Writers, artists and civic leaders on the "war"

Coming next: Sports heroes, Vegas showgirls, and stars of the WB on the "war".

 

Well NOW I'm convinced.


Alex

 

How about elected officials and experts on the subject. Or do they talk in a way thats too complicated for your brain. See what Mtv has done to people.

 

Their opinions are just as relevant as if I were to call the first 50 people in my phone book and get their opinions. Everyone is entitled to their opinion but I don't have to care about the extreme viewpoints of same Hollywood alchoholics and drug addicts that always feel the need to make viewpoints public.

 

Bush was an alcoholic and drug addict. Why is his opinion any more valid?

 

He hasn't had a drink in over 16 years. There's no evidence that he's ever used drugs. He was a two term governor. He is our current President. However, when we have a drunk like Martin Sheen comment then I value his opinion as much as any other drunk.

 

In all seriousness, there are regular, working folks and American citizens like myself who are gravely concerned about the action the Bush administration is about to take on behalf of our nation. In fact, it's a strong departure from any kind of foreign and military doctrine the United States has felt obligated to uphold. I feel it's necessary to reiterate there is nothing extreme about avoiding a rush to war. A concerned citizen has a right and an obligation to speak out against impaired judgement even if it is articulated by our leaders.

For those who are already concerned and especially for those who haven't formulated an opinion please take a moment to consider what the implications of war and more importantly the consequences of a war (quickly administered or protracted) mean to the democratic values we enshrine.

Not In Our Name

I raise this because I am a proud American and want to continue being proud of what my nation stands for.

 

We are all anxiously awaiting the bostonsoccermdl Manifesto.

 

Anyone -- artist, writer, citizen -- has the right to disagree with ANY of our country's policies or actions. Petitions, signed declarations, postings on the Internet...feel free to do it.

And there are people of good conscience, like yourself, who understandably loathe the idea of military action.

So, I took at look at the site you referenced. Some comment on a few of the points you made.

--On the issue of pre-emption: that's simply rhetoric. If we were REALLY engaging in such action on a nation vs. nation scale, we wouldn't have gone throught the UN process. Meanwhile, do we have the juistification to send a drone predator and take out a car containing senior Al Quaeda officials driving in the desert of a sovereign country? Well, guess what, we do.

--On the issue of detaining non-citizens: 1st, 5th, and 14th Amendment rights don't apply to this class of people. We can revoke their visas, and we can deport them. I am not up on international law associated with detaining non-citizens, but suffice to say, we're probably doing a much more civilized version of it than OTHER countries.

--If anti-war activists are put on no-fly lists simply because of their political views, they should call the ACLU pronto. Those publicity hounds would be thrilled to take THAT one to court.

--On the devastation of Iraq -- sanctions NEVER work, but remember that Saddam has diverted billions of oil money to arms, when he could have been HELPING his own people. The fact is that he simply doesn't care about his populace -- didn't then, doesn't now.

--On the WMD issue -- the argument, "Why are we worried about Iraq when others have them?" is a tired red-herring. Sure we used nuclear weapons, but that was 60 years ago, against an adversary who was prepared to have its entire population commit suicide -- and kill millions of OUR soldiers -- to prolong a war that they had already lost. Meanwhile, there is NO way we will use nuclear weapons in a first strike.

--On Saddam Using Nerve Gas when we supported him -- that was a horrendous foreign policy error in retrospect. So is the argument that because we supported him in the past we need to support him now to remain consistent? Well, that's goofy. As for holding OUR officials accountable, what does that mean? War crimes trials? For backing the wrong guy?

--On getting an "oil rich region for an American empire" -- if that's the case, what we should do is conquer Alaska. Plenty of oil up there, and we don't have to send the marines to get it. Seriously, the ambitions of the Bush braintrust, particularly Paul Wolfowitz, is to start the walls of undemocratic and fundamentalist governments falling in the middle east, and to have those countries become democratic.

The fact is that Saddam is despot of the highest/lowest order, a guy who actually looks to Joseph Stalin as his role model. He has burdened his country with two failed wars of REAL aggression, killing millions of his citizens. He has murdered political opponents -- and blood relationship isn't a mitigating factor. He has gassed and poisoned his own population. He addresses his people while cradling firearms. He has flipped the bird at the international community and the United Nations.

Finally, I think military action on our part will not be devoid of cost, but I beieve it will be much less destructive, and much less devastating, than people think. And once we DO go in, and DO win --of that there can be no doubt -- we and international community will bond together to rebuild Iraq.

And watch the Iraqi people rejoice that he is gone, and that we have come to help them.

 

Content is the only measure, it has to be.

Sorry, that's just so good and simple that I thought I'd repeat it.

As for why bother making the effort to read this particular list in order to check their content...sad that this really needs to be explained, but that is the state of our culture today, I suppose. Western culture has ALWAYS valued what artists and writers have had to say about the major issues of their times and for good reason. From Milton to Wordsworth to Orwell to Brecht to Salman Rushdie. Artists, by their very nature, (if they are any good) are in the business of seeing things in new ways, of "defamiliarizing" the familiar. Such an act then sheds new light on the mundane and enriches the viewer/reader for having participated. This is true whether it is Scorcesee defamiliarizing NY immigrant history or Woody Guthrie reacting to the lyrics to "God Bless America." It of course is one reason why artists tend to be progressive by nature: their business is to challenge and change and push boundaries.

As for comparing their relative collective "value" to the opinions of statesmen, I can't believe one would prefer the latter. On the one hand, you have someone whose job description is to be liked by as many people as possible, no matter for what reason. This person also will often have huge financial and career gains at stake depending upon his position on a given issue. Yeah, THAT'S the only group we should be looking to!

On the other hand, artists often have little to gain personally (often much to lose...see Rushdie, Brecht, etc) for taking the stands they do.

