Rumsfeld proclaiming piously that setting fire to Iraqi oil wells was a crime
against the Iraqi people, whose natural wealth they were; Bush saying the the
post-war reconstruction of Iraq might provide the UN with an opportunity to
"find its legs of responsibility again".
One assumes they don't mean what they're saying; the performance is
jawdroppingly brazen. Rumsfeld even manages to sound bored while he's doing
it.
The megaphone speaker by the clock tower I passed on my way home, having
enumerated the evils of colonialism and empire since year dot, wound up with
"...and the third argument I would like to make is, REMEMBER PALESTINE!".
Urge to shout obscenities never greater. The Arab-Israeli conflict was an
immense, entangled and intractable horror even back in the 1960s; now it has
hardened into bitter and desperate farce, Israel squandering her last
remnants of moral capital in a self-defeating travesty of nationhood. There
is nothing in the whole vicious calamity that supports anybody's arguments
for anything; it has no place as a referent in anybody's scheme of
justification, except as a living instance of the worst, of the political
degraded to the last extreme of hopelessness.
"The adiaphorisation of moral action" - Zygmunt Bauman's phrase, originally
concerned with the Shoah. War brings the consequences of policy nearer to
home: a decision is made, missiles are launched, people die. The policy
enacted prior to war also entailed the deaths of untold thousands, but over a
longer period of time and by a much longer series of indirections.
Responsibility is deferred; the multitudes who died under a policy of
containment and isolation of a dictator apparently were not killed "in our
name". Why does anybody think that the war is a new and dreadful sort of
crime? I want to say that it is the same "crime" as before, that it has been
going on for all of what it has pleased me to think of as my adult life.
Apparently a Scud has actually been shot down by a Patriot missile. That'd be
a first, then.
Dominic
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