Chapman billy wrote in message m... (to Mark Houlsby)
In article , Mark Houlsby
says...
Well, patient cajoling has been ongoing in this dispute for some
considerable time now.

My timescale is years, yours, apparently, weeks.

'The cause is often won, with judgement, and silence like the game
of chess. All depends upon the move.'
--Hugh Henry Brackenridge (Modern Chivalry)

Simon,

I hope that you will not mind if I make some comments here on your
response to Mark Houlsby. You should know that I don't necessarily
agree with all his comments to you; as always, I am expressing myself
independently here.

Did you support a campaign of years of 'patient cajoling' to persuade
Saddam Hussein to cease Iraq's military occupation of Kuwait?

One should make the best of a given situation; granted his approval ratings,
most Americans must have made their peace concerning George W Bush's Florida
travails. He is legally legitimate whether you like it or not.

"You ought to be beating your chest every morning. You ought to look
in the mirror, suck in our bellies, and say, 'Damn, we're Americans!'"
--General Jay Garner (Rtd.), who runs Iraq's interim government now

For the record, Adolf Hitler also was the 'legally legitimate' leader
of Germany, and his evident 'approval ratings' (insofar as can be
estimated today) were remarkably high among his people until the last
year or two of the Second World War. By the way, I regard Jerome
Bibuld's now customary "Heil Dubya!" salutation as a rhetorical
embellishment, not a strict historical comparison. Nonetheless, both
Adolf Hitler and George W. Bush came to supreme power without ever
having been elected by a majority of their peoples, respectively, and
both of them seem to be imperialists with dreams of world domination.

Suggesting that Gore is president is "pointless speculation". Furthermore,
according to you, if we engage in this "pointless speculation" and Gore had
won the election, there would have been no September 11. For myself, I don't
believe Al Qaeda could give a fig who is the leading infidel.

Here I have to admit that I don't know exactly how the top leaders of
Al Qaeda (whoever they are) make their decisions. I never have been
invited to observe any of their secret high-level meetings. Do you
happen to have a private reliable 'inside source' therein?

As far as I know, however, Osama bin Laden's primary grievance against
the United States was the presence of American military bases in Saudi
Arabia, which he may have regarded as a desecration of the kingdom's
sacrosanct status as the guardian of the holy Islamic cities of Mecca
and Medina. Previous to that American 'military occupation' of Saudi
territory, however, he does not seem to have been exceptionally
'anti-American'. Indeed, reportedly, he cooperated with the CIA while
waging his personal sacred 'war of liberation' against the Soviet
military occupation of Afghanistan.

"What is Osama bin Laden? He's America's family secret. He is the
American President's dark doppelganger. The savage twin of all that
purports to be beautiful and civilized. He has been sculpted from
the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy:
its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy
of 'full spectrum dominance', its chilling disregard for non-American
lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic
and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has
munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of
locusts....

Both invoke God and use the loose millenarian currency of Good and
Evil as their terms of reference. Both are engaged in unequivocal
political crimes. Both are dangerously armed--one with the nuclear
arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent,
destructive power of the utterly hopeless....The important thing to
keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the
other."

--Arundhati Roy (The Algebra of Infinite Justice)

...Certainly, your view that to "all appearances", Bush is acting imprudently
is odd; to most Americans it appears he has been acting rather sensibly;
don't you read any opinion polls, or do you trust to luck?

I refuse to accept the general proposition that a policy must be
right, or even 'rather sensible', simply because it might seem
popular, according to a selected poll of public opinion. (Most
Americans once supported slavery too.) In 1988, after an American
warship shot down an Iranian airliner, killing all 290 persons aboard,
most Americans (who were understandably deceived by the official
U.S. Navy cover-up) supported that shoot-down too, according to polls.

"Voice or no voice, the people can be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are
being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."
--Hermann Goering (1946, at the Nuremberg Trials)

And Hermann Goering had been in a sufficient position of power to
have known with authority what he was explaining about that.

You seem to underestimate the ease with which polls of public opinion
can be manipulated by the phrasing of their questions: "manufacturing
consent", an expression originated by Walter Lippmann in his 1922
book, "Public Opinion", and more recently popularized by Noam Chomsky
with his book of that title.

"All this was deliberately obscured by government and media in
manufacturing the case for destroying Iraq. Either without proof or
with fraudulent information, Saddam was accused of harbouring weapons
of mass destruction seen as a direct threat to the US....This is an
almost total failure in democracy--ours, not Iraq's: 70 percent of
the American people are supposed to support this, but nothing is more
manipulative than polls asking 465 Americans whether they 'support
our President and troops in time of war'...The doctrine of military
pre-emption was *never* voted on by the American people or their
representatives." (20 April 2003, The Observer)
--Edward Said ("Give us back our Democracy")

http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/st...940123,00.html

"People are not intelligent. It is very unreasonable to expect them
to be so, and that is a fate my philosophy reconciled me to long ago.
How else could I have lived for forty years in America?"
--George Santayana (December 1917, letter to Bertrand Russell)

Contrary to fact, you seem to assume that most Americans are
well-informed about the Middle East, its histories and American
policies there, and hence they are well-qualified to make judgements
about whether or not those policies appear 'rather sensible'.

