Bush's War Against Evil: James Carroll

[Nancy Waterman]

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0708-03.htm

Extraordinary article from Janes Carroll.


What is permitted to be done in the name of ''ridding the world of evil''?

Is lying allowed? Torture? The killing of children? Or, less drastic, the militarization of civil society? The launching of dubious wars? But wars are never dubious at their launchings. The recognition of complexity - moral as well as martial - comes only with ''the distance of history,'' and it is that perspective that has begun to press itself upon the American conscience now.

Having forthrightly set out to rid the world of evil, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq, has the United States, willy-nilly, become an instrument of evil?

<snip>

But there's the problem with President Bush. It is not the moral immaturity of the texts he reads. Like his callow statement in the National Cathedral, they are written by someone else. When the president speaks, unscripted, from his own moral center, what shows itself is a bottomless void.

[Cha]

1. Thank you for the article, Nancy.....I thought this paragraph....

eloquently described bush's dangerous ineptness with the macho cry of "bring em on"....

"To address concerns about the savage violence engulfing ''postwar'' Iraq with a cocksure ''Bring `em on!'' as he did last week, is to display an absence of imagination shocking in a man of such authority. It showed a lack of capacity to identify either with enraged Iraqis who must rise to such a taunt or with young GIs who must now answer for it. Even in relationship to his own soldiers, there is nothing at the core of this man but visceral meanness."


:kick:

[indepat]

2. What is permitted to be done is everything they say needs to be done

to implement their far hard-right ideology, their PNAC vision, for anything at their disposal is permissible, justified, in their eyes. Do I not understand or are they sick, twisted puppies taking us down a perilous path of/to destruction?