A few days ago I linked to an article by Mark Helprin and included this quote;
During the Cold War, one could always suspect that democratic socialists lusted in their hearts for Leninism, and might have given themselves over had the balance of power shifted eastward. This was at least a plausible explanation for their opposition to virtually any measure of Western defense, and their perpetual horror of anti-Communism. But no force, it would seem, should be capable of transforming even a lifetime of socialist ardor into sympathy for absolutist mullahs, 10th-century tribal warriors, decapitators, and circumcisors of women.
Some of our friends on the left took strong exception.
Well, today I have the distaste of presenting the sympathetic Kurt Vonnegut – celebrated author, outspoken Bush critic and “peace activist”.
Asked if he thought of terrorists as soldiers, Vonnegut, a decorated World War II veteran, said: “I regard them as very brave people, yes.”
Vonnegut suggested suicide bombers must feel an “amazing high”. He said: “You would know death is going to be painless, so the anticipation – it must be an amazing high.”
Fortunately, we have Lileks;
Mr. Vonnegut – again, a patriot whose dissent is being cruelly ground into the nurturing earth before your eyes – seems to think that suicide bombings literally happen in a vacuum, an unpopulated space where the bombers just pop like soap bubbles. It may be painless for them – alas – but it is not painless for the victims. You�d think such an obvious observation would go without saying, but we are dealing with an intellectual. What Vonnegut calls brave – blowing yourself up so you can fly up to the great Bunny Ranch in the sky and rut with fragrant houris blessed with self-regenerating hymens – does not exactly compare to the bravery required of the survivors.
Just don’t question his patriotism.
Far be it from me to disagree with a veteran….but hey there can be something said for actually being in the war on terror vs serving in another conflict. Would the Soldiers at Vimy or Roarkes Drift be able to understand today’s conflict and what it means to be a warrior fighting in it?
Vonnegut is terminally caught up in the 60s…the days the American Bolshevik movement recruited an entire generation of coddled, empty-headed suburban brats to capitulate to communist globalism…it is to these aging brats he appeals and still spews the same tired garbage that twisted their minds when they were inclined to the ignorance of youth….Vonnegut, and the rest of the living 60s Bolshevik are still trying to milk their status as the defacto political leaders of a horribly brainsick 60s generation.
I don’t know if it’s as much a matter of these old communists wanting to gravitate towards Leninism as it is they wish to be ( once again) the intellectual/political Mullahs for their generation.
Maybe Vonnegut will follow Hunter Thompson and do the right thing when a 60s burn-out spewing political peacnick idealism becomes irrelevant in the face of realities in the new millennium where civilian terrorism is viewed as a legitimate a political statement by the collective global left .
Poor Vonnegut–reflexively Anti and utterly unable to distinguish Good from Evil.
To survive the fire-bombing of Dresden-by your own side- while a prisoner of war, would give a unique opinion to anybody. Vonnegut is entitled to his opinions, (just like everybody else). Calling him a commie for that, is a bit off the mark.
“Vonnegut is entitled to his opinions, (just like everybody else).”
Er, yeah, and who said he wasn’t? I’m equally entitled to the opinion that he’s an idiot and a schmuck.
Most intellectuals of the left who are enamored of such existentialist popinjays as Jean Paul Sartre believe that suicide is the only answer to the absurdities of life as did many of the more morose existentialists, particularly in the French world, although I could probably dig up some examples from other countries.
This raises a problem, however, if you happen to still be alive when professing this opinion. To be consistent — the hobgoblin of little minds — you must profess, either in a private or public existentialist prayer service, admiration for the bravery of anyone who makes the logical response to the absurdities of life.
What Vonnegut overlooks is that Osama Kabama Inc and their cult of liberation through self-detonation (cue the Sinatra background music “Come fly with me” — was it Billy Strayhorn? ask Steyn) upped the ante a bit by offering the Greek god of Eros to their pious Muslim followers.
The existentialist and morose faux French passim 60’s hippie set never twigged to rejigging their playbook. It must be tough to keep signing up recruits when the only possible inducement to the young men of today is a free shot at Lillian Hellman or Virginia Woolf to compensate for endless rereadings of Camus’ The Stranger and Sartre’s Nausea.
Qu’elle surprise.
