McTag wrote:Ticomaya wrote:McTag wrote:Are you actually saying that our criminals are better than their criminals?
Those would be your words, McT ...
... but are you actually saying that the isolated abuses that have been reported stemming from the US military's treatment of prisoners at Gitmo or abu Ghraib are on par with the cutting off of hands, tongues, limbs, heads, and mass killings under Saddam?
Not my words. You said the victim at Abu Graib still had his head attached, as if this was a plus point. Don't try to wriggle out of that.
Of course they are your words ... you typed them, not me. I did state that because the Abu Ghraib prisoner had his head it's a "plus point," to which you replied by asking whether "our criminals are better than their criminals," and I pointed out those were your words ... which they most definitely are. The wiggling is taking place on your side of the pond in this exchange.
Quote:The "comparison" is your idea. Faults lie on both sides, and it depends on what gets reported, and what you choose to believe. I know that we don't occupy any moral high ground.
Correct ... the comparison is mine. Yes, "faults" do lie on both sides. My point, in case you have yet failed to grasp it completely, is there is quite a bit of a difference between what Saddam and his henchmen did, and what the US military is doing. You may not feel the "moral ground" is high enough, but it is ABSOLUTELY higher than that which existed under Saddam, and you would be foolish to suggest otherwise.
May 27, 2005
"With Us or Against Us"
It Really is a Crusade
By GARY LEUPP
Days after the 9-11 attacks, George W. Bush informed Americans, "This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile." As a Yale history major, he ought to have known what the medieval Crusades were all about: Christians against Muslims, mostly for control of Palestine, fought with all the viciousness and duplicity reflected in the recent film "The Kingdom of Heaven." The explosive term was guaranteed to incite Muslim ire and alarm, and protests from everywhere (including the State Department, I'd imagine) caused Bush to drop it from his fevered rhetoric. But yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is indeed a Crusade, an anti-Muslim project conducted from a Judeo-Christian command center of a particularly unholy type. No matter how much administration officials profess their respect for Islam, denying any religious character to the war, and however they express wide-eyed amazement that Muslims might misunderstand the "war on terrorism" as an anti-Muslim war, it really is a crusading "holy war"---for the following reasons.
After 9-11 President Bush found an opportunity to attack Iraq, which as the books by Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill attest, he had hoped and planned to do in any event. There was no connection between 9-11 and Iraq, and no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (although some may still have faith that such will be found). But the al-Qaeda operatives, most Iraqis, and most of the people in the "Greater Middle East"---that vast oil-rich strategic pivot of geopolitics---are Muslims. Up to 80% of Americans are Christians, and Bush's political base is the fundamentalist Christian right. Many Christian fundamentalists believe that Islam is an enemy, a false faith. This belief can be exploited politically.
In defiance of reason, the Bush administration insisted that an attack on weak, sanctions-bled Iraq would help prevent hate-filled Muslim minds in Baghdad from executing another 9-11 against America, whose overwhelmingly Christian people Bush said he knew were "good people." How he pandered to the self-righteousness of those who believe they're "saved"! Good versus evil. "You are either with us or against us," he warned a startled world in November 2001. Bush echoed the words of Christ in Matthew 12:30: "He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters." Thus did the preacher-man gather his own flock, which loudly bayed "amen" to his planned Crusade.
This is a faith-based war, with all the irrationality of the medieval Crusades, or the wars of religion that accompanied the Reformation. The fundamentalists are big on the Reformation of course, but downright hostile to the Enlightenment that succeeded it. Not just hostile to Diderot and Voltaire and Kant but to Thomas Jefferson who heretically declared, "Question even the existence of God, for if there be one, He will more likely pay homage to Reason than to blind faith." Hostile too to the norms of international relations prevailing in recent centuries. One can look at the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) as the midpoint between the wars of religion launched by the Reformation, and the dawn of reason in the Enlightenment. That treaty posited the sovereign state as the basic unit in world politics and promoted non-intervention in order to maintain peace. All very rational. But the Christian right, some of whose members want to chuck the constitution and impose their holy "dominion" over your life, are happy to chuck hundreds of years of international law to irrationally assault the world. All in the name of God! Their hero George Bush specifically said of his illegal invasion in 2003, "God told me to smite [Saddam Hussein], and I smote him."
