Hoje no Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds comparou o Rio de Janeiro ao Iraque. Desconsiderando a validade da comparação, essa história me lembra de algo que acho frustrante quando se discute o Iraque: a base de comparação para tudo que acontece é hipotética. Quem acha que a ocupação não serve para nada diz “se a Coalizão não estivesse desperdiçando bilhões de dólares e milhares de seus cidadãos, o país estaria praticamente igual ou até um pouco melhor”, enquanto os defensores da ocupação podem dizer “se a Coalizão não estivesse no Iraque a situação estaria tão ruim que qualquer um veria a necessidade de envio de tropas para o país”.
Sabendo de tudo que aconteceu depois, eu ainda acho que a invasão em 2003 foi justificada — com muito mais dúvidas e pessimismo do que tinha quatro anos atrás — porque tenho dificuldade de acreditar que a situação teria se resolvido melhor do que está se resolvendo hoje quando (”quando”, não “se”) o regime Ba’athista desmoronasse sem ajuda da 101st Airborne.
John Seavey faz posts divertidos sobre nerdices. Esse, sobre Ralph Dibny, expressa tudo que penso sobre a infame Crise de Identidade. Esse, sobre a história de John Henry, também. E esse é engraçado o suficiente para merecer ser reproduzido por completo, independentemente do que eu e você pensamos sobre (a) o Iraque ou (b) Indiana Jones:
Everyone discusses how George Lucas’ recently-completed Star Wars prequels are a commentary on George W. Bush’s Presidency. (Well, for a given value of “everyone” and “recently-completed”, that is. And “discusses”, come to think of it.) Palpatine manufactures a war, then uses it as an excuse to claim dictatorial powers, et cetera, et cetera.
But recently, it struck me that ‘Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’ is a far more incisive, and indeed prescient commentary on Dubya’s two terms. Jones, the protagonist who serves as an analogy to George W. Bush, is a man who has a somewhat shaky reputation in his chosen field, and who lives in the shadow of his famous, emotionally distant father (who named his son after himself.) Encouraged by a group of major figures in the field who are closer in age to his father (many characters in the film, including Brody and the Grail Knight at the end, serve as metaphors for Bush Senior’s contemporaries in government), he embarks on a quest for the legendary Holy Grail that eluded his father his entire career (in this case, peace in the Middle East and a stable, democratic Iraq.)
Indy/Bush goes to Europe, and romances the same beautiful, bewitching, treacherous siren that seduced his father (presumably, this is a metaphor for the Presidency and the American people, unless we someday discover something about Barbara Bush that I, personally, never ever ever ever want to know.) He is both helped and hindered in his quest for the Grail by various Middle Eastern powers, and finally winds up leading his forces to the heart of the desert land himself. After a series of battles in which he vanquishes a military power, he finds himself involved in a series of more complex tests. Eventually, he finds the Grail, reconciles himself with his father, and seems poised for victory…
But he winds up screwing up, lets the beautiful woman and the Holy Grail plummet into a bottomless, murky pit for all eternity, needs to be rescued by his dad, and winds up devastating the entire region while an old guy glares at him disapprovingly. Then, seemingly oblivious to his total failure, he rides off into the sunset like he’s accomplished the mission he set for himself.
It’s downright eerie.
Milton e Rose Friedman:
Milton: What’s really killed the Republican Party isn’t spending, it’s Iraq. As it happens, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression. (Rose mutters darkly) Huh? What?
Rose: This was not aggression!
Milton (exasperatedly): It was aggression. Of course it was!
Rose: You count it as aggression if it’s against the people, not against the monster who’s ruling them. We don’t agree. This is the first thing to come along in our lives, of the deep things, that we don’t agree on. We have disagreed on little things, obviously–such as, I don’t want to go out to dinner, he wants to go out–but big issues, this is the first one!
Milton: But, having said that, once we went in to Iraq, it seems to me very important that we make a success of it.
Rose: And we will!
Para uma boa análise deste diálogo, sugiro Ilya Somin.
Zarqawi está morto. A BBC diz que isso vai aumentar a violência. Eu digo que não acredito até ter o tratamento Uday: nenhuma morte está confirmada até se ver o cadáver.
Yasmine Rassam, do Independent Women’s Forum, comenta a vida das mulheres sob Saddam Hussein:
Much of the anti-war propagandists’ defense of Saddam as a champion of women’s rights rests on his willingness to allow women to vote (for him), drive cars, own property, get an education and work. What they choose to ignore, however, is the systematic rapes, torture, beheadings, honor killings, forced fertility programs, and declining literacy rates that also characterized Saddam’s regime. A few examples can only begin to illustrate the cruelty and suffering endured by thousands of Iraqi women.
One torture technique favored by Saddam’s henchman and his sons involved raping a detainee’s mother or sister in front of him until he talked. In Saddam’s torture chambers women, when not tortured and raped, spent years in dark jails. If lucky, their suckling children were allowed to be with them. In most cases, however, these children were considered a nuisance to be disposed of; mass graves currently being uncovered contain many corpses of children buried alive with their mothers.
During Saddam’s war with Iran, nearly an entire generation of Iraqi men were killed, injured or captured, leaving a dearth of men of military age in Iraqi society. As a result, Saddam launched “fertility campaigns” that forcibly administered fertility drugs to school girls as young as 10 in an effort to drive up the population rate.
After the Gulf War–particularly after crushing the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings of 1991–Saddam reverted to tribal and “Islamic” traditions as a means to consolidate power. Iraqi women paid the heaviest price for his new-found piety. Many women were removed from government jobs and were not allowed to travel without the permission of a male relative. Men were exempted from punishment for “honor” killings–killings carried out on female relatives who had supposedly “shamed” their family. An estimated 4,000 women died from honor killings in the ensuing years. By 2000, Iraqi women, once considered the most highly educated in the Middle East, had literacy levels of only 23%.