Anyway, this is not to say that the content still doesn't have to be judged as the key.

 

By the way, in case some of you assume that because Universal chose the quote he did that the rest of the comments are of a similar tone: they're not. Just a brief skim of the list gave a pretty broad range of opinions (Rushdie, for instance, is in favor of a coalition-led "war of liberation"). Anyway, I really liked this piece from Berger's response:

"Democracy is a proposal (rarely realised) about decision making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard. Democracy should not be confused with the “freedom” of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretense.

Today the fundamental decisions, which effect the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered across the planet, have been and are taken unilaterally without any open consultation or participation."

 

I'm guessing if you weren't impressed with this list, you probably weren't impressed with Brent Scowcroft and Anthony Zinni coming out against invasion, either. It ain't just pot-smoking beatniks like World War II veterans who think all-out invasion might not be the smartest way to go here.

The administration has a big hard-on to invade, and the UN and Democrats in the Senate have already given him enough legal justification. The only thing left is to attempt to rally popular opinion. I don't think it'll work, since Bush has made it perfectly clear how he feels about democracy. While we're listing all the stupid and evil things politicians say, how about "I'm the one who gets to decide, not you"?

As far as the reasons why Saddam is a Bad Man - I could debate them all, and heaven knows I have enough free time. But let's stipulate to all of them. The fact is, saying sanctions don't work is a misnomer. They haven't overthrown Saddam, but they have contained him. Limited military action during this Decade of Deception has contained him. He ain't got nukes, despite what Condi "Snooze Alarm" Rice tried to tell us. He ain't with al-Qaeda, despite what Paul "If ONLY I Could Tell You What I Know" Wolfowitz tried to tell us. He ain't no looming threat, despite what Donald "Draftees Were All Pansies" Rumsfeld tried to tell us.

That pretty much leaves the human rights argument, and you know? I don't mind that one. If that was the one the administration was making, I'd feel a lot better. If we were going to be a force for democracy and human rights on this planet, that would probably be a totally different issue. But to think the Bush Administration has any intention of following that policy is laughable.

And if it was about human rights, well, I haven't seen anything that this invasion wasn't going to be something that killed an awful lot of people this whole business is supposed to save. If Iraq was Rwanda, we'd be nowhere near the place.

Somewhere, a gaunt, sick, kidney-diseased Osama Bin Laden is laughing his god-damned head off at us.

 

And yet Saddam has not disarmed, and has not complied with the agreements put in place at the end of the Gulf War. He continues to have weapons of mass destruction programs, and continues to hamper the weapons inspections process at every turn.

 

Bush

Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic.

 

Oops...there it is AGAIN, the "E" word. Yes, that's right, GWB is saying the "evil" things.

Nothing like demonization to make us feel soooooooo good.

So, when you catch a glimpse of GWB on TV, do you immediately thrust out the cross and hide your eyes? Take the GWB bobblehead doll and push those straightpins in...just...a little bit....umph...further??

Meanwhile, the human rights argument has ALWAYS been implicit in our support of regime change. The argument goes like this: WMD legitimizes overthrow (whether it happens via coup or by M1 Tanks parked in Baghdad); with Saddam toppled, we now exert pressure on Iran (whose fundamentalist regime is already under pressure from internal reformists and young people who want to have a reasonable modern life), and then Saudi Arabia, whose two-faced both-sides-against the middle approach has actually exacerbated instability in the region.

Meanwhile, terrorists have fewer and fewer havens to hide in, even LESS likelihood of getting a batch of VX or, worse yet, some enriched uranium.

Now, this may be a grandiose or absurd vision, or one that leads to some sort of unforseen or unintended disastrous geopolitical consequences, but I don't think it's EVIL. Poisoning your own people is evil...ripping out incubators from hospitals is evil...murdering relatives for political purposes is EVIL (I bet Jeb Bush doesn't have a Kevlar vest in his wardrobe).

Now that we've got that straight, sanctions HAVEN'T worked because Saddam still has WMD and he still managed to divert billions to weapons programs (when he should have been feeding his people). The unintended consequences of sanctions is that the Iraqi people are worse off.

Finally, will we "kill an awful lot of people?" I am not sure how many an "awful lot" is, but I bet it will be quite a few less than Saddam killed in his chemical attacks and his adventures into Iran.

This military action will have its price, but I don't think we will see the horrific results some allude to.

 

Re: Bush

Unless your name is Kennedy, right?


Alex

 

Like in Chile, for instance. They didn't have enough human rights abuses. So we gave them the gift of Pinochet.

Selling the poison is, too.

Gen. Wesley Clark, a former NATO military commander: "If we go in unilaterally, or without the full weight of international organizations behind us, if we go in with a very sparse number of allies, if we go in without an effective information operation ... we're liable to supercharge recruiting for al-Qaida."

http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2002/10/17/zinni/

Supercharge recruiting for al-Qaida? Sounds like a great idea! Count me in!

 

There's a lot more on your post I could respond to, but I wanted to focus on this for just a second.

Karl, you gotta be ************ing kidding me.

I mean, you gotta be ************ing kidding with me here.

You just can't be ************ing serious.

You could have saved time and posted "I am a ************ing idiot" and saved some electrons, if that is what you believe.

I mean, this has been disproved over and over again. It's the ************ing ice sculpture in the centerpiece of the case against rushing off to war.

Are you seriously the last ************ing person in the whole ************ing civilized world to not get the word on this?

I mean, you've gotta be trolling me. You just said that in order to see what my reaction would be. Because there's no god-damned way in the whole ************ing world that anyone would bring that up and try to make a case for invading Iraq. No ************ing way.

Please tell me you're kidding.

Sweet chocolate-covered Jesus with rainbow jimmies.