roachboy

it seems to me that the irrational assertion of american sovereignty as over against any and all multinational institutions/agreements was at the heart of the iraq war to begin with--it was not about oil directly--so to reproduce this argument is simply to recapitulate the central element of neocon ideology.

there is nothing more to it.

when it comes to deriving consequences of this ideology, what seems to matter most is a sequence of aesthetic judgements that shape how one prefers to imagine "our boys" and their actions on the ground.

resistances to dissonant information follow from these aesthetic preferences--images of civilian casualties of american bombing raids shown on al-jazeera (for example) become "anti-american" primiarily because they show consequences that those who imagine americans incapable of committing war crimes simply do not want to see.

that this administration has organized a publicity machine to market the colonial war in iraq that reinforces this is an index of how good they are at publicity, nothing more.

that folk who recapitulate this syndrome are incapable of distancing themselves from it, of examining their committments, of recognizing the aesthetic core of their position, is kinda sad to watch through any number of cycles of repetition.

not a bit of it is rooted in anything like a realistic understanding of what is happening on the ground as a result of bushpolicies.
not a bit of it is based on consideration of what constitutes a war crime.
not a bit of it is based on consideration of whether there should or should not be in fact a mechansism in place that would prosecute war crimes independently.
because in this context (iraq), the entire question of war crimes continues, despite all evidence, to be construed as a correlate of the bushwar-on-terror, whatever that is, and so is routed through the delusion that self-preservation is actually at stake in this war.

so anything goes.

which is absurd.

counterfactual question: do you imagine that the american extermination of the native americans could have unfolded as it did had there been transnational legal mechanisms in place that could have triggered prosecutions for crimes against humanity? is a massive, sustained, premeditated crime against humanity ok if you agree with the ideological justifications for it? is all that matters in thinking about crimes against humanity the internal integrity of the ideological justifications that are floated in support of them, that call them something else (manifest destiny is an old fave in this regard)--a renaming that enables those who support violence to not think about the consequences of that violence, to look somewhere else and congratulate themselves for doing so?

if that is the case, how is this a discussion at all?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite