January 21, 2004
Cuenca, Ecuador
 

warning... political commentary below... if you're looking for more travelogue... skip to the next day.

I seem to have incited a little dissent.   A fellow named david from DC sent me an email, not quite sure who he is.  but he sent a long note to me, which i assume must have been prompted by my comments in this website.  Now I appreciate a good debate, but i do have a few problems with his email, which (since it was rather unsolicited) i have taken the liberty of attaching below. 

• First, note the lack of a hello, or a greeting.  now come on david, i don't (think i) even know you!   perhaps you could say hello first!   next, you might want to make this a little more personal.  for instance, "dear daniel, i was reading your website and i think you're really full of shit.  my reasoning follows..."    i get the feeling that maybe this is a generic positioning piece that you are spamming the net with.  perhaps you work in Cheney's office (the real center of power in the country right now, in case anyone was wondering) and this is part of a sophisiticated, low-level, disinformation campaign...

• But enough with the pleasantries, lets get right to the heart of it.  You pose a thesis:  am i against killing or against war, i may have to choose.  hmm.  ok.  fair enough.  frankly, i'm against killing and against war in general, though certainly, when the huns are coming over the wall, its time to grab your club and start swinging.  but more importantly, i'm against lying in order to get what you want.  i.e. the american people aren't sophisticated enough to deal with the truth, lets just shade things because we know that this is really what they want in their hearts anyway.

• But perhaps more germane to your email, i am against one-sided debate david.  if you can't address the valid points raised in both sides of a complex argument, then you have no business entering that debate in the first place.  as we all know... the people that write for the Intellectual Conservative and the National Review on the conservative side, or The Nation and Mother Jones on the liberal, do not generally convince anyone of anything who is not already sympathetic to their cause.  in general, they are there for the mental masturbation of those who are already believers.  if you want to write something that actually convinces someone of something, then you must address the valid concerns of the opposing side, and present your corresponding point of view.  in a sense, you must be somewhat sympathetic.  it would seem you haven't even taken the time to consider, let alone address the concerns of those that don't share your ultimate conclusions.  you isolate two small elements of the whole debate and ignore the rest... come on david... you've got more ammo than that... widen your scope a bit.

• Basically, you launch into a historical overview of wartime casualties, coming to the obvious conclusion that the numbers are getting smaller.  well that's certainly no surprise.  i would agree.  the precision of modern warfare is certainly resulting in lower numbers, and without a doubt the immediacy of the media coverage is lowering our appetite for casualties--and that is definitely a good thing.  maybe when there is a camera strapped to the barrel of every m-16, even one death will be too many.  but is the number of people that die the ultimate judge of the justification of a war?  and furthermore, are we more just simply because our technology for killing is better?   i think not.  if china invades us tomorrow, and only kills one person in the process, does that mean that it was a just war?  of course not... it is the reason for the war, and who struck first, and whether you are invading or defending, and all sorts of other things that constitute the final judgment in the eyes of history.  but by your reasoning, since china only killed one person and we have killed many more than that, then in the final judgment they are justified in their tactics... because that one death is balanced by the many more that we have already caused.  sure you include deaths against iraq's own people, which is certainly disturbing... but you also lump in the iran-iraq war.  are we to have the casualties in vietnam on our head, simply because we participated?  hmm... you may be right about that...    could i suggest david, this is a bad place to start your debate?

• And the complacency thing, david?  Aside from sounding like a mouthpiece for the defense industry (the opposite of complacency would be to engage in conflict, correct?), you are quoting some pretty large and random numbers here of highly dubious origin... "50 million lives to the crime of complacency."  uh... hold on a second.  would you mind footnoting that?  not that it would really matter...  i mean, after all... whose crime of complacency?  exactly what complacency?  is this the complacency of everyone but ourselves--since obviously we're not the complacent ones?  get real my friend...   seriously, this one had me rolling on the floor.

