Another reader of this blog (Heather's husband) has written to take me to task. Or, shall we say, several of them? There's no comprehensive way to address all of Maarten's many points and complaints except to answer in general. And I would begin by making the essential point that Maarten is an "internationalist." Nothing he says can be appreciated in full without knowing that he wishes the world to be a borderless, global society of former nations. ("Former" because they will have all surrendered their sovereignty to the greater good of internationalism.) This reminds us of Einstein's contempt for nationalism as an infantile notion. But it also reminds me that Utopia literally means "no where" ---and that's the one place where "internationalists" and other such sophistos feel most at home. The post-nationalist and indistinguishable world frightens me, and I would only be a stranger there, never a citizen.
I say all this to make the point that, in the real world, there are winners and losers and that there is nothing Utopians and internationalists (i.e., people who have a loathing for their own particular places of origin) can do about it. Sameness and equality and indistinction are anathema to individuals of will and self-determinancy. Winners make losers of their enemies because there are great issues of human dignity and value at stake and these cannot be dispensed with by resort to moral relativism. Why would a great culture such as ours set its sights on the overthrow of a tyrant like Saddam? Because he is an enemy to human freedom and dignity. Maarten, of course, laughs at the very idea that this country should care for liberty and democracy in places like Iraq, but that's because he is an embittered cynic. He doesn't know enough of our purpose as Americans. He was not taught his Lincoln or about the "last, best hope of Earth." We are a light unto the nations (Oops. Sorry about the drippingly Christian language, Heather.), but we are also an instrument of justice. These cosmopolitan types who are too busy being correct and sensitive are living in a state of unnature, as it were; they don't know enough about geopolitics.
Anyhow, there are too many liberals and sophistos out there thinking too much of their own rigteousness and being too pathologically absorbed with hating the President. I would suggest that these feelings of righteous indignation are too often the result of either paranoid ignorance or partisan hypocrisy. Yes, yes: the Bush Administration is just one big cabal of oilmen and Freemasons and Trilateralists. They stole the election from Gore because the President's brother was the governor of Florida and he must have set it all up, right? Right? It's devastatingly pathetic thinking like that that drives me insane. But it only gets worse when you turn to the war against Iraq. It was all done to provide huge contracts to Haliburton or Brown & Root or whoever the fuck. I guess our military screwed it up by not allowing even a fraction of the oil well fires that the alarmists were prophesying.
And, of course, all of that intelligence that was used and abused by Bush and Blair as a pretext for having it out with Saddam was all fabricated. Never mind that Saddam has twice (and, now, probably thrice) been stopped from developing nuclear weapons. Never mind that even pieces of shit like Hans Blix and that traitor/child molester ex-Marine (whose name I can't recall just now) acknowledged that there were huge amounts of bioweapons unaccounted for when the inspectors were finally driven out of Iraq in 1998. Are there really dumbasses in this world who believe that Saddam would have destroyed all of his WMD without telling anyone, thereby denying himself the credit by which he could have ended all of the sanctions against his country? It's fucking stupidity. Of course there are bioweapons in Iraq! Pull your head out!
Let me finish this little rant with the old philosopher's question, "What good is a baby?" All they do is eat, sleep, poop, and cry. And this goes on and on for months. What the hell good are they? It may be that what good we have done in Iraq is also difficult to see because all of its value lies in its potential, not in its essence. It is entirely possible that Iraq will become an ally and friend to the United States in years to come once its physical and political infrastructure has been repaired. That happened in Japan and in Germany; why is it such a joke to those like Maarten that we try it there, too?