Saturday, September 12, 2009
Fouad Ajami's collective-selective punishment:From his Wall Street Journal op-ed: (emp add) The impulse that took America from Kabul to Baghdad had been on the mark. Those were not Afghans who had struck American soil on 9/11. They were Arabs. Their terrorism came out of the pathologies of Arab political life. Their financiers were Arabs, and so were those crowds in Cairo and Nablus and Amman that had winked at the terror and had seen those attacks as America getting its comeuppance on that terrible day. Kabul had not sufficed as a return address in that twilight war; it was important to take the war into the Arab world itself, and the despot in Baghdad had drawn the short straw. He had been brazen and defiant at a time of genuine American concern, and a lesson was made of him. So, if an outfit is based in Afghanistan, you don't pay attention to that fact or the individuals per se. You collectivize by expanding the list of guilty to include all Arabs. But you don't go after all of them. Instead, you select from that pool whomever's ass you want to kick. Ajami went the Al Qaeda - Arabs - Saddam Hussein route. Instead, why not Al Qaeda - Saudis - King Abdullah? Or Al Qaeda - Guys who like violence - Chuck Norris? It's about as legitimate.
posted by Quiddity at 9/12/2009 04:10:00 AM
5 comments
"You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society. You think this bubble fantasy, we’re just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this, ok. That Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth." - - Thomas Friedman
It makes me ill when they use the word "we".
Hussein's military launched at least 32 military attacks, using antiaircraft weaponry, on U.S. military aircraft conducting lawful U.N. authorized missions patrolling the no-fly zones between 9/11/2001 and May 2002.
Any attack on a United States military aircraft is grounds for war. Hussein did it at least 32 times following 9/11. He richly earned both his war and his execution.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Iraq fired dozens, if not hundreds of missiles at US and UK planes (they all missed, BTW). The aircraft dropped thousands of bombs on hundreds of targets over the years. It was a decade-long low intensity war and had nothing to do with 9/11. Unless you watch FOX News.
He richly earned both his war and his execution.
Perhaps. But did the U.S. deserve 'his' war?
"Hussein's military launched at least 32 military attacks, using antiaircraft weaponry, on U.S. military aircraft conducting lawful U.N. authorized missions patrolling the no-fly zones between 9/11/2001 and May 2002," Anonymous said.
That isn't true.The mainstream media has once again sold the US government's version of events to the American people. The bottom line is the "no fly zones" are not set up by the UN, they were not sanctioned by the UN and they are not legal. Mainstream media has not made this clear to the public and has in fact misrepresented the "no fly zones" as UN sanctioned which is the lie US government officials have been pushing. Most often this misrepresentation was done by lies of omission and by reporting on the "no fly zones" as if they were perfectly legal when in fact they were not. - The "No Fly Zones" and Journalistic Malpractice
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