If you were, you wouldn’t post Reagan-loyalist Newspeak falsehoods like this:
The *Sandinistas * were working, over a period of many years, to overthrow Somoza’s dictatorship. The contras were formed, by the Reagan administration, to fight the Sandinistas and keep the useful Somoza administration in power.
Cite? Which insurgent groups have you heard make that claim? Or is that just something else from the righty blogosphere you take as fact? There are many insurgent groups, certainly with differing aims, and many insurgents who can’t be usefully categorized as members of a significant group at all. You do know that, don’t you?
In both cases, indulging for the moment your caricatured view of a lumpen Left, “they” were supporting democracy and self rule, which are among our most cherished values even if our government sometimes forgets that. A better question would be why *you * consistently oppose those things whenever a Republican administration fights them.
Jesus, Sam, you’re not painting with a broad brush, you’re painting with a fire hose! Cherry pick a couple of isolated opinions, which you then define as being the consensus of leftist thinking? Are you kidding? Howzabout I define your political persuasion by whatever I can dig up by Ann Coulter and Jerry Falwell? Give me a fucking break!
Secondly, you don’t know diddly squat about the “insurgents”. You don’t know who they are, what they want, nothing! None of us do! All we have is the solemn candor of an Administration that has told us more untruths in less time than Nixon! But you have the gall to rant about hypocrisy?
Go ahead. Tell us everything you know about the “insurgents” that wasn’t spoon fed to you by people you know have sold you barrels upon barrels of bullshit.
This is where the nuanced discussion you get online gets you in trouble.
So far as I know, the Iraqi insurgents are a mixed bag. Some are definitely Al Qaeda terrorists who want to foment civil war in Iraq, keeping the Americans pinned there and providing a lovely target, leaving them another Lebanon to play games in for years if they leave, winding up with another Islamic fundie state to work from. That’s their ideal outcome. They get no sympathy from me.
Another group is Baathist thugs, as Sam says, who want to keep the Shia majority out of power by force just as they did when they were in charge prior to the American invasion. They get no sympathy from me.
A third group is Iraqis who feel its their patriotic duty to kill invaders in Iraq, which for some reason they see us as. I understand their position, I’m not all that sympathetic, but they’re not in the same league with the other two groups.
A fourth group is Iraqis who are just pissed as hell at having their friends and loved ones killed, maimed and so forth in the invasion and occupation. I have a certain sympathy for them, though I can’t condone further killing.
I bet the majority of Iraqis’ most fervent hope is to keep themselves and their loved ones alive.
I think the last two groups of combatants are furthering the aims of the first two groups. That’s a shame. I hope NONE of them succeeds in killing ANY of our guys, or the innocent Iraqi citizens the first two groups seem to enjoy killing.
But let’s face it, the one who’s REALLY responsible for all the killing is:
George W. Bush.
If he hadn’t invaded, none of this would be happening.
Is there any way you can show them to be morally inferior?
I suspect not, since as elucidator has already pointed out, we don’t know thing 1 about what the insurgency is about.
Speaking hypothetically, of course, if the left was opposing something the right supported… then 20 years later the right oppsed something the left supported… would they both be hypocrites, or would it be acceptable to say that the situations were vastly different in historical context?
Damnit, it would have been more clever to say apples to bananas. Oh well.
I think you’re incorrect in this statement. I don’t think al Qaeda has the coherency or central leadership necessary to carry out an organized plan like this. Further, I think most of al Qaeda’s leadership is pretty far away from Iraq, probably mostly strewn between Pakistan and Indonesia. I don’t think they have the manpower to be able to sustain combat like this, either. I’m not saying that there are NO al Qaeda people in Iraq - several cells are probably working there - but not as a coordinated or massive amount of it.
Certainly a respectable number of other terrorist organizations are present, however, and they are sympathetic to al Qaeda - but not the same thing.
Overall, as I’ve said before, the insurgency is far too dilluted and diverse to discuss as a lump group. There are very few clear leaders standing out - M. al Sadr was in a unique position. Sistani’s words carry volume, but he’s an outsider and he certainly isn’t making strategic battle plans for the insurgents. From all appearances, the insurgency is made up of rag tag groups of civilians, former Iraqi soldiers (whose motivations aren’t united), and terrorists providing them with arms and munitions (though a good chunk of their arms came from Saddam’s armories which we let get looted. Someone should seriously have been fired for that :-p).
