|
well, two different things.
on your last point, i should have maybe been clearer. i dont expect anything in the wikileaks material to bear on questions of the manufactured case for war. those problems are evident---just how evident was clarified by chilcot. but there's more to the manufactured case problem. i take it as a political matter and a quite high order political matter. one of those instances that folk may well look back on later and point to as a moment where something basic slipped away from the american empire.
a moral thing i'd say, if i thought that word signified anything in politics.
on the other matter, the "war is chaos" thing is a straw man.
war is legally sanctioned barbarism.
i'm not a pacifist, but i think that the decision to go to war should be a weighty one and not something taken in the cavalier way that comes from blinkered imperial arrogance, the kind of arrogance that comes from seeing war as some manly activity involving Heroes in Uniform--the reverse abstraction from the straw man of rainbows and unicorns, every bit as uninformed and ridiculous, but the sort of uninformed that is expedient for the military as an institution because it's that kind of illusion that keeps the bloated levels of funding coming.
but really, it's barbarism. i think it's better that people know more than less.
and i think that iraq was a tremendous, costly, brutal fuck-up. and this without for a minute falling into the binary thinking that conservatives like to impute to others, the binarism that would result in a claim that to oppose bushwar was to think saddan hussein a swell guy.
but it's also possible to call to mind despots around the southern hemisphere that the united states has found useful in the past, useful enough to overlook brutalization of people on a far more vast scale than saddam hussein.
and i think the military should be impeded in the unfolding of its organized barbarism as a political matter. this is simply the reverse way of stating the above--because the reality of war has no relation to any of the nice, empty flag waving words that it's political champions impute to it, because it pulverizes the ideals that it's waged in the name of, because it's psychotic and brutal and stupid it shouldn't be unleashed on the basis of something as shabby and ridiculous as the imperialist pipe dreams of the assholes in the project for a new american century.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|