A remarkable column (in the Guardian!) by an avowed internationalist/socialist and anti-American, about why she’s in favor of war. And the way she addresses the anti-war arguments is … very interesting.
“Saddam Hussein may have killed hundreds of thousands of his own people – but he hasn’t done anything to us! We shouldn’t invade any country unless it attacks us!” I love this one, it’s so mind-bogglingly selfish – and it’s always wheeled out by people who call themselves “internationalists”, too. These were the people who thought that a population living in terror under the Taliban was preferable to a bit of liberating foreign fire power, even fighting side by side with an Afghani resistance. On this principle, if we’d known about Hitler gassing the Jews all through the 1930s, we still shouldn’t have invaded Germany; the Jews were, after all, German citizens and not our business. If you really think it’s better for more people to die over decades under a tyrannical regime than for fewer people to die during a brief attack by an outside power, you’re really weird and nationalistic and not any sort of socialist that I recognise. And that’s where you link up with all those nasty rightwing columnists who are so opposed to fighting Iraq; they, too, believe that the lives of a thousand coloured chappies aren’t worth the death of one British soldier. Military inaction, unless in the defence of one’s own country, is the most extreme form of narcissism and nationalism; people who preach it are the exact opposite of the International Brigade, and that’s so not a good look.
(via InstaPundit)