Saturday, May 31, 2003



Who'd have thunk it, part II

(Edited version of my spleen-vent on Daily Kos):

The stupidity of the Bush administration is breathtaking. What did they think was going to happen? That the global opposition to the war would morph overnight into a willingness to send troops to keep the Iraqi people in line while Bush's cronies looted the place of its oil?

To quote the beer commercial, "yeah, right".

The countries that normally provide peacekeepers tend to do it because they have some commitment to multilateralism and to the UN. It's no surprise then that they're unwilling to put their soldiers lives on the line for a unilateralist US administration whose attitude to the UN is to ignore it unless it acts as a rubber-stamp to their hegemony.

The lesson to the US: if you want to ignore world opinion, you're going to have to clean up your own messes. And if you don't like doing that (if for example you don't like the cost in "blood and treasure" of occupying Iraq, or the thought that it's your own guys dying to keep that oil), then perhaps you should be more careful about making messes in the first place.

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