Dave, living through adversity doesn’t buy anyone a free pass. There are some opinions that cannot be allowed to pass unchallenged, this is most definetly one.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from being held responsible for what you’ve said. This is a distinction aparently lost on the Left generally and Vonnegut in particular.
Sure thing he’s free to say it. He’s also free to wear the consequences for having said t.
Kurt Vonnegut’s political comments in recent years have been “all over the place” ideologically, and no one should belittle the experiences of someone who survived Dresden. Whether he really learned very much from the experience, however, becomes more of a question as the years go by. I think younger people sometimes miss the deeply conservative messages which appear all through the works of Vonnegut and the late Dr. Thompson.
Anybody actually read the Weekend Australian article quoted, and try to guess the larger context of the conversation with Vonnegut? Listen to the phrasing: “I regard them as very brave people, yes.” Doesn’t that tip you off that Vonnegut is talking to a typical journalist who already has a story written and just needs the right answer to the right question?
Kate, you talk about “knowing the enemy.” But if anybody says anything about what might be going through the mind of a suicide bomber, they’re “sympathetic” – and you present them as an enemy that you don’t want to know. To quote Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim scholar who has condemned terrorist attacks and yet been vilified as an “Islamic militant” because of his writings about the motives of suicide bombers: “to explain is not to justify.”
“no one should belittle the experiences of someone who survived Dresden”
we are belittling the comments of Bill Maher as mimed through Kurt Vonnegut, rather than trying to de-sanctify his Dresden experience.
“Kate, you talk about “knowing the enemy.” But if anybody says anything about what might be going through the mind of a suicide bomber, they’re “sympathetic””
I thought Daniel Pipes nailed it better than anyone in his 1995 article the Western Mind of Radical Islam and no one accused him of being and no one calls him an Islamic Militant.
Of course, Pipes is Jewish, so perhaps even MSM finds this a hard sell in the Sunday edition.
Hey … He knows who the buyers of his whacked-out books are …
Excuse me while I go a barf up my Breakfast of Champions.
And to think, I used to like that asshole.
I’m glad Rodney Dangerfield isn’t around anymore .. if he agreed with Kurt, would lose respect.
RE Plato: yes, I get your distinction re discounting the experiences of the man (Vonnegut) versus trashing his current views. And, Vonnegut is his own worst enemy in this regard, having ridiculed the very concept of patriotism because he associates it with the “muscular Christianity” (hey, I’m just quoting), of recent Republican administrations.
But: he is on a tangent with Pipes here: the constant discounting of the terrorists (9/11 or otherwise) as “cowardly” because of the suicidal element (a theme of american politicians of all parties) indicates a dangerous underestimating of the mind of the adversary. Vonnegut at least has intimate experience, more than any western writer since Durkheim, probably, with suicide as more than an ethical choice.
Plato’s Stepchild. I remember existentialism when I was growing up and I even considered it once. For about a weekend I believe.
Laura. Every terrorist leader I’ve seen quoted condemns terrorist attacks. Means nothing to me. They are the enemy and I recognize that.
Like I’ve said many times, there was a reason why Dresdon was bombed into rubble. Same reason why two big bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Stupid people are usually doomed to repeat the tragedies of the past. Sad and dangerous.
When someone invades your space and threatens you with death, you are justified in killing him as quickly as you can. Only stupid people will rationalize about this.
there are still oodles of Left Wingers, esp among the NDP in Canada, who do the blind look & love routine on Cuba, the old Soviet Union, South Africa and Zimbabwe. As long as you keep a hate the US orthodoxy, you can be a good socialist and ignore the mass murdering non-democracies, mysogonistic, gay-hating regimes in the world.
As long as you hate the USA, you will always be a good Socialist – doesn’t matter if Stalin had to “purge a few bad apples”, or Cuba keeps the firing squad warmed up for anyone who cracks a joke about Fidel, or believing Saddam wasn’t a bad guy (according to Mikey “the fat boy who lies” Moore or the UN is a valuable forum for international justice, deocracy & freedom . . . etc.
Maybe the USA should just let teh world go to hell quickly. The Taliban could go back to Friday afternoon mass shootings of women & homosexuals and every other tinpot dictator could try and get nuclear arms to frag each other with.
Socialist dogma is in variance with reality so the the true believers ignore that, create a strawman enemy and merrily go about their blissful “my shit doesn’t stink but everyone else’s does” lives.
