I Used To Really Like That Guy

Johno Johno

Back in my halcyon grad-school days, I used to think Ted Rall was a pretty nifty cartoonist. Sure, he was a hard-lefty, but he scored a lot of really excellent points off the American Right, especially their gibbering and howling in the run-up to the Kangaroo Impeachment of President Billy Nutsack. Moreover, I lived in Amherst MA, where my stolid Centrism played like John Birch in some places. So, I read him, I liked him, I didn't always think he made sense. 

But no more. Over the last couple years, I've watched Ted Rall sink deep, deep into moral equivalency and come out the other side into crazyland. 

In this post, Michael Totten lovingly and thorougly fisks a Ted Rall column that among other things asserts " the more we tell ourselves that the Iraqi resistance is a bunch of evil freedom-haters, the deeper we'll sink into this quagmire," and elsewhere calls the same Ba'ath resistance "patriots."

If you read that carefully, you see that Ted Rall really is calling those crazy Ba'ath truckbombing rapist warlord shitwads "morally good freedom-loving patriots." Also, apparently the Iraqi police-trainees who were killed last week, the ones who are helping to establish a homegrown Iraqi social order that is not based on rape, terror, and disappearances, are "[c]ops, who work for a foreign army of occupation [and therefore] are not innocent. They are collaborators. Traitors. They had it coming."

Let me get this straight.

The remnants of a brutally repressive regime, who have taken to killing innocent people and are dedicated to fomenting chaos, starvation, poverty, and martial law in their own country so that they may return to their former positions as local warlords, are freedom loving patriots. Okay, sure, whatever.

And The Iraqi citizens training as police officers, who are working to dig their country and people out of the Saddam Hussein Memorial Thirty-Year Shit-Trench are traitors who had it coming. Got it. Great.

What the fuck, please? I mean, you can argue about how full the glass is. We can, and will, argue as to whether the Iraqi libervasion was justified, for years to come. But that doesn't change certain things they in most places call "facts." Fact: The libervasion happened. We broke the eggs and killed a bunch of people. Now the US can a) bug out and leave the mess they created to fix itself however it will, or b) stick around and try to keep things afloat.

Fact: There is plenty of room to argue about how best to handle the occupation. The President may, or may not, have the right strategery. I'm betting towards "not," personally. But this argument does not negate the fact of the invasion, option b).

Fact: By any moral code accepted by a large number of average people in the Western world, there is a difference between blowing yourself up along with a number of other people, and training a police force to make sure that kind of thing doesn't happen.

Fact: Moral equivalence is fine as a mind-exercise. Moral equivalence is even fine as a tool for living, as long as it is one of many designed to make a person well-rounded. However, moral equivalence is a hell of a stupid way to live. Hence the term, "Fisking."

I'm horrified that certain elements of the American Left, a group who on the whole are perfectly reasonable patriotic people who just happen to see things differently than most of the blog world, have come to the conclusion that American action is always wrong, resistance to power is always right no matter what the flavor, and that training local police forces in Iraq so that US soldiers may cede authority to them is equivalent to flying a loaded jetliner into a building full of people.

It goes without saying (or at least it should), but Iraqi police recruits are as much traitors to their country as the Democratic Party is to our own, with no respect to Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, or any of the rest of the creeps who are Ted's peers on the other side.

Gives the rest of us a real bad name, it does, and it makes me wanna punch them in the neck.

Please read the fisking, and watch Michael crush a vestige of my slightly-more-liberal past like a bug. It's kind of sad. I really used to like that shitwad.

