March 19, 2003 - 8:21pm -- hydrarchist
Louis Lingg writes
Dissent Magazine posted the following brief piece by Iraqi dissident architect and author Kanan Makiya (Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, published under the psuedonym Samir Khalil).
I
support a war on the grounds that the current regime of the Ba'ath
Party in Iraq is a criminal state that has gone beyond the pale
even as judged by the very low standards of the Middle East region,
and certainly of the international community. My position rests
on the exceptional nature of Ba'athi totalitarianism in Iraq (and
is therefore not extendable to all the nasty states that exist
in the world). Moreover, it derives from the particular historical
experience-dating back to the 1991 Gulf War-that binds the United
States to Iraq. The outcome of that war, which left the dictator
in place and precipitated one of the harshest sanction regimes
of recent times, places an extraordinary moral responsibility
upon the shoulders of the United States to finish that which it
in a very important sense left unfinished. Such a responsibility
might not exist were it not for that particular historical experience.
One does not transport half a million men halfway across the world
and then leave the people of a country, who were not responsible
for their state's outrage, broken and bleeding for ten years with
no end in sight to the torment that they are going through.
