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To begin with, he begins with an extended survey of Christian theology, including a discussion of the Ten Commandments, and I'm not going to bother resonding to it because it has nothing to do with this. That's because I'm not Christian and the US is not a Christian nation, and the First Amendment says that we're not supposed to run this nation according to the precepts of any single religion. That's also implied by the third clause of Article Six of the Constitution, which forbids any religious test for holding any position in the Government. Christian theology is no more relevant to this discussion than would be the statements of the Zen Masters. So, moving on: Did we have a choice? NO. Bin Laden's gonna kill anyone who disagrees with him. Anyone who gets in his way. We can't stand that. We can't tolerate it. In fact we HAVE tolerated him and Saddam and a bunch of other nitwits for far too long. We've tried to be nice and play diplomacy and be good guys about this, but they aren't playing by the rules. They're not going along with the world society's rules. They're not coloring inside the lines. So we have to play hard ball. In the short term, it's to preserve our own way of life, and our own existence. That's more or less my argument, too. So Zach is saying "War is always wrong, except that this particular war is right." It's rather difficult to resolve that contradiction. I'm tempted to stop here, since we both agree that we need to fight this particular war, which is what I was contending all along. But once again into the breach, my friends: Should we have done it? NO. As I said before, history has proven time and time again that nothing permanent and pure ever stems from violence. And then he proceeds to present a lot of examples of how violence resulted in only temporary gains. But there's an unspoken assumption in there: Nothing is worth doing unless it has permanent and pure results. I don't agree with that. I used to give flowers to my girlfriend; it made her happy. We've since broken up, so it didn't lead to any permanent result. But I still think it was worth doing and I don't have any regrets about it, because I think that transient and impure results are also worthwhile. Short term gain is worth having, all other things being equal. So for me, to demonstrate that there result of a given war would not be permanent isn't to prove that the war is not worth fighting. One of the reasons why is that "short" isn't necessarily all that short. The destruction of Carthage was part of a tapestry of acts by Rome which resulted in its dominance of the entire Mediterranean for 500 years (and the dominance by its culture of the eastern part for a thousand years. That's not permanent, of course, and by the standards of geological time it's probably "short". But it's not short measured in human lives, and a lot of people who lived in those times were glad it had happened. (And of course a lot of others were not.) By the same token, the war we're fighting now won't have permanent results, either. But it may last a long time and what it does do may be good for us -- and that's sufficient even if it's not permanent. So, moving on... "The goal is to prevent future attacks against the US -- and there's now a damned good chance that it will be at least partially successful at that." Zach misunderstood me. I didn't mean that the goal of this war was to make there never be another attack forever on the United States by anyone. I meant the more local goal of preventing attacks during the next fifty years by the particular bunch who attacked us the last time. (And the only way to "not play" is to surrender.) The rest was more of the same. I'm afraid that this was not the droid I was looking for. (discuss) I recommend to you Gleemax's excellent response. Update: Zach responds one more time, and I'm going to let it rest here. It's, um, err, interesting. |
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