• Lets get down to brass tacks here, david.  Can we dispose with the pleasantries?  Americans feel in their guts that they are justified in saving the world in this way.   We don't have to answer to anyone else.  We know what's right... after all, its obvious, no?  Quoting from the president's recent state of the union speech: America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.  But the problem is, that if America doesn't need permission from anyone, than neither does anyone else--or would you argue that divine insight is reserved for us alone?  For example, if Pakistan invades India for a long list of reasons, chief among them the purpose of liberating the arab population that is suffering under hindu rule, then aren't they justified?  After all, these people are not effectively represented by the government in place, and obviously they are being oppressed!  Where does it stop?   The world is not a perfect place... lord knows the US cannot make it so through sheer force of will and military muscle.

• The funny thing is, that we have a much different form of decision making with regards to crime here in our own country.  We call it trial by jury.  Both sides present their evidence, to a group of their peers, and you know what?  sometimes the bad guys get away... but the benefit of an uncorrupted form of justice is overwhelmingly something we prefer to a situation where a single judge simply decides your fate.  And do you think america has a perfect track record?  David, i can tell you that after 7 months of traveling through latin america, that we have truly corrupted and screwed up the process down here, and in most cases perpetuated and entrenched the mechanisms of corruption and abuse of power to our own ends... this is no garden of democracy down here.  Not to mention that the war on drugs has created and perpetuated the illegal market for cocaine shipments from colombia, which has kept the colombians in a state of warfare more than it has helped to bring peace to that country.  yes... all hail the allied victories in world war I and II, but we meddle for the most part.  its just that the meddling doesn't make it on the front pages.. it only comes back to haunt us 20 years later... as in afghanistan, iraq, et al.

• David, have you noticed how the debate over this war has shifted over the last 2 years?  Sadly you've been bamboozled too.  Nowhere in your letter did you mention those pesky Weapons of Mass Destruction!  But David, this was the primary reason why our president led us into war.  Perhaps you should go watch the newsreels again.  It wasn't "hey this guy is a brutal dictator that's enslaving his own people, lets take him out," it was "hey, this guy is a threat to our national defense."  Don't you remember david?  Post 9-11.  world trade center taken down by arabs... these guys are arabs too... the al-queda connection, the WMD...  lets take them out!  The problem with what's going on here is not even just "the ends justify the means," it's that "whatever the end happens to be, lets rewrite the history of the reasoning in the first place."   Regardless of whether you feel we have convincing evidence that the WMD thing was a lie (yes, Kay resigned and Powell--arguably the only remotely honest person on the staff-- can't seem to keep his hand over his mouth anymore)... i would argue that shifting the reasons for entry from national security to freeing an enslaved people is lying enough.  After all, are we going to single-handedly spend $200B of our own money without any other foreign support to free each and every enslaved peoples around the world?  no... and that was never our expectation at the outset.  this was an interest of national security. what about north korea... they do have nuclear weapons... shall we invade forthwith?  of course not... their nuclear weapons might actually hit us.  At least with iraq, we were pretty sure that it was only the israelis that were going to get it when we invaded... (hello folks... sarcasm alert here).

• I agree that the french and the russians among others had big private contracts that colored their decisions to participate or not.  but does that mean we should act unilaterally?  i.e. if the UN is broke, then address the problems directly and honestly--don't try to run around the world fixing the world's problems without the world's consent.  bush keeps complaining about the UN and iraq's violation of a handful of UN charters...  but iraq could never violate as many resolutions as israel has--its not even a close race. and what do they get?  $3B a year in continued funding... and occasionally a slap on the wrist.... nothing more.  if we expect to do some fixing around here, we need to start in our own backyard first.

