slaps forehead
May. 1st, 2004 06:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sisyphusshruggedIf only I had been Nicholas Kristof, I would have understood the situation.
See, this is the kind of thing that makes me despair of liberals.
If we had realized any of this before the war and, say, gone out on the streets in the millions to try to get through to our elected officials and our pundits (and for that matter -pundits) before it was too late and we had massive destabilization in the Middle East and enemies in Libya and Korea blatantly flouting us because they know our forces are overextended now and likely to be even more so as retention drops like a stone and the determined opposition of most of the world and an economy bleeding to death and an open-ended occupation and a number of dead soldiers which appears to be closing on 1,000 and what is rumored to be more than ten times as many soldiers (although they're being hidden in the attic where they can't embarass Our Fearless Leader so we don't really have the numbers on that one) who are having the costs of the medical care they need because they were wounded and/or crippled on our behalf deducted from their pensions, we could have done something about this.
Sadly, we do not appear to have done that, since, had we, the pundit class would surely have noticed.
Not done anything constructive, perhaps - we're not credible people, a category which appears to owe far more to personal style and social status than accuracy and at least a nugatory sense of honor - but noticed.
Which they clearly did not.
Thank goodness the guys with the good suits are on the case now.
I haven't felt so guilty since that Scaife-funded conservative woman's group showed up all us feminists by discussing worldwide abuse of women for the first time, like, ever.
Which reminds me, girls, how's it going for the women over in Afghanistan these days?
To promote democracy in the Middle East, we didn't have to invest billions of dollars and barrels of blood in our dubious Iraqi adventure.
With W.M.D. still elusive, President Bush has increasingly justified the invasion of Iraq as a bold effort to establish a beacon of democracy. As he declared in November: "The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution."
That's true -- if we succeed.
Mr. Bush is right to link the absence of full democracy in the Arab world with the region's stagnation. But his initiative for democracy in the Middle East has been scorned and rendered ineffective because of hostility to the American war in Iraq.
Instead, we could have nurtured -- and still should nurture -- indigenous Arab experiments in democratic elections in places like Bahrain. Of the 22 Arab governments, not one is a full-fledged modern democracy, but from Morocco to Jordan and Yemen, there are many that have held some type of free elections, established parliaments, accepted an independent press or freed political prisoners.
See, this is the kind of thing that makes me despair of liberals.
If we had realized any of this before the war and, say, gone out on the streets in the millions to try to get through to our elected officials and our pundits (and for that matter -pundits) before it was too late and we had massive destabilization in the Middle East and enemies in Libya and Korea blatantly flouting us because they know our forces are overextended now and likely to be even more so as retention drops like a stone and the determined opposition of most of the world and an economy bleeding to death and an open-ended occupation and a number of dead soldiers which appears to be closing on 1,000 and what is rumored to be more than ten times as many soldiers (although they're being hidden in the attic where they can't embarass Our Fearless Leader so we don't really have the numbers on that one) who are having the costs of the medical care they need because they were wounded and/or crippled on our behalf deducted from their pensions, we could have done something about this.
Sadly, we do not appear to have done that, since, had we, the pundit class would surely have noticed.
Not done anything constructive, perhaps - we're not credible people, a category which appears to owe far more to personal style and social status than accuracy and at least a nugatory sense of honor - but noticed.
Which they clearly did not.
Thank goodness the guys with the good suits are on the case now.
I haven't felt so guilty since that Scaife-funded conservative woman's group showed up all us feminists by discussing worldwide abuse of women for the first time, like, ever.
Which reminds me, girls, how's it going for the women over in Afghanistan these days?