Posted by Johno Johno on   |   § 7

§ 7 Comments

1

So many definitions of freedom exist, but I am surprised that conservatives refuse to apply the most obvious, most nationalistic one to Iraq: that natives have control over their own politics. Would conservatives prefer the right to free speech if it were dictated and administered by a foreign power? (They complain so much about the meager limitations placed upon them by the UN.) Of course, freedom means other things, but the nationalistic definition is applied most often and with the greatest force. It is not only embodied in our national anthem but that of the UK as well ("We shall never be slaves!") whereas no other definitions are. In most cases a polity would rather have a home-grown dictator thrust upon them than have a benevolent occupation. In this sense the Iraqis are not free, and the people attacking the US forces are freedom-fighters. Does this mean that the US should withdraw its forces from Iraq? No. We broke, now we must buy. But resistance to foreign powers, be they mainly American or otherwise composed, will be natural.

ndr ndr

2

NDR, I agree to a point. A polity-- almost any polity-- will prefer a homegrown murderer to benevolent occupiers. But that does not imply that partisans of the homegrown murderer are on the side of good and light. To be expected, yes. Good and light, not so much. I know that you didn't say that they were, but I fell the need to add that moral dimension to your argument.

Where Rall takes leave of reality, and where my anger begins, is when he makes theleap from your eminently reasonable observation, to calling Iraqi police trainees (who after all are learning their job so that the occupation may END more quickly) terrorists.

Yes, resistance will be natural-- I don't think any reasonable person could dispute that. But does that mean it is necessarily right?

Also... You are right that in the sense that the US occupies Iraq that Iraqis are not free. But that is a semantic exercise. Ketchup is also a vegetable, Windows is an operating system, and light beer weighs the same as stout. Are Iraqis now more, or less, free than when Saddam Hussein was in power?

Johno Johno

4

I disagree categorically.

It is possible to look at how the situation has changed for Iraqis, and see ways in which day-to-day living has become constrained. e.g. roadblocks, house-to-house searches.

However, the woodchippers, rape, murder, terrorism, poverty, starvation, and murder as state policies are gone. That is, the systems that were designed to rob Iraqis of their freedoms, and their liberties, are being dismantled. In the face of that advance, the occupation has already reaped dividends for individual Iraqis' freedom. Of course, a lot of those freedoms are theoretical rather than experienced, but there is work to be done.

In the short view, Iraqis have been denied some freedoms (to move freely through US Army roadblocks), but they have simultaneously gained others (such as freedom of expression). Moreover, in the long run, the opportunities are wide open. The short run is useless without the long run, and (although the situation is dicey) in the long term, freedoms and liberties of individual Iraqis are almost dead certain to multiply over what they have been in the past.

When you add in the continued efforts to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure (efforts, I hardly need to add, that the "resistance" is sabotaging at every turn to the disadvantage of hungry and thirsty Iraqi citizens), the balance shifts hugely in favor of increased freedoms in the long run.

You are right that the occupation could still be hosed and chaos reign, but I doubt it, and what's more hope and pray it doesn't happen.

Johno Johno

5

However, this is a rhetorical game itself. Yes, there are some rights and and elevations on limitation on movement, but there is no public life, no politics, and no nationalism. Again, freedom has broader definitions, not all of which may be at issue at any one time. Do they have freedom as consumers? How about planners of their own economy? Does the occupation represent their interests in foreign policy (and attitudes toward Israel would be a good indicator--one of Hussein's most popular policies was the support he gave to the families of dead suicide bombers--is an anti-Israel lobby able to flourish)? Perhaps another case, for purpose of debate, would me more illustrative: are Chechnyans, if they have rights under the Russian constitution and they are defended, free if their struggle for autonomy goes unfulfilled? How about Hong Kong? The former Yugolsavian republics? Northern Ireland? Basque? Western (aka Spanish) Sahara? These are all different cases which we would find more or less preferable. However, there are reasons to say that freedom is lacking even in the presence of rights defended by the government.

ndr ndr

6

I'd say there's more than just the freedom to move through a roadblock being denied. If you're a woman, you stand a good chance of being denied the freedom to have a job by religious nutcases. You're being denied the opportunity to walk down your street without being attacked by criminals.

Fundamentally the choice has been made to trade off short-term living conditions in Iraq for long-term stability. This is a cost. The question on the average Iraqi's mind is, how high is that cost going to be? If a theocracy (even a democratically elected one) ends up establishing itself there, the price will be very high indeed.

Hussein was one man, and with his death, who knows what might have happened in Iraq through natural, domestic politics. A new movement might have arisen. We'll never know now.

Ross Ross

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