that one country (or one household) alone has the right to violate the autonomy of another...
Liam.
Friday, May 27, 2005 11:53:00 AM
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