So a war-funding bill goes before President Bush today. The bill contains a withdrawal timetable for Iraq. The Whitehouse has already told us that Bush will veto the bill and work with Congress to craft a bill everyone can get behind.
This is my second political entry in a row. And right about now there’s a handful of people thinking I should stick to what I know: fiction. And right about now there’s a handful of people thinking that I don’t know jack shit about fiction anyway and that I should just get off my high horse and shut the fuck up.
Those two handfuls of people may be right. I have no intention of disputing that I may be full of shit. I also have no intention of shutting up.
The dilemma, boiled down to the simplest terms (yes, I have criticized simplification of issues in the past, but what I am trying to do here is provide a good jumping-off point for debate), is this: Conservatives (not all of them Republican) claim to believe that leaving Iraq before the war is won will result in chaos in Iraq and may eventually cause security problems for America. Liberals (not all of them Democrats) claim to believe the war was a mistake in the first place and that the presence of American troops is doing more harm than good.
Both ways of thinking are probably flawed but the flaws are not equal.
A conservative will say that the war must be won for the sake of American security. He or she might also say that America started the war in Iraq and it is America’s duty to ensure that the mess is cleaned up before they leave.
Here is the problem: for a war (or anything else) to be won, an objective must be accomplished. There has to be a goal. What is the goal in Iraq? To find weapons of mass destruction?
We know now that there never were any weapons of mass destruction. We know that the Bush administration used unsound intelligence about Iraqi nuclear and biological weapons to bolster support for the war. We must also be cognizant of the possibility that the Bush administration presented this intelligence, not only to the American people but to the UN, knowing full-well that it was incorrect. If this is in fact true, then the Bush administration’s behaviour was criminal and it’s time to start putting together a case for impeachment.
But that is not the point. The point is to find out what, if any, the U.S. military’s objective is in Iraq. Is the objective to deliver freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people?
Perhaps. It certainly sounds like the most benevolent cause for a government trying to rationalize an unjust war. Of course, there is a problem with this argument as well. The problem is that, because of its nature, democracy can’t be given by an occupation army. Freedom is not something that can be enforced from the outside. It requires vigilance from within. In short, it is not up to America to impose democracy on Iraq (or anywhere else). It is the duty of the people of Iraq to fight for their own freedoms if they want them. No one can fix Iraq but Iraq.
So perhaps (and this worries me most) Bush and company want to quell the insurgency in Iraq. They want to hunt down every last terrorist that opposes U.S. political and economic interests and make sure that they are no longer an issue.
Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 was founded on one thing and one thing only. He said to the American people, “I am the only one who can protect you from this nebulous threat called terror.” We all want to be protected from terrorism. What we have to realise, and what we have to tell our leaders, is that the threat is too nebulous to be fought this way. Terrorism is opposition and that opposition will sometimes escalate and it will, from time to time, take extremist forms. You can never end terrorism completely and you can’t fight it physically on the ground. You can take steps to protect yourself from it. You can be open to dialogue and consider issues on a global scale. You can make your country safer by ensuring that you never, ever let blind self-interest guide you. Because if your country plunders the third world, uses terrorist factions to accomplish its own military ends and behaves arrogantly applying strong arm tactics to anyone who opposes it; someone will want to see it destroyed. As much as you hate living in fear, there are people in this world who have spent their entire lives the way you spent one day on September 11th, 2001. That is to say that they spend every day in unrelenting fear for their lives.
Yes, I believe that a military withdrawal from Iraq is in everybody’s best interests. I also believe the U.S. has an obligation to provide funding and intellectual assistance as Iraq rebuilds itself. What we should see is a shift from military force to financial and social aid.
Of course, this is all assuming that at least one of the goals listed above reflect America’s interest in Iraq. We must also consider the possibility that what they really want is oil. Or even more likely: a safe staging-ground in the Middle East from which to launch a military campaign into someplace like Iran. Perhaps then on to Pakistan, Russia and parts beyond.
Of course, the Canadian military is already helping to build just that in Afghanistan.
A liberal, on the other hand, will tell you that they want to end the war in Iraq because it is criminal, wasteful and wrong. And for the most part, the liberal would be right. We have to see that there are other problems, issues at play in America’s foreign policy that reflect much larger concerns. Concerns which, when addressed, may ease some of the tension in the world.