And so it goes.
Maybe Vonnegut, at 83, is in senile territory or maybe he’s still sharp. His written work (and that of others) could be heavily edited. But when I saw him lately on Bill Maher’s show I was struck by how disassociative ( out of it) he seemed and I felt a loss…I not sure why.
Maybe he had a bad night then. So in the interview he could be further losing it or confused or just goosing the interviewer for the hell of it.
Lileks though…I used to like his stuff early on…his strange little obsessive collections. Then he started his rants and to me he got creepy.
I said the same about a change in Helprin.
One only has to read the very words of Osama Bits Aflyin to understand his goal, and witness the tactics he is willing to use to achieve that goal. This has nothing to do with Dresden.
Vonnegut is wrong about Deranged Islam. Military action by the West is the only way to stop him. I have seen no viable alternative to this tabled by the Left.
The question is not how to stop them, but whether we want to or not. I say we must. Period.
Dale and Steve,
Very astute comments and observations. There was an interesting article on Mark Helprin in the May-June 2005 issue off Harvard Magazine. A quick google pulls it up for free I think. It was written by Craig A. Lambert.
As to the “suicidal” v “cowardly”, I wish North Americans would read more Dostoevsky, particularly his Demons (transl by Pevear and Volokhonsky.
I question Vonnegut’s patriotism. If he fought in the Second World War, then, presumably, he fought against facism and fundamentalism. Islamic terrorism is the same mind-set, therefore, if he is now promoting it, he’s denying what he fought for 60 years ago.
Because he was in Dresden doesn’t give him the right to say anything – wise or stupid. It doesn’t make him wiser, or stronger, or dumber or..
Suicide bombing IS, in my view, an act of cowardice, for it rejects responsibility for that action. You, the suicide bomber, are neatly out of it all. The people you harm, remain. That’s hardly an act of bravery.
I suspect that Vonnegut is getting old, and thinking about his current very fragile health; maybe he’d like to ‘end it all’. He thinks of himself as a coward because he won’t, himself, end his own ill health.
“Just don’t question his patriotism.”
You can’t question what doesn’t exist.
I don’t understand the guy. How can he hit the nail so totally on the head in some instances (Harrison Bergeron) and then turn around and churn out completely mindless pap (Slaughterhouse Five)?
It’s almost like there are two Kurt Vonneguts, and the evil/naive one finally came to the forefront.
A bit of additional Vonnegut trivia; yes he is obviously in a turmoil about war service: having written a number of positive articles about Charles Lindbergh in the Yale U. newspaper (“Chasing a Lone Eagle”), he inexplicably enlisted. His mother shortly thereafter committed suicide.
The personae he employs in his “war” novels, however, leave enough ambiguous clues to keep Vonnegut enthusiasts going for quite a while. As someone who has read Vonnegut for over forty years, I don’t know which aspect to be more dismayed about: his own increasingly strange political views, or: the evident unfamiliarity of young readers of today with his novels–which stand quite apart from his political musings.
I think the answer to Vonnegut’s dual personality is found in Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husand and the Double. I recommend the Pevear translations, of course.
I hate to break up the Amen corner, but I need to play Devil’s Advocate for a second.
John Crittenden: When someone invades your space and threatens you with death, you are justified in killing him as quickly as you can. Only stupid people will rationalize about this.
I guess that means you are in full support of the insurgency in Iraq. Otherwise you must be stupid. (Your characterization, not mine.)
ET: Suicide bombing IS, in my view, an act of cowardice, for it rejects responsibility for that action. You, the suicide bomber, are neatly out of it all. The people you harm, remain. That’s hardly an act of bravery.
Do you feel the same way about the dropping of the atomic bombs? The rationalization for that was to avoid a fight. Isn’t that cowardly by definition?
Does configuring the OBL ‘smart bombs’ as brave or cowardly affect in any way our decision on how to respond to their threat? I don’t care if they are brave or cowardly. They are what they are: dangerous, and motivated. Their motivation is clearly spelled out. That they are dangerous is indisputable.
