On the War in Iraq.
http://www.dod.mil/news/Jan2005/n01142005_2005011402.html But the insurgents do recruit, and they are finding a willing pool. This has nothing to do with philosophy, and everything to do with economics, officials said. Unemployment in the nation is high, and the insurgents will pay people to launch attacks on Iraqi security forces or the coalition. "If someone is supporting a family and there is no money coming in, then $200 a month from the insurgents starts looking pretty good," said an MNFI official.
Let's take a look at the otherside of the story. Some of the news that does not make it throught ot the liberal media because it does not sell papers.
http://www.defendamerica.mil/articles/jan2005/a011405cm3.htmlhttp://www.defendamerica.mil/articles/jan2005/a011305la3.htmlhttp://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2005/n01122005_2005011204.htmlHere is the whole lot. Just check out the difference in the tone of the different networks. Good news does not sell like bad news, scandal, and doomsaying. All appeal to our baser human emotions and give into our fears.
http://iraqwarnews.net/Now lets look at the War Protesters:
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-mersereau011503.asp--------------------------------------------------
The two main camps of the peace industry
· The Down With America camp - This is the smaller camp active in America. It denounces any and all things American for no other reason than that's what they do. To them America is bad, every place else is good, especially non-European places. (Europe is suspect, but is tolerated because it is no longer religious. One of America's chief faults is that Americans are still religious.) The oppressions and slaughters that people of color regularly wage upon one another is of no interest to this camp except as another thing to blame upon America. This is the sort that Mersereau describes, although, as I said, he erroneously credits them with actually wanting peace.
This was the kind of pacifists George Orwell described in his essay, Notes on Nationalism, May 1945:
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …
· The Political Identity camp - The larger camp is equally uninterested in peace. Its motivation is pure, partisan politics. It is universally liberal to outright leftist, but not pacifist. Its members do not object to war per se, they mainly object to war being waged by the wrong people. This is the camp referred to by TR Fogey, who links to an article by Michael Totten with this nugget:
While it is unlikely that leftists [the DWA camp - DS] would have supported the war against the Taliban if Hillary Clinton waged it, it is almost certainly true that most mainstream liberals would support the war in Iraq if she were leading the charge against Saddam now. With only one exception, every anti-war liberal I have talked to admits this is true.
That defines the PI camp quite well: their support of or opposition to military force depends almost exclusively on whether their party is the one wielding it. Totten writes,
After weeks of arguing with one of my colleagues, I finally got him to concede that an American military intervention to depose Saddam Hussein is justified and appropriate. I convinced him by sending him reams of information about the brutal nature of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. He really didn’t know, and now he does, and he changed his mind. But with a catch. "This isn't the right American administration to carry out the invasion," he said.
Robert Kagan recently wrote "Yesterday's liberal interventionists, in Bosnia, Kosovo and Haiti, are today's liberal abstentionists. What changed? Just the man in the White House."
Together, these two camps comprise the "peace movement" in America today. It is not possible to grant to either camp the courtesy of good intentions. The DWA camp is virulently anti-American, and therefore pro-fascist, pro-tyranny and pro-oppression, all of which are states of war, not peace.The political identity camp sees peace and war through the lens of whether their own political faction holds power. If so, war may be good. If not, war is always bad.
There are no good intentions to be found anywhere among them.
There are a small number of true pacifists who do not fit into either camp, but their visibility and influence is near negligible. Quakers and Mennonites, for example, generally do not work to undermine America but neither do they support America's wars. However, my personal experience shows that almost all American religious protests against the Bush administration fall into the political identity camp. They almost without exception supported Clinton's war against the Bosnian Serbs and accepted his violent attacks upon Iraq, his cruise-missile campaigns against Afghanistan and Sudan (which killed innocent people) and his invasion of Haiti.
Update: TR Fogey excerpts "Confessions of an Ex-Pacifist" by Dr. David Lazerson, who "tells us how our current situation in our struggle against terrorism differs from the anti-war glory days of the 1960's":
You see, this notion of pacifism gets a bit sticky when one side believes in dialogue, reaching out a hand in friendship, and even compromising, while the other side hates your guts, wants your head displayed on a stick, and would like nothing better than to level your towns and plant their flags all over the joint. Peace only works when it´s a two-way street. If not, pacifism becomes suicide.
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Crumpp