These problems are not all America’s doing. It is, however, largely America’s obligation. They are rich, they are powerful and they have the ability to get the ball rolling. If they are willing to police the world through military force, they must also be willing to assist the world through diplomatic means. They had so much support for it, too, after 9-11. They squandered it on the wrong initiative.
But again, I’ve come away from my point. My point is that though I feel the liberal stance on the war in Iraq is largely the right one, I am wary of the average American Democrat’s motives regarding their opposition.
It is my suspicion that what folks like Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton are doing is adopting the anti-war stance for very, very cynical reasons. They know that a majority of Americans favour a timetable for getting out of Iraq. They see this as a method of capturing votes. Whether or not they actually feel that the war is wrong remains to be seen. But one has to admit that the constant jockeying for position seen from most of the presidential candidates’ camps is nauseating at best (Obama) and outright sickening at worst (Clinton).
Then there’s Al Gore. I have to admit that while I am fully behind his stance on the issue of Anthropogenic Climate Change I wonder about his motives as well. There has been some speculation that there will be a presidential bid from him in the future. Perhaps even as early as 2008. It seems as though his film, while still an important bit of documentary, may have been a two-hour campaign commercial and to think that it was much more is probably a bit foolish.
Remember that this man and his wife are responsible for those stickers on your favourite CDs: “Parental Advisory, Explicit Lyrics”. They lead the inquisition against artists in the nineties to convince parents that all their children’s problems are the result of music. I don’t know about you—but I wouldn’t vote for that, even if he promised to bring in a wizard to reverse global warming (which is basically irreversible, by the way—at this point we can only hope to keep it from getting worse).
On the right you have politicians with outdated ideas about the ways security can be achieved and with some very vague economic reasons for believing them. On the left you have politicians cynically latching on to ideas that they may or may not truly support in a bid to gain power.
Which has only served to reinforce my long-held opinion that no one who genuinely wants to lead is fit to lead.
The title of this journal, The Thinking Person’s Guide to Suicide, has a long and storied history. It was originally to be used as the title of a webcomic to be written by myself and drawn by a fine individual we shall call Jeaux Meaux.
The idea behind the phrase, for me, has always been an expression of the sort of melancholy that occasionally fills every thinking person when they look at the state of the world. Or even, for the smaller thinkers, when they examine their own lives and see how it has been affected by the world at large—whether they realise that’s what they’re seeing or not. There can be no question that the culture we are living in is committing suicide. And from time to time there are those of us who think, when observing the trajectory of mankind, that suicide is the best possible option. There are those of us who think it not only on a cultural level—but on a personal one.
There are often disagreements about the cure for what ails us. There are disagreements over whether or not there is a cure. But the illness we see is rarely disputed.
We have outstripped the planet’s capacity to support us. We’ve damaged the ecosystem that sustains us. We’ve alienated ourselves and each other. We’ve latched on to belief systems that prevent us from seeing the larger picture. We find it so easy to discover causes worth killing for, but we cannot bring ourselves to consider anything worth sacrificing for.
So while we kill for anything, we’ll wind up dying for nothing.
We’ll ostracize our gay friends for our faith. But we won’t give up our SUVs for our world. We’ll condemn our sisters and mothers and daughters for having abortions. But we won’t admit that we’ve already breached the planet’s carrying capacity. We’ll go to war with the entire Middle East to maintain our dominance, to continue living in the lifestyle to which we are accustomed. But we won’t use our strength and our opulence to lend a helping hand in the third world. We’ll drill as deep into the earth as we can to pump more oil out of it. But we won’t conserve it for our children, our nieces and nephews, for our grandchildren—if the earth lasts that long. We’ll demand everything of the government. But we won’t stop consuming.
The war in Iraq is only one issue facing us today. But it is an issue indicative of just about all of the others. It may be wrong to say humankind has reached a turning point—but I don’t think so.
The choices we make in the years to come will be of paramount importance. We can no longer make them with closed eyes. We have to decide what we must preserve and what we can do away with because what has become abundantly clear is that we cannot have it all. It was childish to believe we could monopolize the planet’s resources in the first place. It was childish to assume we could always be right. We now have the responsibility to act like adults.
Rule number two in The Thinking Person’s Guide to Suicide is this:
My advocacy of your right to kill yourself notwithstanding: please, please, please explore other options before succumbing to unnecessary acts of desperation. If there is another way it’s probably a better way.