So yes, this is a Crusade, led by Bush, God's chosen one, against al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi resistance---and so many others who have little in common except for the fact that they emerge from primarily Muslim societies. Syria and Iran are both targeted for "regime change." So was the Palestinian Authority, led by the late Yassir Arafat, who was obliged to appoint a U.S.-approved prime minister in order to maintain diplomatic contact with Washington and Sharon. (It was to that prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, that Bush confided his divine mission to "smite" his enemies.) It's a Crusade against Hizbollah, the most popular Muslim political party in Lebanon. A war on Hamas, which enjoys wide support among Palestinian Muslims.
It's a Crusade that brilliantly exploits ethnic and religious prejudices in the U.S. It mixes the holier-than-thou triumphalism of the End Times believers with both Jewish and Christian Zionist dreams of a Middle East transformed by U.S. power. The "for us or against us" formulation borrowing from New Testament language pits the Judeo-Christian "us" against everybody else (including Cuba, North Korea, and leftist movements) but particularly at present against the Muslim world. Those vague categories "terrorism" and the religious-sounding "evil" were deftly used to morph bid Laden into Saddam; they may be used to conflate these with the Iranian mullahs. The war on all the evil in the cosmos begins with Muslim targets but at a certain point the religious attack can be diverted back to Godless communism too.
For the time being anyway the focus is on Islam, and on aggressively promoting---demanding, really---political change in the "Greater Middle East." Supposedly this is to protect America. "We are going to build a different kind of Middle East," Condoleezza Rice told U.S. troops last March, "a different kind of broader Middle East that is going to be stable and democratic and where our children will one day not have to be worried about the kind of ideologies of hatred that led those people to fly those planes into those buildings on Sept. 11." What is it about the Middle East that breeds the "ideologies of hatred"---those identified as such by the administration including secular Baathism, al-Qaeda terrorism, and Iran's political Shiism? The only thing linking these disparate ideologies aside from a hostility to U.S. policies is their Muslim component. The subtext here is that the Muslim world, as is, is unsuitable. A danger to our kids. So we need a Crusade for the children.
Throughout the world, not merely the Muslim world, the reputation of the U.S. plummets. But especially in the Muslim countries, with 20% of the world's population. The hateful behavior of the U.S. towards Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo inevitably provokes hatred among Muslims with worldviews as diverse as you will find among Christians. One needn't embrace an "ideology of hatred" to oppose the unprovoked attack on a sovereign state, the deliberate public humiliation of its toppled leader, the Abu Ghraib tortures and humiliations. Or to respond with indignation to the arrogance and hypocrisy of it all. The occupier of Iraq demands Syria end its occupation of Lebanon or face the consequences. The power that wants to violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty to produce tactical nukes tells Iran it's not allowed to enrich uranium, which that Treaty allows it to do. It is as though the Bush administration wants to be hated. It can then turn to the American people and say: "See, those people hate us! So we have to change their governments and institutions and education systems and customs, giving them our system, to end their hate and protect ourselves from them!"
The Crusades we read of in the history books were all about Palestine, about Jerusalem. Christians (the Byzantine Empire) had lost control of the region to the Muslim Arabs in 638, but Christians had generally been tolerated under the caliphates. Indeed the Patriarch Sophronios, who surrendered the city to the Arab commander Omar, had been given written assurances that Christians would retain control of Christian holy sites and practice their faith without hindrance. Agreements with Frankish kings or Byzantine emperors had facilitated the maintenance of Christian holy places in the city and the pilgrimages of European Christians. There was a brief period of Christian persecution from 1009, but so long as local Muslim authorities permitted Christian pilgrimages, relations between Christendom and Islam were businesslike and cordial. This changed when the Seljuk Turks conquered the Arabs, taking Jerusalem in 1070, and then gobbled away at the Byzantine Empire, taking Antioch and most of Asia Minor. Christian Byzantium, while at odds with the Roman Catholic Church, appealed to the Roman Pope to aid itself and all Christendom by beating back the Turkish tide.
Pope Urban II accommodated the Byzantines by calling for a holy war. At the Council of Clermont in 1095 he called upon European Christian "men of all ranks, knights as well as foot soldiers, rich as well as poor, to hasten to exterminate this vile race from the lands of your brethren." This vile race! He referred here to the recently Islamicized Turks. "Christ commands it!" he added. So began a European campaign to reclaim for Christendom a region lost to Islamic rule four and a half centuries earlier.
But as in the current Crusade, the objective became very blurred early on. Why were Jews in the Danube valley targeted for slaughter? They had nothing to do with the Turks. Why the bloody Crusader fighting with Slavonians in 1097? The Crusaders took Jerusalem in July 1099, butchering all its inhabitants regardless of age or sex. Why? Why the siege of (Christian) Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204? The troops with the cross of Jesus emblazoned on their tunics committed horrific atrocities, not just against Muslims but against humanity in general. Perhaps it is in the nature of a Crusade to widen over time, to find new enemies, to tap the potential of religious fanaticism and viciousness.