My understanding is based largely on an NPR report by a journalist who had been in Iraq since the invasion. He was concerned about all the Iraqi professionals – doctors, lawyers, administrators, etc. – who were being targetted for assassination. Not kidnapping, as has been widespread by Iraqi criminal gangs, but assassination. He said the extent of these assassinations was being greatly underreported in the media. To him it looked ominously like what went on in Cambodia under Pol Pot. His feeling was that since they were assassinations, they were probably being committed by people who were looking far ahead to the endgame in Iraq, their goal being to remove the professional classes and take over to run a fundamentalist Islamic state.
I had heard of Iraqi professionals being targetted for assassination prior to that.
Hm, that sounds very interesting. Do you have a link, or is it published anywhere? I’d be very interested in following this up, even if I do prove to be wrong.
Ever since WWII, the international community has accepted the principle – such international peace as we have had has been based on the principle – that national sovereignty is a more important consideration than the value of any particular political or social system. I don’t have a cite for that, I don’t know if it’s embodied in the U.N. Charter or any other instrument of international law, but it’s something everybody just knows. I’m not entirely happy with it, as a rule of international relations – I don’t even approve of the idea of national sovereignty as such – but there can be no question that it is a well-established, widely accepted rule. It was the principle of national sovereignty that Bush I invoked in the Gulf War. From the POV of the Kuwaiti people, democracy vs. despotism was not at issue; the only issue was whether they would be ruled by a Kuwaiti despot or a foreign one. But their country had been invaded by foreigners, and Bush was able to sell the international community on the idea that that alone justified intervention.
And by that standard, we have no more right to invade any despotism to give its people democracy than North Korea would have a right to invade South Korea to impose Communism. In either case it would an interference with international sovereignty. Interference with another country’s sovereignty is generally held to be inviolable except in very unusual and extreme circumstances, e.g., where foreign intervention is necessary to put a stop to genocide, as in Bosnia and Kosovo.
The Iraqi rebels, on the other hand, are fighting an internal insurgency over what regime is to govern their own country. And that kind of struggle is legitimate even though it is always, by definition, illegal. Most governments now existing, after all, had their origin in a revolution of one kind or another. (Including ours, of course. And Britain’s, whose present political system is rooted in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.) The insurgents’ terrorist tactics might be abhorrent and intolerable by any internationally accepted standards, but by those same standards, their cause is perfectly legitimate; and by those standards America’s occupation and “nation-building” program in Iraq is not a legitimate cause.
I can’t, and for these purposes I don’t need to. Whether a given political cause is legitimate according to the usages of the international community has nothing to do with whether that cause is just or unjust. In the time you’re speaking of, I rooted for the Sandinistas (when I paid any attention to that conflict at all), not because they were the established goverment and the Contras were the rebels, but because the Sandinistas had what I considered a more just cause than the Contras, in terms of what kind of society they wanted to build in Nicaragua; but a lot more than that would have been necessary, IMO, to justify official U.S. support for either side.
I’m reminded in the scene of Three Kings (sorry if I spoil it for any of you) when Mark Wahlberg’s character is being tortured by the Iraqi intelligence officer, and his fumbling response for why America went to war for Kuwait was something along the lines of, “becasue it creates craziness… you can’t just go around invading other people’s countries… we want peace…” and the officer (excellently played by an actor I have never found the name of) says, “This is your peace, my man” and begins pouring oil down his throat.
Kinda waiting for Three Kings 2 to come out now. :-p
Sorry, I meant, of course, “In either case it would an interference with national [not “international”] sovereignty,” and, “Interference with another country’s sovereignty is generally held to be unacceptable [not “inviolable” except in very unusual and extreme circumstances.”
Of course, a better response would have been, “What difference does it make? I’m a soldier, I’m here for the same reason you’re here – I’m following orders. Did President Hussein consult with you before he decided to invade Kuwait? Of course not. And President Bush did not consult with me before he decided to intervene.”
Easy to come up with a response like that in the peace and calmness of your living room, in front of your computer. But with electrodes attached to your balls? Not likely.
Small correction: I was incorrect in this, I later remembered that it is “stability”, not “peace” that they were speaking of. I knew it was wrong at the time but couldn’t remember the right word.
As I recall, he had been hit with chemical weapons, flipped a heavy vehicle onto its side, was beaten, tied down, and electrocuted in rapid order before the oil scene. I’d be afraid to meet the man who can keep cool logic after an experience like that.