You may know that no "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs) have been
discovered in Iraq to date. Certainly, no WMDs were employed by Iraq
in the recent war.

According to a May 14-18 poll of 1265 Americans conducted by the
Program on International Policy Attitudes at University of Maryland:
34% of Americans believe that WMDs have been *already found* in Iraq.
22% of Americans believe that WMDs were *used* by Iraq in the war.

"Given the intensive news coverage and high levels of public
attention, this level of misinformation suggests some Americans may
be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance."
--Steve Kull (director of Program on International Policy Attitudes)

"Only a few people--a shrinking number, apparently--are willing to
study current events in depth. Denver pollster Floyd Ciruli says
between 2 and 10 percent of the population are 'extremely involved'
in following the news, and only 1 to 2 percent closely follow
foreign affairs. And roughly 30 percent, he said, 'will *believe
anything*'." (22 June 2003, Denver Post)
--Fred Brown ("What can we learn from our ignorance?")

Here are some comments on the American people and their leader now
from Thomas de Zengotita, an American writer, in his essay, "The
Romance of Empi and the politics of self-love", in Harper's:

"All his life Bush has been protected by his birthright from the
consequences of pretensions he might not have been able to live up
to on his own. He became tough and confrontational--but without
risk....Bush's heart was elevated on 9/11 from a personal to a
historic plane. He understood his role after that day in terms of
divine election--don't doubt that. He experienced himself being
chosen by God to lead a War on Terror in exactly the way he once
experienced his personal salvation: in his heart, where floods of
feeling admit no doubt. So conceptualized, this sentimentality
appears to Bush as his own essential goodness, a goodness that
merges with the greater goodness of the American People, binding
them together. Patriotic participation in a mission, embodied
in gear, is extended through this gesture to the romanticized
polity, embracing millions of Americans who identify their highest
selves with this same sentimentality....

He has no notion of historical context at all. None. The world
is flat as a set to a man who equates learning with affectation,
which Bush has done all his life. So the comparison between his
goodness, which is the goodness of his people, and Saddam's evil
is all he needs. It is that simple, and Bush prides himself on
simplicity. Simplicity is what allows him to follow his heart.
....
The Grievance, instantly iconic, also gave Americans permission
to ignore the history of our involvement in the Arab and Islamic
worlds. 'Nothing could justify what they did on 9/11...'
functioned as a blanket pardon for continued indifference to
context. Conditioned by media to avoid anything they can't
understand in a minute, our citizens have learned to think of
ignorance as sturdy common sense. They have internalized the
flattery heaped upon them by generations of political shysters,
serving various agendas, all of which have this in common: they
rely upon the nation's civic laziness. The vaunted 'wisdom of
the American people'--even more vaunted than Iraq's Republican
Guard--is the more to be cherished for being theirs by
definition, effortlessly acquired, no tedious study, no ethical
reflection demanded, yet another convenience among so many. It
is sufficient to declare that 'you have to take a stand at some
point!' in tones that thrill with conviction, because such
bromides seem adequate to the tiny sphere of one's own experience.
Projecting such maxims onto the complexities of world affairs
follows automatically, because representations of that world have
been reduced to terms that invite just those projections.
Performing those reductions is the whole business of journalism,
and the whole business of politicians is to align their
personalities and policies with them.

In the case of Bush, no particular exertions were required.
Indifference and ignorance were long entrenched, already cast as
virtues. And people in his constituency are drawn to him for
just that reason. Jokes about Dubya's mangled vocabulary,
revelations of his inability to identify foreign leaders and
historical events--the educated classes in the blue states might
have been gleefully appalled, but folks in the heartland, folks
who take pride in describing themselves as 'ordinary Americans',
they were neither gleeful nor appalled. On the contrary. They
resented the snobs who jeered at his natural awkwardness and
innocent errors in an ill-disguised attempt to draw attention to
their own suave ways, their own erudition. Bush's hold on his
constituency depends not only on the rhythms of sentiment they
share but on their common antipathy to all things intellectual
and refined, an antipathy deriving from devotion to practical
enterprises. Bush's people know the difference between being
smart--as in quick, cunning, focused--and being educated,
overeducated, psuedo, verbose, affecting an interest in the
useless, the unintelligible, the foreign. Unlike so many who
mocked him for stupidity, they knew that Bush was smart; it
showed in the way he looked people in the eye, always gauging,
a gifted salesman scoping out the client. So when Bush triumphs,
his people triumph. When Bush confounds the highbrow critics--
the tenured radicals, the effete Frenchmen, the African diplomats
with thousand-dollar suits and Oxbridge accents--all those
masters of gray nuance, weaving their paralyzing webs out of
distant causes and obscure consequences--when Bush the Bold
confounds them all with simple words and simpler deeds, well,
his people are themselves vindicated. They were right all
along, right to be ignorant, right to be parochial--*right*,
by God, just to be American.."