If one is to espouse not responding, then one must be assuming that the motivation ends at the national boundary. The reasoning around extrapolation of the motivation should be the topic of discussion, not bravery, not cowardice, not patriotism, not existentialism.
plato . . .: yes, while many commentators, including here, suggest the irrelevance of the motivation of the adversary, there is empirical evidence of why the distinctions are important: has the U.S.A. been well-served by characterizing the terrorists as fanatical/irrational/suicidal individuals, when all the evidence suggests they were intelligent, resourceful, backed by excellent research, etc. etc. This suggests a similar personality profile to some of those American personnel who sacrificed their lives on near-zero-percent-survival missions in WWII!!
I’m going to quote in full something that appeared today on this (general) topic.
Bill Palmer American Thinker
The opponents of the war are not cowards for the simple reason that they have nothing at risk. They have nothing to be cowardly about.
We have a voluntary military. If we were in a quagmire, our warriors would know better than anyone else and wouldn�t re-enlist in numbers sufficient to fight the war. This self correcting mechanism should be all the reassurance that any rational person should need. As long as our warriors are willing to fight and the President is willing to lead them, even those who think the war was a bad idea should be willing to support them.
There is no draft. Our warriors aren�t asking the Left to fight or risk anything (which is why the Left are not cowards). In fact, all they are asking of the Left/Democrats is that they not stab them in the back.
Unfortunately, the Left/Democrats don�t seem to be able to do even that.
The Left is against the war, not because they are cowards, but because opposing America is what the Left does. In their socialist/marxist fantasy world (what I call the S/M World) America is always the villain, anyone who opposes us are �freedom fighters� and the war is always wrong.
Those on the Left are not cowards. A better word might be timid. But calling them either cowards or wimps obscures the real problem which is that they have a world view which is profoundly opposed to America.
Steven Dugger
Bill Palmer understates his case. It�s not that the left is cowardly or timid. Leftist hate this country; some of them hate us almost as much as the Islamic fascists (really they�re the same kind of people using different names). Right now, leftists believe that they can conquer and dominate the United States through lies, fraud and a little violence. If their political influence continues to wane, I�m reasonably sure we�ll witness an escalation in violence. This is a sad, but inevitable consequence of the majority of Americans forgetting the price of freedom. I hope we�ll crack down on leftist groups before it gets too bad, but our current leadership in the Republican Congress doesn�t fill me with confidence. Clarification: I want to be sure that everyone understands who I�m referring to when I say �leftist� A �leftist� as I use the term has completely surrendered any ethics to the ethos �The end justifies the means�. Many leftists have what they think are noble goals. A pristine environment, equal distribution of wealth, healthcare and education for all, any or all of these may be the goals of any one leftist. Indeed, I�m sure there�s a bunch of stuff I�ve left off my list. What all leftists have in common is an absolute disregard for any law or morality, except where they can be used as weapons against an opponent, a desire to use any method (including terrorism) to achieve their ends, and an absolute certitude in the righteousness of their cause. There are very few real leftists in the United States, but there are lots of people who have leftist leanings. Together, they represent the longest term threat to the well being of the United States
I think the last paragraph of the article said it best:
“But Vonnegut’s latest comments are likely to make many people wonder if old age has finally caught up with a grand old man of American letters.”
As Napoleon said, “Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence”
As the vast maority of “insurgents” in Iraq (a country that has twice demonstrated a clear majority will through the act of voting) are foreign nationals, who just so happen to be blowing up ordinary Iraqis, the “invasion” argument wears pretty thin.
This is a fundamental battle between tribalism and fascism vs a fledgling democracy. Nothing more, nothing less, no matter how much you enjoy burning effigies of American presidents to protest otherwise.
Speaking of which…
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2005/11/george-bush-makes-history-praises.html
Times change, some people adapt and change with the times, others get locked in forever, and pay the consequences. Vonnegut and I come from the same part of the planet, and I used to read all his stuff. I also read Salinger, John Knowles, Joseph Heller, and Norman Mailer, but mercifully resisted Khalil Gibran.
Vonnegut is in his eighties, fer cryin’ out loud. Cut him some slack. Don’t get yer knickers in a twist. He is an “artist”, and the artist is rarely as pretty as the art. Paul Hellyer is pretty old and believes in UFO’s. Does anybody reading this know how they will act at that age? (When, and if, I reach eighty, I plan to take potshots at coyotes from the back porch with an unregistered firearm)
Amazing that Kurt can evoke a shitstorm in his dotage.
