actually, I’m waiting for the administration to start reporting Iraq news thusly:
Car bomb in Bagdad - 175615 Iraqis not killed.
There’s no argument that slavery was a supportable institution, but (as horrible as it is) it seems obvious that its being allowed to die a natural death would have been “better” than all-out civil war. A million people died horribly, and the U.S. economy took a six billion dollar hit.
Anyway, you’ve got a false dichotomy there. There were alternatives to civil war that didn’t involve decades of continued slavery. A fraction of the cost of the war would have been sufficient to develop the southern states economically and industrially so that they didn’t feel that slavery was absolutely essential to their existence. Market adjustments designed to give the South fair value for their resources would have gone a long way.
Similarly, nobody wants to hug Saddam – but even doing absolutely nothing about him would have been better for the Iraqis than the cluster-fuck they’re dealing with today. Thirty thousand civilians have been killed, the country is in ruins, and there’s no end in sight. That’s more than twice the number of prisoners that Saddam’s regime has executed in the last twenty years. There isn’t even any guarantee that when the dust settles the new Iraqi government will be an improvement over the old one.
Saying that a civil war in Iraq is a “good thing” compared with letting things alone is like saying that removing a toe with the aid of a shotgun is a good thing when compared with living with the pain of a bunion.
And less than a third of the number of Kurds Saddam killed with poison gas. This is fun! You throw out the next irrelevent fact, and then I’ll do another one!
The difference (which you say doesn’t exist) is that that’s a question on a lot of American viewers’ minds. I doubt many TV viewers were out there wondering, “Could this civil war possibly be a good thing?”
I’d have been just as outraged if it had been CNN. If you’re going to assume that this is just about Fox, go fuck yourself, OK? I would have been more surprised (in retrospect; it’s hard to imagine I’d have been more surprised at the time) if it had been anyone else. But that’s about it.
Apparently the “central issue” of this thread is whether we needed to know the “central issue” of that discussion in order to Pit the people who chose to represent that discussion in the aforementioned manner on screen. You say yes; I say no. You say stop, and I say go, go, go. (Oh, no. :))
That 30,000 people, (a number, by the way, that is going to become obsolete really fast, if indeed it hasn’t already), have died since our “humanitarian” engagement in Iraq is not an irrelevant fact. As facts go, as facts concerning wars ostensibly conducted out of supposedly philanthropic motives against the explicit advice of about half the planet go, it’s pretty much as relevant as they get.
It seems to me that executions of prisoners is relevant because it can be assumed that they would carry on at a similar rate until Iraq saw a change of government, one way or another.
The attacks against the Kurds aren’t relevant, because they’re history. There’s absolutely no reason to think that Saddam’s remaining in power would result in additional losses – in fact, the Kurds have been enjoying fifteen years of what has been described as a “Golden Age.” They are considerably less secure now that region has been destabilzed.
Casualties from a war that’s been over for twenty years are hardly a factor in a contemporary costs/benefits analysis – and even if they were, high estimates of Kurdish civilians killed in those massacres top out around five thousand – so even if we included them, the death toll from the last five years still exceeds the worst of Saddam’s regime over decades.
However, I think there’s a big difference between turning that kind of historical scrutiny on a war that ended over 140 years ago, and talking in that way about a possibly imminent bloody conflict that could kill and immiserate hundreds of thousands in the very near future. I saw Iraqis crying and raging on TV this evening as they rushed wounded people to Red Crescent ambulances following today’s attacks. I think that even debating whether such events on the scale of all-out civil war “could be a good thing” is appalling.
I don’t mean that we can’t inquire about possible bright spots, along the lines of “Could open conflict lead to a faster resolution of differences?” or “Are the prospects good for keeping this conflict on a comparatively small scale?” But to phrase such an inquiry as “Could all-out civil war be a good thing?” is, as I said, delusionally Panglossian, and even barbarically callous.
No. All-out civil war in Iraq could not be a good thing. Blood, misery, bombs, fire, suffering, death, for thousands and thousands of people. Not a good thing.
You are right that we don’t know what the overall tone of the interview was. Perhaps the two screen shots that Media Matters reproduced, with the “Upside to civil war?” and “Could it be a good thing?” captions, simply represented momentary searches for bright spots in a discussion that was overall appropriately serious and responsible.
Even if so, I still think the choice of wording for those captions absolutely sucked. The captions do come across as sounding barbarically callous, even if that doesn’t accurately reflect the interview content as a whole.
No, the central issue is about assumptions and presumtions. You see a partisan smear cite issue two screen-shots without provenace or context, and you assume that it is accurate and you presume to understand the context, and from this you pass judgement.
It’s childishly obnoxious and you should know better. Certainly you have no shortage of critical thinking when the shoe is on the other foot.
Do you not see this or are you truly a partisan idiot savant?
Hey, Scylla: off the top of your head, how many left-wing “partisan smear sites” can you name? What about right-wing “partisan smear sites”? Just curious.
I bet he knows 'em when he sees 'em.
I sent the same e-mail request for a transcript yesterday before Revtim did. I didn’t even get a response.
I sent mine Sunday, I only mentioned it after I got my response yesterday (Monday).
Ok.
Left: Moveon.org, Democraticunderground, mediawatch, FAIR,
Right: Freerepublic, Rushlimbaugh.com, swiftvets
Not too many, off the top of my head.
It should be noted that most of Europe’s non strife-i-ness probably has something to do with aligning populations and borders post WWII (and some post WWI).
Same difference, really. Or haven’t you been reading my posts where I’ve gone into this in detail?
I was Pitting Fox News for incredible callousness in even considering the possibility that the horrible deaths of many thousands, and millions living in fear, could be a good thing. But if, as you say, they’re a partisan smear site (I’m not gonna argue), that could obviously have a lot to do with it; they’d have a party line to justify.
I don’t understand your context. What is ‘it’ here?
If you’ve been reading my posts, you already know I don’t presume to understand the context. Most of the time, one needs to understand the context of a statement in order to judge it. But I contend there are statements sufficiently far out there that, on the face of it, no context is likely to render them acceptable (try, for example, “It was a good thing for the country that James Earl Ray shot that nigger King”) ; in such situations, one can judge first, and retract that judgment later if by some miracle the statements were in some context that somehow renders them acceptable. Intelligent people do this all the time. You seem to disagree with that practice, but we will just have to disagree.
Oh no - someone faked up another screenshot of a Fox News caption. However, the sentiment fits with the argument that Scylla might make anyway, so perhaps this simply fits in the category of “Yeah, Fox would probably say that, but someone probably photoshopped this, but we can’t know the context of what was being said anyway, so it doesn’t matter.”
Holy Photoshop, Batman! We’ve got to unearth the criminal mastermind behind this evil conspiracy! 
Ya know, Keith Oberman poked fun at this (the second faked-up screenshot) on his show tonight. And for a moment I thought they had picked the story up from an alert view (me) e-mailing them.
I have gotten a good response from the Countdown team in the past when I’ve sent “heads-up” type email to them. Once they even sent me some video snippets from previous shows when I requested them. But could it be that nobody caught the Fox segment on tape? Seems doubtful. More likely everybody caught it, but just didn’t feel like making much hay out of it.
Cite?
Just paraphrasing Hentor. Now I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. I better start watching Fox News to get my screenshot facts straight.