A Cry for Help: Moral Clarity

March 24, 2004

Moral Clarity

So I'm sucking up to my boss President Bush in my little briefing, telling him how we need not apologize for deposing an evil dictator. Then I tell him how Qaddafi's (also a nasty dictator) decision to give up WMD production is a victory for our foreign policy. This leads me to wonder whether we would have left Saddam, a brutal dictator who slaughtered his own people, and so on, in power had he somehow been able to credibly show that he had disarmed and was not seeking WMDs. If so, how can we use "Saddam's a bad guy" as justification for invading Iraq? If not, then why did we go through all the trouble of saying "he's on his last chance to disarm" charade in the buildup to the war, since it was obvious we were going to piss off the world community anyway? And we wonder why most Arabs hate us. We'll either look the other way for a weaponless repressor or bomb the shit out a neighbor they see as trying to defend itself from an antagonistic superpower.

This made my head hurt, so I just ignored the cognitive dissonance and went on to talk about Israel's giant wall. This seems to me what most non-idealogues in the Bush Administration go through, and I have sympathy for these guys. Or rather, I would, if they weren't so obviously putting us in more danger.

Posted by Bil at March 24, 2004 10:57 AM | TrackBack

Comments

Sickly stuff, huh? History will not view us kindly... However, as a left leaning moderate, I must say that the pendulums swing back each way from time to time, unfortunately too far in each direction in America.

The wacko-right is getting their way in the Middle East now, but I'm sorry to say also that the far left has historically been WAY, WAY, WAY too easy on the Arab nations. Gross abuses (human, political, economic, religious, etc) have been poo poo'ed by liberals for years, dismissed as being, "That's just how they are," or, "It's their culture, and we shouldn't intervene." Well, guess what, they want to intervene with us!

A co-worker here, who is an Egyptian Assyrian Christian (who as a group are harshly persecuted there), believes the average American has no idea how zealous even the "average" Middle Eastern Muslim is there. She says that we are nieve to believe that everyone the world over just wants to live in peace and be happy (this, indeed, she says is really the "American Dream"). Her experience in Egypt growing up, she explained, was "be Muslim, be essentially a slave, or be dead." She is afraid that viewpoint is being implemented now on a global basis.

- Garris

Posted by: Garris at March 24, 2004 03:11 PM : Link this comment

I can't help but continue to be drawn to the fact that one bad guy has oil, and the other bad guy doesn't.

Of course it's not that simple, but it's pretty close.

Posted by: Cotuit at March 25, 2004 10:55 PM : Link this comment