This is my second political entry in a row. And right about now there’s a handful of people thinking I should stick to what I know: fiction. And right about now there’s a handful of people thinking that I don’t know jack shit about fiction anyway and that I should just get off my high horse and shut the fuck up.
Those two handfuls of people may be right. I have no intention of disputing that I may be full of shit. I also have no intention of shutting up.
The dilemma, boiled down to the simplest terms (yes, I have criticized simplification of issues in the past, but what I am trying to do here is provide a good jumping-off point for debate), is this: Conservatives (not all of them Republican) claim to believe that leaving Iraq before the war is won will result in chaos in Iraq and may eventually cause security problems for America. Liberals (not all of them Democrats) claim to believe the war was a mistake in the first place and that the presence of American troops is doing more harm than good.
Both ways of thinking are probably flawed but the flaws are not equal.
A conservative will say that the war must be won for the sake of American security. He or she might also say that America started the war in Iraq and it is America’s duty to ensure that the mess is cleaned up before they leave.
Here is the problem: for a war (or anything else) to be won, an objective must be accomplished. There has to be a goal. What is the goal in Iraq? To find weapons of mass destruction?
We know now that there never were any weapons of mass destruction. We know that the Bush administration used unsound intelligence about Iraqi nuclear and biological weapons to bolster support for the war. We must also be cognizant of the possibility that the Bush administration presented this intelligence, not only to the American people but to the UN, knowing full-well that it was incorrect. If this is in fact true, then the Bush administration’s behaviour was criminal and it’s time to start putting together a case for impeachment.
But that is not the point. The point is to find out what, if any, the U.S. military’s objective is in Iraq. Is the objective to deliver freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people?
Perhaps. It certainly sounds like the most benevolent cause for a government trying to rationalize an unjust war. Of course, there is a problem with this argument as well. The problem is that, because of its nature, democracy can’t be given by an occupation army. Freedom is not something that can be enforced from the outside. It requires vigilance from within. In short, it is not up to America to impose democracy on Iraq (or anywhere else). It is the duty of the people of Iraq to fight for their own freedoms if they want them. No one can fix Iraq but Iraq.
So perhaps (and this worries me most) Bush and company want to quell the insurgency in Iraq. They want to hunt down every last terrorist that opposes U.S. political and economic interests and make sure that they are no longer an issue.
Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 was founded on one thing and one thing only. He said to the American people, “I am the only one who can protect you from this nebulous threat called terror.” We all want to be protected from terrorism. What we have to realise, and what we have to tell our leaders, is that the threat is too nebulous to be fought this way. Terrorism is opposition and that opposition will sometimes escalate and it will, from time to time, take extremist forms. You can never end terrorism completely and you can’t fight it physically on the ground. You can take steps to protect yourself from it. You can be open to dialogue and consider issues on a global scale. You can make your country safer by ensuring that you never, ever let blind self-interest guide you. Because if your country plunders the third world, uses terrorist factions to accomplish its own military ends and behaves arrogantly applying strong arm tactics to anyone who opposes it; someone will want to see it destroyed. As much as you hate living in fear, there are people in this world who have spent their entire lives the way you spent one day on September 11th, 2001. That is to say that they spend every day in unrelenting fear for their lives.
Yes, I believe that a military withdrawal from Iraq is in everybody’s best interests. I also believe the U.S. has an obligation to provide funding and intellectual assistance as Iraq rebuilds itself. What we should see is a shift from military force to financial and social aid.
Of course, this is all assuming that at least one of the goals listed above reflect America’s interest in Iraq. We must also consider the possibility that what they really want is oil. Or even more likely: a safe staging-ground in the Middle East from which to launch a military campaign into someplace like Iran. Perhaps then on to Pakistan, Russia and parts beyond.
Of course, the Canadian military is already helping to build just that in Afghanistan.
A liberal, on the other hand, will tell you that they want to end the war in Iraq because it is criminal, wasteful and wrong. And for the most part, the liberal would be right. We have to see that there are other problems, issues at play in America’s foreign policy that reflect much larger concerns. Concerns which, when addressed, may ease some of the tension in the world.
