\t\t\t\tBush-haters’ criticisms of the liberation of Iraq tend to follow scripts. One common complaint was first voiced by Wesley Clark at the beginning of his ill-fated but highly amusing run for the nomination, to the effect that Iraq was a “distraction” from the war on terror that actually emboldened the terrorists at the same time that it pissed them off. We should never irritate the terrorists though express action, because if we ignore them they’ll go away.<\/p>\n
Another script is making the rounds of the more extreme (explicitly) anti-capitalist wing: that Saddam wasn’t really such a bad ruler, because the sanctions regime was the real villain in pre-liberation Iraq. This script is put out by the same people – Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore – who say that invasion was unnecessary because “containment was working.”<\/p>\n
Excuse me, but “containment” and “sanctions” are two names for the same thing. So how can this thing be bad when the Bush-haters need to answer the human rights dimension of the liberation, but good when they need to slam the death and destruction coincident to the liberation?<\/p>\n
In Chomsky’s fantasy, lifting the sanctions would have ensured that the Iraqis themselves could have otherthrown Saddam, which means that he at least sees the contradiction and tries to address it, while Moore doesn’t see it at all (at least according to his appearance on the lame Air America<\/a> “O’Franken Factor”<\/a> today).<\/p>\n If elimination of the sanctions was the key to the overthrow of Saddam by Iraqis, why didn’t they get around to it before the sanctions were put in place?\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bush-haters’ criticisms of the liberation of Iraq tend to follow scripts. One common complaint was first voiced by Wesley Clark at the beginning of his ill-fated but highly amusing run for the nomination, to the effect that Iraq was a “distraction” from the war on terror that actually emboldened the terrorists at the same time … Continue reading “Logic Problem”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-um","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1882\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}