Louis Proyect wrote: >Right. Our "intelligentsia": Christopher Hitchens, Marc Cooper, >Michael Berube, George Packer and all the others who would have been >writing articles in 1914 had they been alive in favor of stopping >the Hun.
Marc Cooper wrote this in the LA Weekly for August 16-20: >And yet, as I strolled the crowded streets around the dazzling >Golden Mosque in the ancient Kadhimiya quarter of the city and >looked upon the black-robed Shiah women with tattooed lips and the >old wizened men puffing on hookahs under green fluorescent lights in >the corner tea shops, I couldn't think of one single justification >for waging war against this nation or its people. > >And now, as Bush the Second noisily threatens to finish the job that >Poppy pooped out on, I find even less justification, if that's >possible. At least during the first Gulf War you could delude >yourself into thinking we were rescuing occupied Kuwait and >restoring rule to its syphilitic sheiks. > >But this time around, what? We can be chums with the nuclear-armed >Chinese Stalinists who hold public executions of petty criminals and >beat up senior citizens in Tian An Men Square. We contained the >Soviets and their arsenal for 50 years, but we can't figure out a >way to deal with Saddam short of invasion? > >When it becomes so patently obvious that the administration's >warmongering stems not at all from any authentic security concerns >but rather from cold and cynical domestic political calculation, why >is there no clear and steadfast anti-war opposition? > >Instead, as New Yorker writer Henrik Hertzberg recently said, "In >Washington one side wants war; the other wants debate about war." >The result is a pro-war faction and a "maybe war" faction, he >rightly says.
