Tuesday, March 30, 2010

A terse response

I caught up too late with comments on another blog concerning one of my posts on this blog. My initial post,
No apologies, please, excoriated the waste of American lives and the mutilated bodies of young soldiers, along with the thousands of dead Iraqis -- all for nothing.

Here is the comment that piqued my interest:
"I wonder if Ms. Wright would’ve opposed U.S. battling the Nazis in World War II, allowing the Nazis to kill even more millions of Jews, Gypsies, etc. After all, Germany never attacked the U.S. Also, since the U.S. helped install Iraq's Saddam Hussein in the first place, why did the U.S. not have a moral obligation to remove him?"

You got that right about WWII. This country's security was never in jeopardy in either of Europe's so-called World Wars -- not in No. 1, nor in No. 2. The U.S. was under no threat from Germany and in no danger of Hitler carrying on a war 3,000 miles from his shores. He could hardly handle the blitzing of that little island just across the pond. Europeans have been killing off one another since forever. We had no reason to meddle in yet another of their ludicrous and centuries-long squabbles. Of course, the Great WWII has been sanctified by all those ridiculous Hollywood movies, and by the men who fought in it and, understandably, don't want to think of their efforts as worthless. If ever there was an "entangling alliance" that we could have stayed out of, this was it.

And where did the ignorant notion come from that this country went to war to "save the Jews," or any of Hitler's other victims? This is obviously a trope that has become popular as we move further away in years from the actual conflict. Churchill and Roosevelt weren't conferencing over such matters to alter these events, even though there were rumors of atrocities going on.

And the justification for invading Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein is a new one. So, whenever we install a dictator in a country, that gives us an automatic right to return to that land, kill off endless numbers of its population, turn its society and culture upside down, while taking out the dictator we originally installed? This is so dumb, that it's un-effing-believable! Such a policy could keep the U.S. busy at war for the rest of its history. A "moral obligation" to kill Iraqis, so that we could murder the country's leader? What kind of twisted rationalization is that?

By the way, the blog being referenced is made up of "black conservatives." Most of the responding comments were pretty much along the lines of the above quoted one. They are heavy into justifying "collateral damage," i.e., our unfortunate soldiers and the unlucky Iraqi people. Ho-hum, somebody's got to die, after all.

Related

Wrecking what was left of the West

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