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An immoral protest.
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
That's the link to the short editorial that I agree with. I'd love to debate you peeps if anyone wants to read it.
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/o...nists/54711.htm
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http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/o...nists/54711.htm
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A different one might. Did you mean this?
How about this for a sense of some of the US feeling...
You know, I can't say that I've ever really looked at that rag before. It's not owned by Murdoch, is it?
I probably should know who owns what but I don't. The same guy that owns Fox owns the Post. The Post is conservative. The NY Times liberal. 75% of New Yorkers are democrats...liberals.
By MICHAEL KELLY
February 19, 2003 -- LAST weekend, across Europe and America, somewhere between 1 million and 2 million people marched against a war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. All protests against war are ultimately ethical in nature, and Saturday's placard-wavers did not break with tradition: "Give Peace a Chance," "Make Tea, Not War," "Bush and Blair - The Real War Criminals." These are statements of sentiment, not power politics, and the sentiment is, or is meant to be, a moral one.
Of course, not all the marchers can be counted as 99.9 percent pure moralists. Some - perhaps many - marched out of simple reactionary hatred: for the United States, for its power, for its paramount position in a hated world order. London's paleosocialist Mayor "Red Ken" Livingstone, a featured speaker at that city's massive demo, comes to mind. His enlightened argument against war consisted chiefly of calling George W. Bush "a lackey of the oil industry," "a coward" and "this creature."
But doubtless, hundreds of thousands of marchers - and many more millions who did not march - believe quite sincerely that theirs is a profoundly moral cause, and this is really all that motivates them. They believe, as French President Jacques Chirac recently pontificated, "war is always the worst answer."
The people who believe what Chirac at least professes to believe are, at least as concerns Iraq, as wrong as it is possible to be. Theirs is not the position of profound morality, but one that stands in profound opposition to morality.
The situation with Iraq may be considered in three primary contexts, and in each, the true moral case is for war.
Context No. 1: The people of Iraq. There are 24 million of them, and they have been living (those that have not been slaughtered or forced into exile) for decades under one of the cruelest and bloodiest tyrannies on earth. It must be assumed that, being human, they would prefer to be rescued from a hell where more than a million lives have been so far sacrificed to the dreams of a megalomaniac, where rape is a sanctioned instrument of state policy, and where the removal of the tongue is the prescribed punishment for uttering an offense against the Great Leader.
These people could be liberated from this horror - relatively easily and very quickly. There is every reason to think that an American invasion will swiftly vanquish the few elite units that can be counted on to defend the detested Saddam; and that the victory will come at the cost of few - likely hundreds, not thousands or tens of thousands - Iraqi and American lives.
There is risk here; and if things go terribly wrong, it is a risk that could result in terrible suffering. But that is an equation that is present in any just war, and in this case any rational expectation has to consider the probable cost to humanity low and the probable benefit tremendous. To choose perpetuation of tyranny over rescue from tyranny, where rescue may be achieved, is immoral.
Context No. 2: The security of America, and indeed of the world: Here too morality is on the side of war. The great lesson of 9/11 is not that terrorism must be stopped - an impossible dream - but that state-sanctioned terrorism must be stopped.
The support of a state - even a weak and poor state - offers the otherwise deeply vulnerable enemies of the established order the protection they need in their attempts to destroy that order - through the terrorists' only weapon, murder. To tolerate the perpetuation of state-sanctioned terror, such as Saddam's regime exemplifies, is to invite the next 9/11, and the next, and the next. Again, immoral.
Context No. 3: The idea of order itself. The United Nations is a mightily flawed construct, but it exists; and it exists on the side (more or less) of law and humanity. Directly and unavoidably arising from the crisis with Iraq, the U.N. today stands on the edge of the precipice of permanent irrelevancy. If Iraq should be allowed to defy the law, the U.N. will never recover, and the oppressed and weak of the world will lose even the limited protection of the myth of collective security. Immoral.
To march against the war is not to give peace a chance. It is to give tyranny a chance. It is to give the Iraqi nuke a chance. It is to give the next terrorist mass murder a chance. It is to march for the furtherance of evil instead of the vanquishing of evil.
This cannot be the moral position.
I was thinking how familiar the verbal diarrhoea of the NY Post is and then it struck me: it is part of News International.
Just for your info pnj, every last one of the 37 News International newspapers and tabloids found around the world are rabidly pro-war. Of course this is completely unrelated to the fact that proprietor Rupert Murdoch is also rabidly pro-war. Not that he'd ever interfere with the editorial policy of his newspaper empire.
But here's a thought that I almost put into a thread except it's too American oriented for a UK site. Fox News, just really came into its own after 911. And I wonder how much it is impacting on America's public opinion? Also, did you know Fox was kicked out of Iraq recently by Saddam? CNN can still broadcast. Of course CNN was almost kicked out of Israel when Ted Turner, former CEO and founder, said Israelis and Palestinians are terrorizing each other.
You are joking right!!!!!:eek:
The NY Post is a rag mag frankly and wouldnt give it the time of day as you seem continually ready to do.
What these articles intend to do is to spotlight attrocities on the particular subject of political and military focus to the exclusion of all other similar or worse subjects which continue to enjoy full support of these same "oh so deeply concerned" administrations.
Not that anything I or anyone else tries to explain to you will ever sink in. I just hope that you one day have occassion to spend time outside the US and see more clearly how much spin you once swallowed so readily.
Damn. Agreeing again...
And I'm a native NYer. Must piss off that 75%....
Also a native NYer. Also refuse to read a newspaper written for four year olds by four year olds.
BTW, that is not a NY Post article. Might be printed there, but Michael Kelly is a writer for the Washington Post, a real newspaper.
But I do love to argue. :mad:
Meantime, I'll throw out a great approach the peace movement didn't use.
"Americans talk about losing 3,000 lives on 911. We're trying to protect 250,000 lives of US soldiers. Soldiers who don't have to go into a war where they are the experiment and war - today - is unnecessary. Let's work together to contain Saddam and save 250,000 American lives."
Am I good or what?
I got stuck debating the anti-war side in school.
But beyond that, I'm not afraid of hearing a liberal view and considering it. Why are people afraid of hearing mine? Could it be that the peace movement people were so sure that they had the high moral ground until someone points out how Saddam called the protests an Iraqi Victory? Or how France has the oil deals not the US as the protesters say.
I think most people on here can accept when someone else is right, we can all learn........
http://au.news.yahoo.com/030220/2/qh5v.html
UN inspectors in Iraq say they have received less cooperation from Iraqi officials since last week-end's anti-war rallies.