“I will not sign it, because I strongly believe that an “overthrow of Baathist government” cannot be applauded on any level at all if it was not begun and wholly supported by the Iraqi people themselves. The US actions in Iraq are the same as in Vietnam, just on a smaller scale: racism; mass killing of innocent bystanders and feeding terrorism. This time, the US has sold off Iraq through massive contracts for oil and reconstruction to American businesses. In no way was this a revolt against imperialism: quite the opposite. If we tolerate this, why not Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe, North Korea, China, Russia, Cuba, the Ukraine, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, the United States or any other corrupted government in the world, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian lives?”
09May06 — 4
What percentage of approval do you need before it counts as “wholly”?
Well, then he explains that the US government is equivalent to that of the PRC, which clarifies where he’s coming from, philosophically: He’s a fucking idiot.
Exactly! How do you know when we haven’t had a democratic state in Iraq? Who do you listen to – the Baathist fascists and the deeply Islamist clerics? How do they represent working people, trade unionists and human rights activists in Iraq?
Any democrat of the left works with the the forces of democracy and civilization – it is part of out Internationalism to show solidarity with those who support democracy. We don’t make pacts with fascists, wherever they come from!
I seem to remember a time when leftists automatically supported the overthrow of ‘corrupted governments’ (even when as in the case of Iran the end result was something infinitely worse).
And for that matter they generally weren’t that squeamish about a few hundred thousand casualties (or millions or tens of millions if you were Lenin, Stalin or Mao).
Remember Che’s call for ‘a hundred Vietnams’ and his and Fidel’s enthusiasm for actually launching those Soviet missiles at the US.
In comparison the neoconservatives seem remarkably restrained.
That guy is hilarious. At the end of his post about Chavez he says:
“Edit: and once again, the lying media has made a fool of me.”