Hegemony Cricket!
In case you missed this when Spade Hammer posted it back in February here is George II’s view of the world. There is more interesting artwork by Dave Cohen here.
Yearly Archives: 2003
What are we Fighting For?
Eric Alterman points us toward this NY Times article (free registration) which reports on Justice Scalia receiving the Citadel of Free Speach award in Cleveland. You will love the headline. But the Justice’s views on individual rights scare me:
He talked mostly about the constitutional protection of religions, but also said that government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution.
“The Constitution just sets minimums,” Scalia said. “Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires.”
And I thought that the rights I enjoy were clearly stated in the US Constitution. I wonder if he has been reading a draft of something new being prepared by Ashcroft’s minions.
Repeating History?
This historical review by Thom Hartman is posted at The Smirking Chimp. It is not comforting reading.
Willing?
Read Tim Dunlop’s take on what it means to be part of the coalition of the willing.
The administration can mouth it a 1000 times (they will), they can add names and numbers to a meaningless list (they will), they’ll find countries to help clean up the mess, and this will still be the coalition of George and Tony.
And, one blog earlier Tim links to this dialogue on the casus belli.
Iraq Afterwards
Josh Marshall suggests in this article that it may not be quite as easy as some think to transform Iraq into a democratic pro western government:
a low death toll is key to convincing Iraqis and the rest of the Arab world that we are liberators, not conquerors or destroyers. In short, it’s key to making our invasion seem like a good thing.
But that’s the catch. Occupying armies will always keep things under control in the short-term. But the sort of transformation we engineered in the former Axis powers required a far greater pliancy, one which allowed us not only to disarm these countries but rewrite their textbooks, reorient their politics, and do much more.
Doing that in a foreign country may require a mauling of the civilian population that we are rightly unwilling to undertake.