[Dean's World] Dave Price: Not Antiwar

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dave Price:
Not Antiwar
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1172398620.shtml


   [1]Just on [2]the other side.

     There is certainly no suggestion from any "respectable" publication
     that the resistance in Iraq is justified, and that therefore Iran
     should be praised for supporting it. That such an obvious argument
     has been totally excluded from the mainstream debate tells us a lot
     about the honesty of our intellectual culture and the integrity of
     our "free press".

   This is what total inability to perceive moral reality looks like.
   It's the same disease that had people defending the Soviet Union even
   as they murdered tens of millions -- except the Communists at least
   pretended to have a noble ideology; the insurgents in Iraq offer
   nothing but death, repression, and poverty, whether of the Baathist,
   Qaedist, or Sadrist variety. To call the Iraqi insurgents "legitimate"
   requires one to ignore the [3]strides made in freeing Iraqis, the
   deliberate attacks on civilians, democracy... one has to wonder what,
   if anything, the insurgents could do that could possibly delegitimize
   them in the eyes of people like this.
   It's also worth pointing out that for all his talk of "intellectual
   honesty" the poster is being misleading, probably deliberately: he
   displays a graph purporting to prove that most attacks are against
   coalition forces, and claims on that basis that the vast majority of
   insurgent attacks do not target Iraqi civilians, but leaves off in
   August 2005, after which time [4]the number of attacks on civilians
   and ISF has grown enormously (p24), which is fatally inconvenient to
   his already grotesquely flawed thesis.
   One can also point out the very obvious fact that areas that coalition
   forces are sent to are by design the most violent; if an area is
   stable and peaceful, [5]like the Kurdish areas, coalition forces are
   not needed. Finding that a large percentage of insurgent attacks are
   against the coalition is sort of like discovering that a large
   percentage of boats are found in the water -- they're there for a
   reason.

References

   1. http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=24570_Daily_Kos_Kidz_Support_Terrorists&only
   2. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/23/13758/6189
   3. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4450582.stm
   4. http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/iraq/index.pdf
   5. http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=2491526n