out of curiousity i looked at this blog's posts from 4 years ago, the begining of the Bush War. below is some of what i found:
"today the noise is talking about maybe we will preemptively strike iraq before they premptively strike us before the war starts. public discourse will never recover from this kind of jumbled language.
the main thing about the start of the war is that at that point i will be rooting for our side - once the ballon goeas up a lot of us, as the buzz word at my former employer intel goes, will "disagree and commit".
but i still think the war is a bad idea. why?
well not because war, any war, needs to relagated to past cultural eras (altho it does). sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
but not this time. because:
1) we are uninformed about the worldview in that part of the world. how things are settled. often a problem is solved without even talking openly about it, just a word here, a realignment there. as vietnam proved it is a bad idea to fight a war against a people you can't talk with because you don't comprehend the local worldview.
2) if we win in one day and saddam's body is displayed on tv (don't be surprised if this happens) we will just have begun a long, draining, frustrating, dangerous, and expensive series of blunders that will cost us and the world dearly. remember yugoslavia, another arbitrary country made up of disparate peoples?
3) one of the justifications of the war we hear repeatedly from the vox populi is that the president knows things we don't. this is true. and some of the things he knows are no doubt blood-curdling threats to our susvival.
however it is good to remind ourselves that we know things he doesn't. the corporate oligarchy running this war is by definition out of touch with the way you and i live. remember bush sr.'s problem with checking out in a grocery line? i would feel much better if the prez and his cabinent each spent a couple of months on the street with few resources, learned about our world, returned to government and then made their decision about war.
....
5) the deal as of now is that if iraq disarms before the 17th no war. iraq is considered disarmed when england and the u.s. say so. that is the sole criteria today.
6) the scripted press conference last week, and the governor's yearly meeting the week before with the president; each governor got to ask the prez 2 questions submitted in advance. in the past these events were loose and people TALKED to each other. the secrecy, the disnformation to the american people, the extreme twisting of logic and rhetoric make the hitlarian "big lie" look like a very primitive way to manipulate the public. if there is any public left.
.....
the war wobbles on. people like myself, and there are a lot, find themselves in the interesting position of how to comment on the decision's of the government as the language of public discourse continues to shrink into a small puddle of pre-canned cliches.
on the one hand i do not wish disaster to our troops. i want them to survive and win.
on the other hand the ineptness, the hubris, the linguistic distortions of our government, the newly institutionalized secrecy, the corporate connection, can only be ignored by a self-imposed denial.
some of the recent postings on this site do not so much represent, in my view, absolute truth as much as they represent perspectives absent from the "main stream media". (tip of the hat to the neo-conservitives am radio rabble rousers for that last phrase.)
we are not losing the war. we are seeing, sort of, what happens when a lot of powerful, culturally isolated people born and bred to money and power, sit in closed, sealed rooms, incapable of understanding worldviews other than thier own, or of even realizing that there are other worldviews, and plan the future.
one of the things i have been hearing over and over from am radioland is "the president knows more than we do." i disagree. he knows different things than most of us. but because of class and socio-economic distinctions, he and his cohorts are surprisingly naive about the world of other people. including the islamic world.
repeating myself: saddam's hold on a piece of the world is a problem. the hundred's maybe thousands of those like him will continue to be a problem as time goes by. the proliferation of WMD, like saturday night specials, will continue to be a growing problem.
the war, win lose or draw, will not solve any of these problems but only add to them. only rubes, marks, aristocratic provencials, or corporate oligarchs incapable of transcending thier point of view can think otherwise."
if i, the archtypical or maybe typical man on and of the street, reacted to the initiation of the Bush War as the above indicated, how come?