There were seven Crusades between 1096 and 1254. The Crusaders lost, the Muslims won, in the end graciously according Christians the right to trade and to visit as pilgrims while Christian Europe went about its religious inquisitions and pogroms. The current Crusade of Bush tells Muslims they can't go about their own business---because Christ through Bush commands that they change so as not to frighten American children. While the U.S. military disdains to count civilian dead in Afghanistan or Iraq, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, a deputy Undersecretary of Defense says, "We're a Christian nation" and "the enemy is a guy called Satan." Bush's religious mentor Franklin Graham calls Islam a "wicked, evil religion." The Graham father and son are well known for their televangelizing extravaganzas, which they call---what else?---"crusades." Born-again boys from believing communities march off to the Muslim world to respond to 9-11, as their Christian predecessors (peasants, children, knights) set forth from Europe a century ago, waywardly, many to their doom. Onward, Christian soldiers, "with the cross of Jesus going on before"
But there are of course Christians who reject the crusading mentality, now and a millennium ago. Why did Saladin, who did battle with Richard Lionheart in the late twelfth century, become so celebrated in medieval European romances? The Kurdish Muslim warrior (featured prominently in "The Kingdom of Heaven") impressed all with his rationality and magnanimity. This in the twelfth century, when the Islamic world was far more enlightened, inclusive and tolerant than Christendom. The present Islamic world may not afford an attractive alternative paradigm to the western one. But neither world is evil incarnate. To grasp that fact and accept that the world isn't simple is to fatally challenge the Crusader mentality. Let us including the good Christians among us smite that murderous mentality.
I do know we have bombed and napalmed civilians, shot unarmed civilians, terrorised a country, vilified and robbed a culture, behaved in an illegal, brutal and vicious way towards prisoners- some of whom were guilty of nothing.
You are ABSOLUTELY wrong if you claim any moral superiority.
McTag,
While it may be true that Tico picks the occasional nit, and indeed that he does "not know the totality of what the US military is doing", I believe the same observations apply equally well to you.
Quote:I do know we have bombed and napalmed civilians, shot unarmed civilians, terrorised a country, vilified and robbed a culture, behaved in an illegal, brutal and vicious way towards prisoners- some of whom were guilty of nothing.
You are ABSOLUTELY wrong if you claim any moral superiority.
In the first place the use of napalm as a weapon by U.S. forces was discontinued about 30 years ago. We have better, and more discriminating weapons now. We didn't napalm anyone in Iraq.
You're doing it again, George. McTag accepted responsibility for the immoral actions of his government when he said "we". When it's so obvious that this is an illegal war, a war based on lies and, as you admit in your next sentence, craven self interest, it's hard to reconcile your lack of remorse.
I certainly don't make any claim of moral superiority, and I haven't seen Tico make one either. Our actions in Iraq arise out of the all-too-human world of politics and international greed and amorality.
Both of you have done so by not condemning something that you'd be screaming about if the Russians did it, or if the Chinese went into Taiwan. Hypocrisy doesn't become you nor is it becoming to a country.
I challenge you to define for our illumination just what might have been a "morally superior" political position with respect to Saddam's regime in Iraq, after the many acts of aggression he had taken against his neighbors and his brutal suppression of freedom and dissent in his own country. Be prepared to consider, in an historical context, the moral implications of both action and inaction in the face of evident moral evil and danger to ourselves and the region.
Stop, stop right here! This is that hypocrisy that I've mentioned, MORE THAN ONCE. How can you, with a supposed straight face, even begin to ask McTag such a question. Have you forgotten how you supported Saddam against his neighbors {Iran} and his own citizens {Kurds}, even to the point of using WMDs {chemical weapons}?
Such blantant hypocrisy and you have the gall to challenge McTag!
What should have been done? My god, it's so simple. Do what any normal thinking person does, follow the rule of law. You would be mortified [or at least I hope you would] if your government started to exterminate the Mafia and their families.
No one can deny that society, in the short run, would be better off if a policy of extermination were implemented. But, in the long run, maybe not such a great idea. Yet all too many citizens sit by while this same thing is done on a wider scale. It's equally amoral.
Do require that the policies of your country consistently evoke such moral superiority? Do you believe it has met that standard? Can you give me a single example of a powerful nation that has done so?
