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"its this pansy-ass liberal "But you said.." crap that prompts the political need to "justify" our actions to the public in the first place."
gee, i thought that in order to "export democracy" you would have to have it at home to export....if bushworld requires no public justification for its actions, how exactly is the united states different from a dictatorship?
it seems to me that bushworld's new spin on things--trying to defend some vague sequence of "contacts" between iraq and al qeada---amounts to saying that if i watched a marx brothers film and made some kind of connection to that film, then i am a marx brother.
it is profoundly not ok for an administration to lie to the public about war--and even if "patriots" more than assume, but somehow rather enjoy the fact of propaganda once a war is on, there is still a huge problem with lying about the premises for going to war. if you look at the evidence, the fact that bush at best distorted the situation is obvious. but it has always been obvious in this case. what is surprising to me, still, is that it has taken this long for the problems to emerge inside the political bubble that is the american press.
as for the matter of "terrorism" nothing coherent can be said about the problem without actually looking at the conditions that spawn it, the role that various large-scale factors play in spawning it (globalizing capitalism, american foreign policy, local/domestic matters) and working to change those factors. the idea that "terrorism" can be understood at all in terms of the politics-as-western-movie idiocy that the bush administration has floated since 911 is ridiculous. the logic of crusade is the only one that follows form the non-analysis bush and his cohort have provided. you might also think about the extent to which the term terrorism prevents anything like a coherent analysis and/or response. but bush does not seem interested in coherence, really--he is interested in "god's will".....apparently, god did not like saddam hussein any more. apparently god thinks that husseins dictatorship was qualitiatively worse than the other dictatorships the americans either put into power or supported over the past 60 years from somoza to pinochet and so on. apparently god forgot that the americans supported and armed iraq under reagan just as they supported and armed the taliban, just as they trained and armed death squads all across central america. given the history of american foreign policy since world war 2, the argument that there is any plausible humanitarian motive for this war is not even a joke.....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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