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slims---there's a choice about how to proceed. we could find any number of "arguments" to exclude the other from speaking. you could continue the tack you adopt at the end of the last post. i could go after your academic credentials. but we are on a message board, so what's the point?
i am not inclined to see anything "good" coming from the war in iraq because it never should have happened. all that is possible are less-awful outcomes. the operation was incoherent from the beginning--any space in which the wolfowitz "plan" was confused with a Plan is not a space populated with competent people. and that space was, in the end, a civilian space populated by a republican administration that rationalized what they were doing in abstract pro-military language.
in terms of "good" things that followed:
i see the whole of the conflict as an absurd imperialist fever-dream. the *only* good outcome is that it ends.
within that context, the "good" that comes is basically people who try to survive the psychosis of war survive it and manage, somehow, to get by that psychosis and build something in which civilized human beings can live. so make something that is the antithesis of war, particular war that had, from the outset, no coherent point.
you could say the same kind of things about afghanistan. they'd only require more qualifications.
basically there the united states finds itself party in a civil war and is looking for a face-saving way to declare the "mission" accomplished and get out. so the only "good" outcome there is the construction of a way to save face long enough to get out. because the war made no sense from the beginning. but we've had this discussion and don't agree. which is fine.
i'll be interested to see what discussion follows once the documents are released.
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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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