As Chomsky has explained many times, it is a given that U.S. motives are always pure. All criticism has to accept that. As a result, _any_ war the U.S. wages has from the beginning a large base of support. After all, probably a third of the population thinks Iran is someplace in South America. When I once asked a class where El Salvador was (this was during the civil war there), quite a few guessed the Middle East. I wonder if any public opinion poll in (say) 1968 asked if Vietnam was in (three choices). If they had, they would have gotten some strange answers probably.
Carrol -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jim Devine Sent: Saturday, March 03, 2012 4:54 PM To: Progressive Economics Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Obama: War only if Iran builds a bomb Carrol Cox wrote: > When has U.S. war making had anything to do with facts? it has always had _something_ to do with facts. Those are needed to legitimize a war (though legitimacy is less needed with no explicit conscription). If they can't justify the war with actual factual facts (as it were), they create them (as with the Gulf of Tonkin "incidents"). In either case, it is worthwhile to attack the "facts" that the government puts forward, along with their interpretation of them. Simply dismissing them as "lies" won't do. -- Jim Devine / "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." -- Paul Dirac _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