--Thomas de Zengotita (Harper's, July 2003, pp. 36-8)

You seem to underrate the ability of demagogues in democracies
to inflame the base passions of their peoples and sometimes to
persuade them into supporting catastrophic decisions of state.
At such times, I like to read Thucydides's account of Athens's
Sicilian Expedition in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE).

"The moral splendor of American empire can be made to stand on a
pedestal of lies....The American news media can be relied upon to
sell the spectacle and leave the story to the government....
Package the imperialist agenda as instructive entertainment, and
the American public will come to know and love the product....

Welcome to the brave, new freedom-loving world envisioned by the
heirs and assigns of what once was a democratic republic. Let
any nation anywhere on earth even begin to think of challenging
the American supremacy (military, cultural, socioeconomic) and
America reserves the right to strangle the impudence at birth."

--Lewis Lapham ("The Demonstration Effect", Harper's, June 2003)

One of the big problems in the world today is the abysmal level of
governance across huge swathes of the planet.

'The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.'
--Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France)

"What is happening to this country? When did we beome a nation
which ignores and berates our friends?...How can we abandon diplomacy
when the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?"
--Senator Robert Byrd (19 March 2003, speech in the U.S. Senate)

Yes, many Americans already strongly agree that there should be a
"regime change" in Washington in 2004-5.

"Lewis H. Lapham (the editor of Harper's) writes for those willing
to expand the discourse beyond the sermons of Donald Rumsfeld and
Ari Fleischer. The word 'democracy' oozes from the American media
millions of times a day. But because it always comes after 'defend
our' or 'protect our', it remains a concept used mainly by those in
power to conceal the motives of a jittery government and imprison
its citizens. Democracy is thus never actualized at home and becomes
more of an illusion each time a bomb is dropped in its name on another
sovereign state."
--Lewis Akenji (letter to Harper's, June 2003)

"On matters of the gravest importance, constitutional principles have
been violated and the electorate lied to. We are the ones who must
have our democracy back." (20 April 2003, The Observer)
--Edward Said ("Give us back our Democracy")

If, a big if, Bremer pulls it off in Iraq, then the US economy can only
benefit, albeit in a small way given Iraq's relative unimportance:
besides, what are you suggesting, that the Allies pull out?

Why do you seem to believe that the United States government always
has kept the best interests of Iraq's peoples in mind? As I recall,
the United States tended to support Saddam Hussein, including during
a period when he was crushing the Kurds, until he made the fateful
miscalculation of invading Kuwait (without asking permission first).

"In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then the U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations, was asked on national television ("60 Minutes", 12 May 1996)
what she felt about the fact that five hundred thousand Iraqi children
had died as a result of U.S.-led economic sanctions. She replied that
it was 'a very hard choice', but that all things considered, 'we think
the price is worth it'. Albright never lost her job for saying this.
She continued to travel the world representing the views and
aspirations of the U.S. government."
--Arundhati Roy (The Algebra of Infinite Justice)

Why do you seem to believe that the American invasion of Iraq was
motivated only by the goal of creating a democracy therein?

I have to say that you seem too impressed or distracted by American
flag-waving. You seem not to question the facile American rhetoric
of supporting democracy, and you seem to ignore the historical record
of bloody American actions to put down democracy in many countries.

It would be unprecedented for the United States to support a truly
democratic government in that region. For the record, here are some
of the national leaders whom the Americans actually have supported:
the Shah of Iran, the King of Saudi Arabia, and Emir of Kuwait, and,
yes, Saddam Hussein himself (especially during his war against Iran).

Before the Americans (and other Allied forces) liberated Kuwait from
Iraq's conquest, the United States government proclaimed to its people
that this 'liberation' would mean 'restoring democracy' to Kuwait.
Today, with the full blessings of the United States, the Emir of
Kuwait rules his people while hardly allowing any more democratic
institutions than before.

One thing I am sure of, it won't make a huge difference to the
American economy.

On the contrary, as I recall, Iraq's proven oil reserves are exceeded
in amount in its region only by Saudi Arabia's. For the foreseeable
future, the United States government will enjoy primary de facto
control over how Iraq's oil supply is allocated. And that may have
major strategic as well as economic importance to the United States.

...I can curse or praise with equal gusto any leader on the planet, is
that servility?

'Unanimity is almost always an indication of servitude.'
--Charles de Remusat

I have no reason to doubt that you express yourself here both
sincerely and independently. And I have attempted to respect
your views even though I should disagree with some of them.

On the other hand, some of your rhetoric appears aimed quite
selectively here. You have taken me to task for writing a
factual post about a 1988 historical event, even though you
do *not* (indeed, no one else here does) dispute its facts.
Meanwhile, you have remained silent while a faction of
jingoistic American racists here (Tim Hanke, StanB, Briarroot)
has waged a campaign of baseless ad hominem attacks on me.
Of course, you are not morally obliged to speak out in my
defence; I am quite able to defend myself well against such
attacks. Yet I mention this only in the hope that it might
lend more balance to your perspectives on rhetoric here.

'Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which
there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more
personal liking.'
--George Eliot (Felix Holt)

--Nick