Dear Coop: to lighten things up a bit: your aphorism about “never ascribe to malice . . .” was unfortunately not copyrighted by the little corporal, so I have recently seen it used, about a dozen times in the last two weeks, by accountants explaining away various balance sheet peculiarities at annual meetings: C.A.’s appear to be exempt from intellectual property niceties!!
In reply to jaymeister – why is avoiding a fight cowardly ‘by definition’? That would deny the value of negotiations and state that all dissent can only be settled by conflict. That’s the ideology of The Hero. A bit out of date. Sometimes you have to negotiate and sometimes you have to fight. The atomic bomb, to my understanding, was to stop the fight. How can permitting continuance of a devastating pacific battle scenario be considered right? The Japanese were not ready to stop.
I question Dale’s statement that it’s the USA that has characterized the terrorists as ‘fanatical, irrational, suicidal’; he states that they are, instead ‘intelligent, resourceful and have excellent research’. First, this post suggests that the definition of the terrorists as ‘fanatics, irrational etc’. is a false description applied by the USA without grounds; i.e., it’s ‘just words’. I don’t agree.
Someone who blows himself up, blows up other people, is not carrying out a rational act, for the result does not and cannot advance a political agenda. It will simply be seen as a violent act- to be reacted to with equal violence. Rather mechanical actually. Someone who murders people is not rational, but a psychopath; that requires fanaticism. The verbiage that always accompanies these acts, either by the agents or the praisers, is always fanatical and irrational.
Someone who kills themself for a non-attainable political agenda, has serious psychological problems.
Intelligent? How? They can’t think through a problem logically – for that would tell them that blowing up a wedding reception will not produce love in a population; 9-11 will produce only military reaction. So? Is that intelligent?
Resourceful? How – getting the bomb together? Hardly. Did they develop a country? Did they free the Iraqi people? Did they enable elections? Did they enable an Iraqi constitution?
Excellent research? How? Fundamentalists are not ‘thinkers’; they are followers. Therefore, they do not innovate. They didn’t invent the computers they use; the researchers in the USA and UK did. They didn’t invent the cell phones they use; they didn’t invent the cars they use; they didn’t invent the planes they hijack; they didn’t invent a thing. Because fundamentalists are followers. Not thinkers. Not researchers.
My young friend et: we’re apparently discussing this very issue because of the effectiveness of the strategy: ask citizens of Israel whether their political choices have been influenced by terror.
What would they say: well, I can only speak for my own relatives(and I am a Lutheran, but bellieve it or not, there are some of us in the middle east), but it is profound, no matter what political party they eventually support!
What I mainly hear from them is that “I can’t possibly understand the issue” since I dont face annihilation fromm terrorist bombers every single day. I don’t accept that argument for two reasons: I haven’t been given opportunity to vote on mid-east policy by my allegedly democratic gov’t; 2. I’ve paid enought taxes to support you blighters (not the best logical argumnt). But: what can you say to persons who face killing every time they go to a pizzeria?
As I read back in the history of American isolationism, their point of view, especially now that I have children, looks better and better to me.
Dale
Dale
72 virgins and dwell in heaven forever. That’s quite a reward. Plus in the good old days your family would get $25,000 from Saddam.
Nice work if you can get it.
Kinda makes that arguement about suicide bombers being selfless and brave and admirable a bit weak.
They might be fanatical, but that’s not the same thing.
Jaymeister: I guess that means you are in full support of the insurgency in Iraq. Otherwise you must be stupid. (Your characterization, not mine.)
The “insurgents” as you call them, were the first to invade many “spaces” in the world to kill and mutilate innocent people indiscriminately. Get your facts straight. Don’t confuse the statement I made. It was a very simple statement so as not to confuse people like you. The ordinary people of Iraq, who want to be just as free as you and I, are not the insurgents in Iraq. These insurgents are the same people who kill children on busses riding to school, blow up people sitting in a cafe with their families having dinner, saw the heads off live people, or push handicapped people in wheelchairs off a ship into the water to drown.
Like I said, I now the enemy. Apparently you don’t. That seems to be a liberal failing.
I agree with ET’s response to jaymeister.
John C:
Can you absolutely, 100% guarantee that EACH AND EVERY person who is fighting against the Iraq occupation is a foreign fighter or involved in the terrorist activities targetting civilians? Can you unequivocally say that there aren’t any Iraqi nationals just defending their own turf? Because if there is even one of those, then he is justified by your own definition, of killing U.S. troops with IED’s. I’m not advocating the position, just pointing out the absurdity of your guidelines for what violence is justified when.
