May 12, 2005

Where My Head is at

 by Jeremy

In the comments to my previous post someone asked whether my failing to post about Iraq lately means that I have decided that I was wrong. My lengthy reply shunted all the blog voltage out of my brain, so I'm posting it here as well...

* * *

Well I stopped writing about anything at all for a while.

I have felt it important to advocate for intervention in Iraq specifically because it has been something that most people find too painful to think objectively about, but it's nevertheless something that is part of a larger urgency for the world's super power to take some sort of stand against fascism instead of continuing to profit from it.

But it isn't a pleasant thing to think about for me either, especially as I'm being accused of supporting genocide, or whatever it is people think I'm doing.

So to answer your question, No. I in no way think that I was wrong to support this war.

Nor am I wrong in continuing to think that there was a moral necessity to free the slaves here at home, though the horror of the Civil War is something that is very nearly unthinkable. How can you read about the battle of Gettysbury -- in which there were more than 40,000 casualities in 3 days -- and still support emancipation? Some people go about this problem by denying that the Civil War had anything to do with slavery. I think that's a little too convenient.

My point is that being an abolitionist could not have felt very pleasant or morally clean back then, just as supporting intervention against the rise of Islamism and fascism in the Middle East doesn't feel very pleasant or morally clean now.

I heard an anti-war person say recently, in a heavily sarcastic voice, "gee whiz, I really feel good about the world now." And my unuttered response was "who the fuck cares how we feel about the world?" Is he saying he felt good about the world when Saddam's police force were bulldozing freshly slaughtered women and children into mass graves? Possibly, but only because he didn't have to think about the fact that things like that were happening in order to maintain a 'stable' Middle East so as to bring us cheaper gas than anyone else in the world has ever had. That was blood for oil, by the way.

We can probably agree that the occupation was mismanaged. We can agree that freeing the American slaves resulted in a century and a half of African Americans living in poor and violent slums because the emancipation was handled poorly. I'm not sure how to feel good about any of this.

One thing I'm sure of, however, is that pretending to have the one morally pristine opinion is more about self-soothing than about the truth. My approach to self-soothing has been to take a sabbatical and then to blog about Che Guevara and to take a bold stand against serial killers. The thematic thread that runs through these topics, though, is that I think there is something regarding the causes of extremely bad human behavior that we as a society have been failing to understand.

To wit: bad behavior is part of human nature, so there have to be checks against bad behavior before it gets so extreme that it's impossible to ignore. It's hard to know how to apply this principle to North Korea, of course, but it would be a helpful principle to bring to the table when confronting dictators who put political dissidents into concentration camps.

But remember, for some people, it actually is all about how they feel.

If one is against war, it's always possible to feel morally righteous. To weigh the human cost of war against the possible consequences of not going to war is to weigh an actual event that always involves some negative consequences with an abstraction, a supposition. People who are against war can always point to the real and negative consequences of a war and conveniently ignore the rest.

Posted by: neo-neocon at May 12, 2005 10:42 PM

I heard an anti-war person say recently, in a heavily sarcastic voice, "gee whiz, I really feel good about the world now."

I'll bet that individual felt pretty good when the US left Vietnam. And NEVER felt bad about the Killing Fields genocide.

I'll bet that person person voted for Clinton in 96, AFTER he ordered the "no use of the word genocide" about Rwanda in 94. And felt good about his vote for a draft dodger over boring old war hero Dole.

Please ask him how many children must be raped by UN peace keepers before the UN looks no better than the US as the World's policeman.

Too bad we NEED a world policeman -- none better than the US seem available.

Posted by: Tom Grey - Liberty Dad at May 19, 2005 11:24 AM

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