[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Commentary: Illogical Reasoning of a War Against Iraq (March 13, 2003)

[Jay Mittenthal]

>From: "Ted Ernst" <ted at chicagohumanist.org>
>To: <ted at chicagohumanist.org>
>Subject: Commentary: Illogical Reasoning of a War Against Iraq (March 13, 
>2003)
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>Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 11:40:11 -0600
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>http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/transcripts/2003/mar/030313.freundlich.html
>
>PETER FREUNDLICH:
>
>All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are
>going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein
>that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We're going to wage war to
>preserve the UN's ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that the
>UN's word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word to
>guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is too important not to
>take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right?
>
>Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the
>democracy of the Security Council, then we are honor-bound to do that too,
>because democracy, as we define it, is too important to be stopped by a
>little thing like democracy as they define it.
>
>Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at home, we cannot
>afford dissension among ourselves. We must speak with one voice against
>Saddam Hussein's failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are
>sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that might
>does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does. And we are
>twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us oust a regime
>that twists the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in power a dictator
>who ignores his own people. And if our people, and people elsewhere in the
>world, fail to understand that, then we have no choice but to ignore them.
>
>Listen. Don't misunderstand. I think it is a good thing that the members of
>the Bush administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I only wish
>someone had pointed out that "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking
>Glass" are meditations on paradox and puzzle and illogic and on the
>strangeness of things, not templates for foreign policy. It is amusing for
>the Mad Hatter to say something like, `We must make war on him because he is
>a threat to peace,' but not amusing for someone who actually commands an
>army to say that.
>
>As a collector of laughable arguments, I'd be enjoying all this were it not
>for the fact that I know--we all know--that lives are going to be lost in
>what amounts to a freak, circular reasoning accident.
>
>
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