Thursday, September 18, 2003
Keeping Track Of The Outrage
The outrage that is Bush & co, and your own outrage at that outrage. No small task with this administration.
Now comes the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace, which also publishes Foreign Affairs, with a really neat on-line feature, "BETWEEN THE LINES, (DECONSTRUCTING AND DECODING OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS)" The document is presented with certain portions in red, when you pass your cursor over those sections, the authors commentary appears.
This first installment, "Revisiting the Case for War," presents the October 7, 2002, speech the President gave in Cincinnati, Ohio, and in which he made a detailed case for war against Iraq.
Using intelligence documents that were declassified and released on July 18th of this year as part of the administrations efforts to deal with the growing controversy surrounding that damn yellowcake from Niger, the authors, Joseph Cirincione and Dipali Mukhopadhyay, through their running commentary, make clear precisely when and how the President's words don't reflect what's in the documents.
The speech is worth reading again, to remind yourself of how focused was the effort to justify the notion of a preventive war against Iraq, without relying on the central argument that is now emerging as its chief justification, a strange amalgm of an idealistic desire to restore the fundamental human rights of the Iraqi people, and a neo-colonial impulse to control the shape of their society and government in order to create a pro-Western Arab free-market democracy, the first falling domino by which the entire Middle East will be transformed, more to our liking. Oh, and of course, that will be best for all the people there, because all people long for freedom.
No snarkiness implied in that last sentence; I believe that all human beings long for freedom, along with autonomy and community. I just think that different people, as well as peoples have very different definitions of concepts like freedom, autonomy, and community.
Now comes the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace, which also publishes Foreign Affairs, with a really neat on-line feature, "BETWEEN THE LINES, (DECONSTRUCTING AND DECODING OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS)" The document is presented with certain portions in red, when you pass your cursor over those sections, the authors commentary appears.
This first installment, "Revisiting the Case for War," presents the October 7, 2002, speech the President gave in Cincinnati, Ohio, and in which he made a detailed case for war against Iraq.
Using intelligence documents that were declassified and released on July 18th of this year as part of the administrations efforts to deal with the growing controversy surrounding that damn yellowcake from Niger, the authors, Joseph Cirincione and Dipali Mukhopadhyay, through their running commentary, make clear precisely when and how the President's words don't reflect what's in the documents.
The speech is worth reading again, to remind yourself of how focused was the effort to justify the notion of a preventive war against Iraq, without relying on the central argument that is now emerging as its chief justification, a strange amalgm of an idealistic desire to restore the fundamental human rights of the Iraqi people, and a neo-colonial impulse to control the shape of their society and government in order to create a pro-Western Arab free-market democracy, the first falling domino by which the entire Middle East will be transformed, more to our liking. Oh, and of course, that will be best for all the people there, because all people long for freedom.
No snarkiness implied in that last sentence; I believe that all human beings long for freedom, along with autonomy and community. I just think that different people, as well as peoples have very different definitions of concepts like freedom, autonomy, and community.
