(np) Hitch-22

[Joe Allonby]

The Civil War ( War Between the States, War of the Rebellion, War of
Northern Aggression etc) was just that. The US didn't invade another
country to stop slavery there. The slave holding states (with a few
exceptions) made "pre-emptive" war on the industrialized north. Acting
as the world's policeman is fraught with unintended and unforeseen
consequences. What if Harry Truman told De Gaul to go to hell and
backed Ho Chi Minh's independence movement? What if we didn't
intervene to reinstall a corrupt Shah of Iran? American foreign
intervention and adventurism, no matter how well-intended, has a bad
track record. I don't share Hitchen's enthusiasm for sending in the
Marines, maybe because so many people I know and love are or have been
Marines.

The Marsh Arabs benefited from the invasion and overthrow. The Kurds
are a mixed bag. I doubt that most Iraqis are really better off with
the chaos, violence and religious division that has taken place since.
I don't buy it. Saddam was brutal (as are many other dictators) and
violent toward his own people, but he was contained and there was even
some autonomy for his Kurdish victims. He was in no position to
threaten his neighbors.There were no "weapons of mass destruction"
despite Bush's inability to pronounce "nuclear" .He would eventually
die. A popular uprising was not out of the question.

Now we have a lot of dead people and an Iran looking to its left and
right and saying "Maybe we out to get a really big fucking bomb?"



On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 8:36 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> he laments the lack of an international socialist movement to which
> one can belong
>
> he applied for and received US citizenship (and thinks NYC swings more
> than London do)
>
> thus I believe he believes in what believers might call the Church Militant
>
> and points to Marx's support of Lincoln's stand against slavery (or,
> if that is inaccurate, how about, he supported Lincoln's measures in
> the Civil War as being the only way to stop the spread of slavery in
> the US)
>
> I read that Marx on the Civil War thing a couple years ago, someplace
> funky linked to it so I wound up reading it by mistake, and it was
> quite impressive!  To the point of making me wonder if pacifism had a
> better way to solve that problem.
>
> I think he probably would want to go ahead and have the US change the
> regimes in all those places you mentioned.
>
> Displays some good arguments, 's all I'm sayin'
>
> What I want to do, is backscatter pacifism so nobody ever deposed
> Mossadegh, a-and the US just bought Cuba from Spain instead of going
> to war, and let Allende be, and for gosh sakes no Iran Contra, etc
> etc...
>
> A plan even less practical, for the moment, isn't it?
> and how WOULD one eliminate slavery?
>