From: Damien Sullivan (phoenix@ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: Thu May 08 2003 - 09:54:02 MDT
On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 02:56:02PM +0930, Emlyn O'regan wrote:
> Just to open up a can of worms... how do people now feel about the war,
> given that the reason for going to war in the first place has turned out to
> be bunk (well, lies actually, I guess). If we could wind back time to before
> it happened, would you have still supported/opposed it?
I think I'm still agnostically opposed. I know I argued against it on the
list, but I've got a contrarian streak where when I'm not sure I'll tend to
oppose whatever position is being advocated at the moment. With vehemently
anti-war friends and family I'd suggest reasons for the war.
For me it was "get rid of evil dictator" vs "we're pissing everyone off and
lying and I don't trust our leaders and what's the long term plan?" So, we
got rid of the evil dictator, yay. Without much loss of life, but that didn't
surprise -- I figured if you applied Moore's Law to the Gulf War you were
going to see some improvement. As you and Keith say, those who thought the US
was lying about hard evidence of WMDs seem vindicated -- nyah nyah! Not that
I'm shocked, since I believed Paul Krugman when he was calling Bush a
shameless liar before he was even elected.
There's still concern about what's going to happen next. A la
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0508/p01s02-wosc.html
about the Taliban maybe coming back in Afghanistan. A big concern of anti-war
people was that we'd kick over the anthill then wander away, and if enough
chaos got caused we could actually make life worse for the proverbial average
Iraqi. Still too early to tell on that front. There's still gunfire every
night in Iraq, the WHO doesn't feel secure in helping out to stop cholera
(disease around wars has usually killed more people than the actual fighting),
families are afraid to send their kids to school, and this in Baghdad itself.
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=2704577906.m
Plus, it's odd to think of us spreading democracy abroad while civil liberties
are eroded at home and people want to make the Patriot act permanent early and
we're criticizing the Canadians for giving people too much protection against
government snooping.
So, it's still possible that the net effect of the war could be positive.
There's still room for a royal fuckup too. And I'm still voting Democratic in
2004.
-xx- Damien X-)
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