In response to ET, the atomic bomb was neither a negotiation nor a fight. Firebombing civilian populations is much the same (although, technically, you risk getting your plane shot down during the mission, so it’s not as cowardly.) If the Japanese had dropped one on Los Angeles, for example, you wouldn’t consider that cowardly? Wasn’t the Pearl Harbor attack called cowardly? Again, I’m not arguing here whether the A-bomb was justified in the context of that war, but making a point about what is considered to be “cowardly”.
Jaymeister. Can you absolutely, 100% guarantee that EACH AND EVERY person who is fighting against the Iraq occupation is a foreign fighter or involved in the terrorist activities targetting civilians?
I never said they were foreign fighters. I can be relatively sure, from various reports including US army bloggers, Iraqi bolggers, US reports and Iraqi government reports, that many of the terrorists, I don’t call them insurgents, are either from the group of thugs that supported Hussein and helped carry out his atrocities or foreigners. It doesn’t matter where they come from, it matters how they treat their neighbours.
Most of the people in Iraq want to be free, probably even most of those in the old Baathist regime. Most of the latest victims of these terrorist bombers have been Iraqi or hadn’t you noticed.
In any free democracy the most dangerous enemy always walks among us. Like I said, it pays to know the enemy.
Having said all that I am of the opinion that Iraq was instrumental in 9/11 and also the Oklahoma City bombing. I believe that the US had a right to go after Hussein and his supporters. But that’s another issue and another blog.
John C:
You failed to see the distinction I made between terrorism against civilians and defending against an invading force. Obviously this discussion has been exhausted, since it has gotten off the rhetorical track that I had intended. But I’m REALLY curious about your theory about an Iraq-Oklahoma City connection. Now you’re getting into tin-foil hat stuff. Where is your evidence?
Dear plato:
i wonder, if you have not alrready done so, if you would want to read MOTHER NIGHT again. I think I shall do this myself inthe next few days, since my friends, both on the extreme left and right, keep saying it supports their views. My understanding is that it is a work of fiction, but wwe shall see.
Jaymeister. It’s not my theory. The fact that Iraq was involved in the OK City bombing was the finding of one US Judge and several top investigative journalists as well as others. I understand that if some people don’t hear it in the MSM it’s tin-foil hat stuff. That’s too bad in my opinion.
If you’re interested in doing a bit of research you could start with ‘The Third Terrorist’ by Jayna Davis. It was a New York Times best seller. I did a quick search in Google and came up with this URL: http://www.jaynadavis.com/. The Wall Street Journal also wrote several articles on this.
Anyway, it’s off topic to this post so I should not have brought it up. Sorry about that Kate.
The problem with people like Vonnegut is that their support for terrorists are entirely inspired by their hatred of Bush. Since that motivation in itself is not an intellectually astute one (in fact, it’s downright immature) they try to coat it with philosphical gibberish that may appear insightful, but is in fact in every sense of the word just a load of farcical bullshit.
If someone blew himself up in the name of “Jesus Christ” for example, Vonnegut would be left with a moral conundrum. Would such a person, by Vonnegut’s own definition, be any less motivated by “self respect”, if they did it because they felt that Christians were being persecuted by leftist ideology? Of course not.
Hypocrisy and double standards are worn as a badge of honor by the Vonnegut’s of this world. And yes, I question his patriotism. I question his commitment to human rights and political freedom. I question his sanity. Tough noogies if he doesn’t like it.
John C:
Just one more point on this, since it’s off-topic. I did a Google search with an open mind and read a few articles online, as well as checking out Jayna Davis’s site. I have four main points of skepticism:
1. Why wouldn’t McVeigh or Nichols squeal – especially McVeigh?
2. This
3. Why wouldn’t Iraq (or al-Qaeda, for that matter) claim responsibility for something like OK City if they were trying to make a point?
4. Why wouldn’t the Bush administration push this information if it were ture? Not only have they never mentioned Iraq with regards to OK City or WTC ’93, they have categorically said that Iraq was not involved in 9/11 (albeit blurring the lines of distinction for political expediency). If true, it would be a much stronger case for the war than WMD. I have to believe the Bushies would be all over it if there were really something there.