McTag's "we" should have given you a hint, George. He stated pretty damn clearly that his government has not met the standard that thinking people would like to see met. Yet you and Tico just go on supporting, BLINDLY, the illegal and immoral machinations of your government.
Ah, well, as you said, "you're all you've got".
"The upgraded weapon, which uses kerosene rather than petrol, was used in March and April, when dozens of napalm bombs were dropped near bridges over the Saddam Canal and the Tigris river, south of Baghdad.
"We napalmed both those [bridge] approaches," said Colonel James Alles, commander of Marine Air Group 11. "Unfortunately there were people there ... you could see them in the [cockpit] video. They were Iraqi soldiers. It's no great way to die. The generals love napalm. It has a big psychological effect."
A reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald who witnessed another napalm attack on 21 March on an Iraqi observation post at Safwan Hill, close to the Kuwaiti border, wrote the following day: "Safwan Hill went up in a huge fireball and the observation post was obliterated. 'I pity anyone who is in there,' a Marine sergeant said. 'We told them to surrender.'"
At the time, the Pentagon insisted the report was untrue. "We completed destruction of our last batch of napalm on 4 April, 2001," it said.
You are disingenuous with your nitpicking silliness.
Answering the last remark here: you do not know the totality of what the US military is doing. You are on the receiving end of a sausage-machine of propaganda, some of which is reproduced on these pages from time to time. I do know we have bombed and napalmed civilians, shot unarmed civilians, terrorised a country, vilified and robbed a culture, behaved in an illegal, brutal and vicious way towards prisoners- some of whom were guilty of nothing.
You are ABSOLUTELY wrong if you claim any moral superiority.
Well, so much for our discontinued use of napalm bombs for 30 years.
McTag wrote:You are disingenuous with your nitpicking silliness.
I'm only being accurate. My "nitpicking" would not be necessary if you would not state things that require my correction.
You, sir, lack perspective. The propaganda which you receive has instructed you that occasional abuses on the part of the US or UK is to be compared with Hitler, Saddam, and Stalin.
So now you're agreeing that these have taken place, Tico.
You realize that Gitmo has recently been compared to a Gulag by the irrational media?
Let me nitpick a bit. The media, as far as I have been able to discern, has reported the statement of an AI spokesperson. How does that make them irrational?
Have you seen the instructions the US military has been given about handling the Koran? You name one other country that goes to such lengths to properly handle the religious texts of its prisoners.
Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Germany, France, Spain, ... and to boot, these countries, in all likelihood, though I can't state unequivocally, think that gulags such as Guantanomo shouldn't exist. I'll venture that a tidy portion of US and UK citizens think the same thing.
The people we're fighting against will cut off the heads of innocent people they've kidnapped, in the hopes that it will gain them an advantage and terrorize the population of the US and UK. In contrast, a few bad soldiers in Abu Ghraib abuse some prisoners much like a college hazing, and you want to compare the two?
No one has dared to make such a comparison, ... have they? This "we're better than they are" argument is an argument better suited to the school ground, Tico. Why don't you take it there? As Lash says, let's focus on the individual problems.
How naive you must be to think that the things that happened in Vietnam couldn't happen in Iraq. Would you like some facts brought forward to disabuse you of your ignorance?
The hypocrisy is just so stunning. Why aren't you writing letters to the military asking them to attend to the Tiger Force investigation which is running some 30 years behind schedule?
McTag wrote:You are disingenuous with your nitpicking silliness.
I'm only being accurate. My "nitpicking" would not be necessary if you would not state things that require my correction.
Ticomaya wrote:McTag wrote:You are disingenuous with your nitpicking silliness.
I'm only being accurate. My "nitpicking" would not be necessary if you would not state things that require my correction.
Let's deal with the annoyingly silly part.
You write, I paraphrase, "This prisoner (who is being criminally abused) at least still has his head attached"
I reply- "So you are saying that their criminals are worse than our criminals?"
You reply- "These are your words, not mine"
I reply "Not my words, your comparison", and you go off on a silly routine about the actual words used rather that the meaning of the argument.
You avoided the point, and that's why I used the word disingenuous the describe that.
Somebody used the phrase "a few bad soldiers"- was it George? It seems to me only the goons stupid enough to let themselves be photographed suffered much in the enquiries. Who procured the dog collars and leads, the electrical wires, and other apparatus of abuse? Who trained the interrogation techniques? Who connived at the beatings and murders? Not a few soldiers. Not a few commanders. It was and is endemic.
