From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Jan 22 2003 - 23:51:47 MST
Lee Daniel Crocker writes
> What I am saying is plain English--the very concept of "country"
> is an outdated an irrelevant one, and if you continue to think in
> those terms I remain unmoved.
I'm a little amazed to hear that you believe the
concept to be outmoded. Countries, I admit, are
a (low order) reification of certain societies,
but even that term you might suspect.
Countries appear to take actions, act like they
have feelings, or have thought certain things
collectively. I'll agree that there is little
"fact of the matter" here, but I'm still surprised
at your take.
> My standards, as I've said time and again quite
> clearly to everyone capable of listening, are
> simply that /people/ have the right to defend
> themselves or others against other people who
> would harm them or take their freedom. Any
> argument for going to war must be framed in
> that context for me to take it seriously.
> "Should the USA attack Iraq" is not even a legitimate
> question to me: the question is "Will it serve the
> American and/or Iraqi people for their present
> government to send troops to attack the Iraqi army
> and/or remove Saddam Hussein from power?
Yes, a lot of us just find that quite an acceptable
question, and quite equivalent.
> But I am totally unconcerned with the idea that
> I should "respect" the sovereignty or government
> of Iraq, or indeed of any country on Earth,
> including my own. I don't give a damn about
> countries, I care about people.
I don't have a rational argument right now; but I
suspect that people and nations *treat* other
nations as nations for a reason. An evolutionarily
derived reason.
Alejandro writes
> The immediate effect on war would be negative, assuming that some people
> would die before they would have died if the war would not have
> happened. How many people? No idea. Some people said 100,000 on the
> last one, so if there's a repeat, I would consider it a big negative (if
> a bus crashes and 10 people die is "tragedy", and 3000 on WTC qualifies
> for "horrible, despicable event" and 6,000,000 gets a "holocaust", then
> 100,000 probably hits around "unbelievable massacre" label or so).
Don't forget the "Iraq/Iran war" level. About 200,000 thousand
had been killed *before* the "war of attrition" began.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/ops/war/iran-iraq.htm
a nice history of the whole war. In total, about a million died,
it seems.
> There would also be a sizable negative property score for damaged
> buildings in Iraq, probably a sizable positive property score to the US
> military business and to world media businesses, some points for
> enjoyment of "marines getting some action", some for the US population
> feeling safer, some subtracted for some of the US population feeling
> guilty, and a sizable negative score for Iraqi suffering at the loss of
> relatives and friends, but none of those (except maybe by the last one),
> I would think, would put much of a dent on the -100,000 full points that
> we started with.
You also need to score (a) the relief that many Iraqis
will feel when Hussein is gone (b) the potential for
many further deaths over the rest of his and his son's
lives, and (c) the (admittedly unquantifiable) benefits
that could accrue to other nations, especially Islamic
ones, in the region.
> Now, since the post-war effects are unknown, and I
> can't assign probabilities to what the possible outcomes will be (if you
> can, please post), they would have to be given a neutral or zero score.
> In which case the war stays at "unbelievable massacre" level, and should
> be a no-go.
Having good judgment about the myriads of factors is
something that I believe can be left to the professionals
who are employed by the various governments; that such
professionals will not agree, however, bespeaks both the
difficulty of any final say, and the ideological component,
which is based ultimately on differing values.
Lee
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