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Welcome to the musings and notes of a Cadillac, Michigan based writer named Micah Holmquist, who is bothered by his own sarcasm. Please send him email at micahth@chartermi.net. Holmquist's full archives are listed here.
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Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution) Aljazeera.Net English Blogs that for one reason or another Holmquist would like to read on at least something of a regular basis (always in development) Thivai Abhor |
Thursday, January 23, 2003
"What would be enough?" miniluv has recently asked antiwar bloggers to explain, "What would be enough?" for them to justify war with Iraq. (I assume by this he means what I would consider the escalation of the war with Iraq.) I figure I might as well take a shot at the answer. I would support U.S. military action against Iraq for the sole purpose of preventing Iraq from attacking the U.S. or some other country in a manner that is designed to kill civilians. And after such action has been completed, I would not favor a broader war with Iraq. I would not favor retaliation to a an attack by Iraq on the U.S., U.S. interests or U.S. allies because quite frankly I feel that what the U.S. has been doing since 1990 is waging war on Iraq and that such actions just provoke Iraq to, rightly or wrongly, want to strike back. The U.S. appears to me to be a serious threat to Iraq while Iraq doesn't look like much of a threat to the U.S. I don't believe the U.S. should be attempting to control countries in the Middle East, or anywhere else, because it can and so I think the U.S. should be getting out of the area as soon as possible and let Iraq have all the weapons of mass destruction it wants unless the U.S. decides, or is forced, to get rid of its weapons of mass destruction. I disagree with people like Eric Tamm who believe "Evidence of currently ongoing and widespread human rights violations that are grievous enough so that we can be confident that the human cost suffered by the Iraqi civilian population (as well as the poor bastards involuntarily conscripted into Saddam's army) as a result of a war would be LESS than the human rights violations that we would be stopping" is enough of a reason to go to war. But I do respect them so long as they: -clearly state what constitutes crossing the quantitative and/or qualitative line of abusing human rights to the point that other countries have the right to overthrow that country’s government. -have drawn up a list of all countries that have crossed that line and favor U.S. military action against all such countries so long as war is not expected to cause more suffering than the ongoing human rights violations. -fully accept that being a force for freedom in the world means that lots of really evil and mean people are going to hate you and perhaps attack you but right of those risks as nothing more than the cost of bringing justice to the world. -believe that country that abolished slavery before the U.S. abolished slavery would, after having abolished slavery, justified in taking over the U.S. prior to at least September 22, 1862 in order to get rid of slavery in also that in all likelihood it is unfortunate that the Great Britain lost the American Revolutionary War as Great Britain would allow slavery in all of the Crown’s land well before slavery was abolished in the U.S. and slavery was a far greater injustice that anything suffered by the colonists. Funny I have never ran into anybody who met these criteria. |