O ridículo é que comentários sobre o suposto igualitarismo de gêneros sob o regime Ba’athista ainda são repetidos por aqueles que se opunham à derrubada do ditador iraquiano. Havia muitos argumentos de qualidade contrários à guerra de 2003, mas foi impressionante o modo como aqueles que faziam menos sentido tiveram mais força. Este foi um deles; que vá bem para o fundo do buraco de memória.
Antes que saia a próxima edição da Hoover Digest, alguns rápidos comentários sobre os três artigos que mais me chamaram a atenção na edição anterior:
- Niall Ferguson está pessimista quanto às chances americanas no Iraque, pelo menos em termos militares. Creio que sua ênfase na proporção entre a quantidade de soldados da Coalizão no Iraque e a população do país é errônea. Ele compara com a proporção da força britânica no país durante a década de 20, mas a eficiência de cada soldado multiplicou-se muitas vezes nas últimas décadas. Pode haver ainda o desequilíbrio que ele aponta, mas é menos grave que os números brutos dão a entender.
- Charles Wolf Jr., por outro lado, está relativamente otimista quanto ao que acontecerá quando o regime norte-coreano cair e a Coréia se reunificar. Ele discute uma reunificação diferente do que aconteceu na Alemanha, com uma esforço menor em direção à paridade de renda nas duas metades. Eu gostaria que ele estivesse certo, mas não consigo imaginar a queda do comunismo juche levando tão obviamente à reunificação. Se eu tivesse que apostara, diria que o caos que vai seguir a queda da Dinastia Kim, ou precedê-la, fará com que os sul-coreanos fechem suas fronteiras, contenham o fluxo migratório e passem a adiar progressivamente a unificação.
- Thomas Sowell explica como o anti-semitismo segue um padrão de comportamento racista contra minorias que ocupam posições similares em uma sociedade. O argumento é lógico, mas eu estaria mais convencido de sua correção se conseguisse ver a comparação que ele faz entre o anti-semitismo na Europa e sentimentos anti-libaneses no Brasil: não estou dizendo que são absolutamente dessemelhantes, mas que a analogia é mais forçada do que, por exemplo, sua analogia entre os judeus entre os brancos americanos do começo do século XX e os coreanos entre os negros americanos em décadas posteriores.
Deu, chega. Vocês têm o que ler. Já me sinto menos culpado pela diminuição na quantidade de posts. Vou ver desenho animado.
Um jornalista perguntou a John Howard, durante uma entrevista coletiva do primeiro-ministro australiano ao lado de Tony Blair, se a culpa pelas explosões em Londres não era da invasão do Iraque. The Corner fornece a resposta e eu destaco os melhores momentos:
PRIME MIN. HOWARD: Could I start by saying the prime minister and I were having a discussion when we heard about it. My first reaction was to get some more information. And I really don’t want to add to what the prime minister has said. It’s a matter for the police and a matter for the British authorities to talk in detail about what has happened here.
Can I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government and indeed the policies of the British and American governments on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it’s given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.
Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.
And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.
Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia’s involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn’t have done that?
When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn’t be in Afghanistan?
When Sergio de Mello was murdered in Iraq — a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, a person immensely respected for his work in the United Nations — when al Qaeda gloated about that, they referred specifically to the role that de Mello had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor.
Now I don’t know the mind of the terrorists. By definition, you can’t put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber. I can only look at objective facts, and the objective facts are as I’ve cited. The objective evidence is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq. And indeed, all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggests to me that this is about hatred of a way of life, this is about the perverted use of principles of the great world religion that, at its root, preaches peace and cooperation. And I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.
PRIME MIN. BLAIR: And I agree 100 percent with that. (Laughter.)
A segunda passagem é particularmente importante para o público do Bananão e particularmente depressiva. Um brasileiro proeminente foi assassinado em um ataque terrorista brutal e algo me diz que, se perguntarmos aos jornalistas brasileiros “de quem foi a culpa?”, a maioria vai dizer “do Bush e do Blair” e não “da Al Qaeda em geral e do FDP que o atacou especificamente”.
Cathy Young, na Reason:
In The New York Times Book Review, reviewer Stefan Kanfer acknowledges the factual accuracy of Red Star Over Hollywood only to dismiss it as a pointless inquiry into an episode that will forever remain grist for “fantasists” on both sides. But setting the record straight is important. There is a reason the Hollywood Left clings to what the Radoshes call the “fable of innocence destroyed by malice.” This fable props up its moral authority to this day. From the height of this authority, today’s celebrity radicals blast American policies while ignoring the evil of a Saddam Hussein.
It is often said that McCarthyism provides a cautionary tale for our own era, when dissent once again risks being branded as unpatriotic. That is a real danger. But the Radoshes’ book gives us the other side of that cautionary tale: Some people who cloak themselves in the banner of “dissent” stand for things that are truly reprehensible.
Só para reforçar: Ms. Young, assim como eu, não crê que acreditar que invadir o Iraque em 2003 foi errado é moral ou intelectualmente equivalente a acreditar que Stalin era um ideal a ser imitado. Mas os opositores da guerra não foram apenas estes: há os George Galloway do mundo, e eles são mais comuns e mais acolhidos nos grupos pacifistas do que deveriam ser.
Já perdi a conta de quanto tempo faz que o escândalo Petróleo-por-Comida (ou Petróleo-por-Palácio, como alguns o chamam carinhosamente) começou. Mas não pára de se desenvolver. Roger Simon tem informações novas, vindas diretamente de uma testemunha da investigação independente da ONU.