These problems are not all America’s doing. It is, however, largely America’s obligation. They are rich, they are powerful and they have the ability to get the ball rolling. If they are willing to police the world through military force, they must also be willing to assist the world through diplomatic means. They had so much support for it, too, after 9-11. They squandered it on the wrong initiative.
But again, I’ve come away from my point. My point is that though I feel the liberal stance on the war in Iraq is largely the right one, I am wary of the average American Democrat’s motives regarding their opposition.
It is my suspicion that what folks like Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton are doing is adopting the anti-war stance for very, very cynical reasons. They know that a majority of Americans favour a timetable for getting out of Iraq. They see this as a method of capturing votes. Whether or not they actually feel that the war is wrong remains to be seen. But one has to admit that the constant jockeying for position seen from most of the presidential candidates’ camps is nauseating at best (Obama) and outright sickening at worst (Clinton).
Then there’s Al Gore. I have to admit that while I am fully behind his stance on the issue of Anthropogenic Climate Change I wonder about his motives as well. There has been some speculation that there will be a presidential bid from him in the future. Perhaps even as early as 2008. It seems as though his film, while still an important bit of documentary, may have been a two-hour campaign commercial and to think that it was much more is probably a bit foolish.
Remember that this man and his wife are responsible for those stickers on your favourite CDs: “Parental Advisory, Explicit Lyrics”. They lead the inquisition against artists in the nineties to convince parents that all their children’s problems are the result of music. I don’t know about you—but I wouldn’t vote for that, even if he promised to bring in a wizard to reverse global warming (which is basically irreversible, by the way—at this point we can only hope to keep it from getting worse).
On the right you have politicians with outdated ideas about the ways security can be achieved and with some very vague economic reasons for believing them. On the left you have politicians cynically latching on to ideas that they may or may not truly support in a bid to gain power.
Which has only served to reinforce my long-held opinion that no one who genuinely wants to lead is fit to lead.
The title of this journal, The Thinking Person’s Guide to Suicide, has a long and storied history. It was originally to be used as the title of a webcomic to be written by myself and drawn by a fine individual we shall call Jeaux Meaux.
The idea behind the phrase, for me, has always been an expression of the sort of melancholy that occasionally fills every thinking person when they look at the state of the world. Or even, for the smaller thinkers, when they examine their own lives and see how it has been affected by the world at large—whether they realise that’s what they’re seeing or not. There can be no question that the culture we are living in is committing suicide. And from time to time there are those of us who think, when observing the trajectory of mankind, that suicide is the best possible option. There are those of us who think it not only on a cultural level—but on a personal one.
There are often disagreements about the cure for what ails us. There are disagreements over whether or not there is a cure. But the illness we see is rarely disputed.
We have outstripped the planet’s capacity to support us. We’ve damaged the ecosystem that sustains us. We’ve alienated ourselves and each other. We’ve latched on to belief systems that prevent us from seeing the larger picture. We find it so easy to discover causes worth killing for, but we cannot bring ourselves to consider anything worth sacrificing for.
So while we kill for anything, we’ll wind up dying for nothing.
We’ll ostracize our gay friends for our faith. But we won’t give up our SUVs for our world. We’ll condemn our sisters and mothers and daughters for having abortions. But we won’t admit that we’ve already breached the planet’s carrying capacity. We’ll go to war with the entire Middle East to maintain our dominance, to continue living in the lifestyle to which we are accustomed. But we won’t use our strength and our opulence to lend a helping hand in the third world. We’ll drill as deep into the earth as we can to pump more oil out of it. But we won’t conserve it for our children, our nieces and nephews, for our grandchildren—if the earth lasts that long. We’ll demand everything of the government. But we won’t stop consuming.
The war in Iraq is only one issue facing us today. But it is an issue indicative of just about all of the others. It may be wrong to say humankind has reached a turning point—but I don’t think so.
The choices we make in the years to come will be of paramount importance. We can no longer make them with closed eyes. We have to decide what we must preserve and what we can do away with because what has become abundantly clear is that we cannot have it all. It was childish to believe we could monopolize the planet’s resources in the first place. It was childish to assume we could always be right. We now have the responsibility to act like adults.
Rule number two in The Thinking Person’s Guide to Suicide is this:
My advocacy of your right to kill yourself notwithstanding: please, please, please explore other options before succumbing to unnecessary acts of desperation. If there is another way it’s probably a better way.
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