Frederick

<snip>
I don't like a lot of what I've heard from the demonstrations around the
world either - the simplistic moralism; the refusal to think
geopolitically...
<snip>

Agreed. I missed the introduction, but I believe it was Michel Abdul Massih,
addressing the London demonstration and 'speaking as a lawyer' (in fact, as
Britain's first Palestinian QC) who declared that 'this war' broke 'every
international law', as though it had already started, and that Israel was
'unique' in using torture. Which is infantile, of course.

But no more infantile that rationalising a war against a secular fascist
whose deputy Prime Minister is a Chaldean Christian on the grounds that he
is secretly in league with an Islamist terror network.

Or the comparison made by Condoleeza Rice between the delay in going to war
against Iraq and the appeasement of Nazi Germany.

The US continued to 'appease' Nazi Germany until its own interests were
threatened, of course. It armed Saddam Hussein. It trained Usama bin Laden.

<snip>
...the argument that US bombs will kill Iraqi babies when S.H. kills babies
every day
<snip>

SH does not act in my name; Blair does, as Bush in yours.

<snip>
only a war - not this farce of inspections - will free them
<snip>

But war isn't some sort of airborne mother and baby unit. The casus belli,
purportedly, is to free Iraq of WMDs on the grounds (a) that they might be
used against the US or US interests and (b) that they might be sold or given
to Islamist terrorists.

Since regional chaos is by no means unlikely during or after the war,
'babies' may well carry on dying and weaponry may well fall into the hands
of, say, Ansar al Islam and/or other Islamist groups and/or into the hands
of various warlords.

(Chechen terrorists left a dirty nuclear bomb in Moscow in 1996 without,
however, detonating it, BTW. So the common pro war line that attacking Iraq
is about keeping the djinn in the bottle or getting it back in the bottle
doesn't make much sense.)

<snip>
The convenient forgetting of, say, the Kurds in the north of Iraq...
<snip>

By whom? Certainly by Bush I. And are we now to bomb Iraq on behalf of Ansar
in Kurdistan or some of the Shia groups allied to Hizb'ullah elsewhere in
Iraq by way of remembrance?

<snip>
...who have been terribly oppressed and who pray that we'll invade.
<snip>

That's smug to a degree. The impression I have is that many Iraqis, Kurds
included, have given up on the West. As well they might. Hence the growth in
Islamism, including militant Islamism.

<snip>
Both the American ruling class AND the rest of us will have some LEVERAGE in
the mid-east
<snip>

Zvi Bar'el, writing in Ha'aretz, has an entirely different, more
sophisticated take. The mass demonstrations in the West, by evidencing
pluralism, are a counterblast to the Islamist temptation and the various
extremist binaries constantly being rolled out. By what they signal about
the divisions in the West they don't show weakness but rather offer, at
least potentially, a way in which the politics of the Arab street and the
policies of the leadership can fruitfully come into dialogue. Which is, I
think, rather needed if these brittle and unrepresentative regimes are not
to be replaced by something very much worse.

CW