In perhaps his best column (that I've ever read), James Lileks:
On one level, you can’t be in favor of the Iraqi vote and opposed to the war. On another level, you can, but it’s a happy chocolate land where the fountains spout fudge and the bunnies are edible and Saddam relinquishes power, ashamed, because Kofi Annan drafted a stern letter promising Serious Consequences, and some Iraqi Gandhi not only showed he was morally superior to the Tikriti gang, but had a titanium-hulled body that made him impervious to torture shredders. And then the Baathists devolved and the Rotarians took over.
Perhaps in 15 years Iraq would be free under that scenario; who cares? I don’t live there. Of course, perhaps in 15 years it will be Rabid Foamy Mullah Central. We’ll see. I just like the idea of actual voting for actual constitutions in the Land of the Strong Man, and seeing all the fictions of the post WW2 Arab landscape upended and dynamited. But that’s me. What struck me was that these people standing by the shopping mall were protesting the means by which the right to vote had been secured. It seems like protesting Meals-on-Wheels because the truck broke the speed limit and had expired tags.
Then again, the Meals-on-Wheels truck didn’t kill anyone en route, right? One of the signs, of course, said “Who Would Jesus Bomb.” Never heard that before. Hmm. Well. I think the proper question is “On Whom Would Jesus Levy Porous Sanctions Undermined by Corrupt International Officials Who turned Oil-For-Food Into a Massive Payola Operation for the International Nomenklatura,” but that wouldn’t fit on a sign.
The answer would, though. Jesus, you may recall, got the moneylenders out of the temple. How? With sternly worded pamphlets, I think. Also a march, which oddly enough included people who wanted the Jews out of Palestine. Strange bedfellows and all that.
So why do they get to play the Jesus card? Everyone got highly spooked over that bogus and rebogused story about how God came down in a flaming pillar and told Bush to invade Iraq. It makes an annual appearance, because it confirms what so many wish to believe: Bushitler is a freaky nutwad who thinks he gets specific operational instructions from on high everytime his knees hit the carpet. Sometimes the message comes in a dream, sometimes it’s a bird that looks at him with a cocked head, sometimes it’s the change in the color of his urine. You have to be careful to note the augurs.
Hat tip to Inoperable Terran, who is the best anti-idiotarian aggregator in the blogosphere.
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
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9 comments:
I take it this guy does not like Bush, then??
Hard to say. The Good Samartian was just a narrative figure of course, so it's hard to say what a fictional character would do.
But Danny, you do ask a tough question that Christians have been grappling with for years. Is violence ever acceptable? Should we kill to protect others? Ourselves? Our property?
Michael: I don't know about Ian of Inoperable Terran. He doesn't write much himself -- just links with short annotations. But if you're asking about Lileks, if I remember correctly, he is a center-Left hawk.
I'm not at all sure about that. Maybe coming through his archive would be revealing.
Lileks is a centrist hawk. Dunno about the left or right aspect of it. Chances are he has a libertarian streak which tends to rob left-right of meaning.
Ends justify means. Always. Or else you live in Happy Chocolate Land.
Sure. I'll buy it.
Facts are stubborn things, Jockey Street. Without the allied invasion of Iraq, there would not have been a constitutional vote.
Facts are stubborn things, indeed, but...
A. That's not necessarily a "fact." Had we continued to do things the way we'd been doing it, there would quite likely not have been a vote on the constitution the other day, true. But it's not either/or... either business as usual, or invade. Even if you're right on that note, "fact" is a stretch.
B. "Facts" don't determine moral value. The "fact" that there would have been no constitutional vote (which I agree is a good thing) does not imply absolutely that therefore the invasion was "good." Other "facts" have to be taken into account-- thousands upon thousands of dead people, issues of stability, just for starters-- and weighed. Even adding up all the pros and all the cons, there's no equation, no mathematical trick, based purely on "facts," that says "this was good" or "this was bad."
So facts can be stubborn, but they're not the final authority.
What this guy is saying is, essentially, that the ends justify the means. And that arguing against that is illogical. If you like the ends, then you have to accept the means. If a drunk driver runs over a serial killer on the way to kill a family, then you have to say that it was "good" that the driver was drunk. You can't, according to Lileks, say that you're happy that someone stopped the serial killer AND that you think driving drunk is wrong. That would just be illogical and you would belong in Happy Chocolate Land.
The invasion of Iraq may or may not have been justified... but Lileks equation here is a silly little pseudo-logical word game.
And he's pretty dismissive of Christian progressives... offensively so (though perhaps no more so than I sometimes am of Christian conservatives).
I think that what Lileks is saying is that the benefits that Iraqis are enjoying today would not be occurring without the coalition invasion. Iraqis would remain enslaved by a tyrant -- until the dumped their bodies into mass graves.
Ends don't always justify the means. I agree. If we had liberated Iraq my nuking most of the country, then without a doubt, it would not. But given how nicely things have turned out since April 03, I'd say that these ends have justified these means.
Niceness is relative. I think many under-estimate how bad things were under Saddam and his sons. We could and did ignore their barbarity for years. Their victims didn't have that option.
If a woman screams and no American can hear it, does she still suffer? I think we would all agree she does. We might disagree on what to do about it. Sometimes "giving the sanctions time to work" or sending a strongly-worded letter of protest just isn't enough.
As Sanctimonious Hypocrite said, niceness is relative. People aren't being bulldozed into mass graves anymore and are voting in a representative government for the first time in their lives. Considering other lengthly reconstruction times (e.g. Germany post WWII), I'd say that it's gone well.
Would I support a French invasion f the US? Well, if the US became a brutal totalitarian thugocracy mass-mudering its own citizens, then yes. Without a doubt, I would support armed liberation by a foriegn power intent on restoring democracy and human rights.
If 'forcing our way of life' on people means protecting them from murderous thugs, then call me an ethnocentric bigot, because I'm all for it.
Human rights are not just a Western 'way of life'. They are a moral absolute that everyone should be able to enjoy.
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