KENT JOHNSON wrote:
>
> Henry,
>
> We'll get lots of images of people celebrating now, especially of the
> long-oppressed ethnic groups. Who can't feel happy for them, even
> those of us who oppose this war?
>
> I can understand how such images would give you a rush of
> vindication that you would want to share, now that the conquering
> legions are closing in on victory and all the statues are being pulled
> down.
>
> But what about the images of horror we have seen so little of and of
> which there are so many? Those countless stories of pain and
> despair we will never know? The thousands, probably tens of
> thousands, of dead and maimed and traumatized? Not just the
> "innocent," but the countless combatants, too, most of them
> perfectly decent and loving and confused people like us all, I'm
> sure. And to think that it is not over yet...
>
> I know you are sad about the many deaths and broken lives. But
> I'm wondering: Do you feel now that these celebrating images prove
> that the slaughter, still ongoing, was worth having had?
>
> I'm not trying to start a row with you, and I don't want to, frankly.
> But I have a question, and I'm really interested in your answer: Will
> you also support the coming invasion of Syria? It, also, is a
> Baath'ist regime. Why stop now? And why stop after that? There's
> no doubt we can roll over everyone, and that our TV's will show us,
> at the end of every case, the crowds in the square cheering as the
> statues come down...
>
> Kent


How very short-sighted of them.  All those people celebrating the fall
of Saddam Hussein.  But you know, maybe they're all CIA plants.  Or the
Marines paid them.  Or held guns to their heads.  Something like that.
They're obviously morally insensitive.  To the maimed victims of
bombing, but even more so to morally sensitive antiwar Westerners.
Those unruly mobs don't realize that the most important thing in the
world is the feeling that one's own hands are clean. It's terrible that
people like Uday Hussein casually shoot people and the Mukhtabiyeh
torture them and the Fedayeen Hussein push women and children ahead of
them and fire from crowds but the point is that those are BAD people.
GOOD people must go on being GOOD, with clean hands, i.e., passive and
impotent.  Oops, no, sorry, not impotent, but using LAWYERS,
INTERNATIONAL LAW, INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS like the UN and Amnesty
International and so on.  But not  nasty guns and bombs and tanks and
POLITICS, because that runs the risk of blurring the difference between
being GOOD and being BAD.  Those people pulling down statues and saying
"USA Good" and even, horribly!!!!, "Thank you Bush" are so dreadfully
terribly wrong and shortsighted - they've made YOU UNCOMFORTABLE. It
would have been so much better, so much more life-affirming and humane
and progressive, if they had gone on enduring the informers and the
torture cells.  You would have been SO much happier if they had shunned
the Marines.

Unspeakable.  And Stuart Ross's email.  Unspeakable.  You'll exploit
anything, won't you.  Even maimed bombing victims.  It's interesting how
malleable truth is.  It is TERRIBLE that Unintended Consequences haven't
quite come into play as much or as fast as you wanted.  But there's no
need to rethink - you can still warn against them.  In some hypothetical
future war.  SURELY the US will sell out the Kurds or put some martinet
in charge or kill (NO DOUBT intentionally) another reporter or do some
other stupid thing to go on justifying your bad opinion of it.

I love that gesture of slapping Saddam's picture or the severed head of
his statue with a shoe - apparently the worst insult, worse even than
pissing on it (which we almost saw one guy do).  Very effective symbolic
gesture.  I wouldn't mind adopting it.