• And how about all that good-samaritan fixing we're supposed to be doing over there?  I'd call it a half-assed, pretty much botched job at best.  We weren't even ready for what we were dealing with... or rather the people that were aware of the scope of the challenge were quietly kept off the team.  we failed to guard the principal ministries, and the national museum and let 100 years of official records and all of the key treasures of the cradle of civilization itself get plundered.  (fucking unforgivable, don't you think).   we have miserably failed at bringing peace there, and now we're running back to the same UN with our tail between our legs, trying to rush a handover that is doomed to fail as well.  the arabs have a saying that "40 years of oppression is better than one day of anarchy."  its interesting to think about, eh?  not sure that i buy it completely, but it makes you take a second and think about the implications that even a short period of disarray can have, doesn't it?  By the way, i pulled that quote and a few of my facts from among other places, this amazing article on just how badly we have botched the "fixing" we're doing in Iraq.  Can you supply an equally in-depth article from a perhaps more conservative paper on just how well the fixing is going?  Seems to me over here that the conservative voices don't tend to do the probing, in-depth pieces...  but prove me wrong.  (you get fox news calling themselves "fair and balanced"  what a crock of shit.  there's no accountability for what gets said.)  Come on david, cough up the article... after all, we're supposed to be there to fix things up, right?

• As for your blogs... thank you for the references.  There are some good ones in there.  I will remark that i don't know the demographics of web-literate iraqis, or how many of these iraqis are in or outside the united states right now.  But i will tell you that i accept the notion that there are a large number of iraqis that are darned glad to be rid of saddam.  Did i say i was a saddam fan?  No... i did remark a couple days ago on the number of US soldier suicides, and i made an offhand comment that there were certainly a large number of iraqis that feel like they may have traded a dictator on one hand for the evil empire on the other.  If I was in their shoes... who knows, i might be dancing in the streets.  my point is... i hate to be lied to.  go read the intro to this site.

• Let me reframe your original question david:  "if something's amiss... shouldn't we do something about it?"  I wholeheartedly agree.  We should.  In that respect, I think America's heart is in the right place.  Yes, if a man is clubbing a puppy to death, then you rush to help.  But david, it's the how of how we go about it, that needs some serious fixing.  If it's to lie about the reasons... then no, i don't think so (did i mention that i hate to be lied to?).  Keep in mind, you don't have to lie to anyone about the reasons to save a puppy from being clubbed.  If Americans can't make the right decisions given all the information, then lying to them isn't going to make matters better.  Its called 'taking justice into your own hands' david, and there are a million episodes of a million cop shows and a million "law and order"-type shows out there that beat into our heads everyday why that's wrong.  can i refresh your memory?  its because no one person, no one entity, can profess to be the final judge for the rest of humanity.  no one person is blessed with absolute moral purity, and even if there was such a person (uh, hint, probably not george w. bush) -- once you give the candy (the right to judge) to one kid... all the rest of them want it too, including the rotten apples.  we need solutions and a framework that works for all peoples, not just for one cowboy nation.

• Can i give you one more hint?  The world is getting smaller david... what may have worked before when anarchy largely ruled the globe will no longer work in the future.  Yes, perhaps it has been helpful to have an (arguably) benevolent bully with a big fat stick in the past, perhaps not.  But regardless, the times are changing.  In 200 years, the things we call countries now will probably be more like states--some independence, but not complete unilateral freedom.  It must change, because the population is growing, technology is accelerating at a blistering pace, the economy is now officially global, and environmental resources--key among them space, fresh water and energy--are drying up.  (oh, excuse me... .sorry said the nasty environment word).  it has to change.  and it will.

Can anyone out there do a better job than our friend david?  Perhaps he's not up to the task... lets have some real debate here.  Are there any really smart people out there in this mcdonald's nation that actually believe all this crap we're being served? 

Remember... the question is:  is it ok to lie to your people in order to achieve what you think they want?  Or perhaps you'd like to debate whether you think we've been lied to or not (oh, please... go ahead, make my day)   Yes, yes, saddam was a bad man... we've all got the point.  Stick to the main argument if you please.

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