Last Straw

Like many Kiwis on the net I enjoy read­ing Rus­sell Brown’s blog, Hard News, but every now and then some­thing goes ter­ribly ter­ribly wrong.

It’s called a straw man and, if I recall cor­rectly, it’s not the first time it’s been employed on Hard News:

I have no patience for the “war is hell” walk-away argument.

Well that’s great Russ but this is not the argu­ment put for­ward by those ser­i­ous about end­ing U.S. and Brit­ish crimes in Iraq.

If you want a ser­i­ous argu­ment to throw around in your mus­ings on West­ern crimes in Iraq can I sug­gest this response on the ques­tion of with­drawl from Noam Chom­sky:

There is a cer­tain prin­ciple that we should adhere to. The prin­ciple is that invad­ing armies have no rights what­so­ever. They have respons­ib­il­it­ies. The prime respons­ib­il­ity is to heed the will of the vic­tims and to pay massive repar­a­tions to the vic­tims for the crimes they’ve com­mit­ted. In this case, the crimes go back through the sanc­tions which were a mon­strous crime, through the sup­port for Sad­dam Hus­sein, right through his worst atro­cit­ies, but par­tic­u­larly, those of the inva­sion. Those are the two respons­ib­il­it­ies of an occupy­ing army.

Well, you know, the pop­u­la­tion has made it pretty clear. Even U.S. and Brit­ish polls make that clear. Over­whelm­ing major­it­ies want the U.S. to set a timetable to with­draw and adhere to it. Bri­tain and the United States refuse. Repar­a­tions, we can’t even talk about; that’s so far from con­scious­ness in the doc­trinal sys­tem. Well, I think that answers the ques­tion. Doesn’t really mat­ter what I think. What mat­ters is what Iraqis think, and I think we know that pretty well. The reason the U.S. and Bri­tain aren’t with­draw­ing are those I men­tioned. You know, the con­sequences of inde­pend­ence for Iraq would be an ulti­mate night­mare for them. And they’re going to try to do any­thing they can to pre­vent Iraqi demo­cracy, as they’ve been try­ing in the past.

Update: Turns out I mis­un­der­stood Russell’s mus­ings. See com­ments for clarification.