(I’m sorry this is off-topic, but it’s much more interesting than rest of the thread.)
Well, okay. I kinda got myself into this didn’t I? But I think Kate has her limits and I may have crossed it. 🙂
Even though I support America and the war on terrorism (although the name is a misnomer) I have serious reservations about how they are waging it. I agree with some of what you say. Here are my thoughts:
1. Perhaps McVeigh didn’t know. Perhaps he did but had his own reasons for keeping quiet. He hated his country. But I think the FBI knew and hid the facts.
2. I think some of these points have been addressed by Jayna Davis and others. I’ve read both sides of this argument and still come down on the side of the judge who wrote a devastating decision in the case of an Iraqi who sued the investigative journalist. The judge basically said the Iraqi was guilty of everything that the investigative journalist claimed and so he had no case. In other words the investigative journalist proved her case.
3. Again, this doesn’t make sense to me either. But then al-Queda has claimed responsibility for other atrocities that it turned out they had no part in. I think Iraq may have been active in the US at that time and didn’t want to tip their hand. Saddam Hussein was quoted several times after the first Iraq war that he would make the US pay for what they did.
4. This also concerns me but in the world of international politics I think we see only the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of things going on that we have no idea of. Like I said above, I don’t understand some things the GOP does or doesn’t do. Some of it makes no sense to me but then I don’t have all the facts.
If you send me your email address I’ll send a bit more info that I don’t feel comfortable publishing online, at least not on Kate’s blog. Here’s a link to my contact form: http://www.johncrittenden.com/contactus.html
http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/1841-.html
Vonnegut on Iraq: SDASocializing medicine: Cafe HayekThe cost of freedom: Confed. YankChris Matthews in denial: LGF. Would he have said the same of Hitler and Stalin?A quote from Dinocrat, re the Iraq vote:"The Left is in a profound crisis, a crisis
Jay doesn’t like the way the arguement is going .
But keeps on finding ways to support the wrong sides argument!
Your minutae of points always line up for the terrorists side and against conservative western culture that was built upon centuries of winning wars and advancing enlightenment. This is the only reason you have the freedom to be so backwards thinking.
The cold war was so easy.
The Russians as depraved and intellectually dishonest as they are/were, were not stupid enough to ignore or be so blind to not see and understand death through “mutual inialation” or at least superior firepower.
The cousin marryin muslim fucktards seem to be actively pursueing such an ends.
The question is are they (ISLAM) such blind idealogues that they truly want to die for their worldview, You know it’s like the left says “It sends the right message” or are they to stupid to see they are outgunned.
Either way it lines up , our introspective weakness and disent from selfloathing cowards can only help the forces fighting against civilization as we know it.
Rich, I could barely understand a word of your syntax, but I’ll try to answer that.
Your minutae of points always line up for the terrorists side and against conservative western culture…
Well, that’s what “Devil’s Advocate” means. I’m challenging you to justify positions that seem odd to me. I have never said that I’m in favour of the terrorists or against western society (which is a very liberal culture in many respects, but that’s another argument for another time). But being an Oilers fan doesn’t mean you never criticize them. Do you think that everything the U.S. does to combat terror is infallible and holier than thou? Or free of partisan rhetoric? That’s what the “coward” business is all about. Competent warriors don’t need to trash-talk.
Hey sorry about the syntax.
I think most of the problems with my writing is punctuation , but thanks for lowering yourself to respond.
What “position seems odd” to you, that you need to regurgitate every tired argument and lie you’ve read at moveon.org or as you say “I need to play Devil’s Advocate” ?
You do sound like what I would expect from the legal counsel of Satan. Kudos for that, very convincing!
Just explain your uneasiness with the position.
Is it simply your uneasiness with incorrect syntax or the exact meaning of the word coward, that makes you argue the pro-headhacker side.
If you think selfexploding muslims with a wish to bang 70 selfhealing virgins for eternity are brave just say it.
Re: Iraq & OKC bombing.
I have read a few of the books about this, and I have to say I wasn’t convinced, but there was a very curious thing about Mr. Youssef (not his real name). He apparently used a passport that could only have been obtained by the Iraq government at the time (it might have been a Kuwaiti one issued during Iraq’s brief occupation).
Anyone have any clarification on this?