confessions of a knee-jerk pacifist

By jere 22 Mar 2003

Markov, by the way, has done it again! “signed his ticket, Dumbass” is kind of how I feel. Been doing some long, heavy thinking about this war. I hate how we were snookered into it.. I hate how everyone went along, one sheep after the other, until only recently, nobody said, Hey, wait a minute! This might not be such a good idea! How do you install democracy in a country where all voices of opposition were executed or exiled themselves? After Hussein: what? somebody worse? This has been coming since before W got elected. But I don’t want to take up space and reading time with my reasons for being against the war they are legion but why I find in the last few days that maybe it isn’t such a criminal idea. Common anti-war arguments: 1) Resolve the issues through diplomatic/political and economic means: when confronted with (understandable) resistance from Iraq about weapons-inspections, the UN failed to assert the world community’s “right” (is it a right? Your opinion?) to protection from harm (witness the use of nerve gas against the Kurds which went unpunished); economic sanctions failed: Iraqi children, women and men starved and died of diseases while their government funneled what little money it had into munitions; 2) this is just about oil, and asserting S world hegemony; a glance at this article makes another argument, at least as far as the Prez is concerned, although I don’t deny that the big oil companies are probably licking their chops; 3)non-violent resistance breaks the cycle of violence begetting more violence: yes, eventually, possibly… although Gandhi himself admitted that it would take a very long time and very many dead people before peace prevailed; how many more gassed “Kurds” are we willing to accept? One is haunted by the thought of how many Jews might have been saved if Hitler had never been allowed to continue past 1938. Iraq was in violation of UN resolutions to disarm, certainly in 1998; it has shown utter disregard for human welfare; it has shown a willingness to sacrifice its own people to further its own perceived ends. One of many troubling thoughts, though: Iraq is not the only country to behave this way, and others proceed without a murmur.. that’s our own lop-sided moralism at play. I have a light burning in my window, but it’s a forelorn hope that the light of reason will truly prevail.