There is something wrong when 50 people on the margins make the headlines around the planet and threaten world peace for simply exercising their First Amendment Right to freedom of expression. There is something wrong when they are pressured not to do it because it will spark violence among people who reject our notions of freedom. There is something fundamentally wrong when we are willing to sacrifice our freedoms for fear of attack from those who don’t like our ‘civilization’.
Category Archive: Iraq
In his 2004 book, Colossus, Niall Ferguson argues the United States is an empire and should assume its rightful place as the inheritor of Britain’s 19th century ‘White Man’s Burden’. He decries the American schizophrenia of being an empire in denial, sending troops abroad without the intention of staying and being squeamish when GIs die. Ferguson says we should go, stay and impose our will for world order and to prevent chaos.
This may seem easy to say for a man comfortable in the Ivory Towers of Oxford and Harvard who never did military service, much less saw the harsh realities of war but he does have a point. Americans need to back their wars or not fight them and that is why I say we need to bring back the draft.
Djibouti, North Eastern Africa — The atmosphere was electric Thursday morning. Friday is their day off and Thursday is Khat day, the day everybody indulges heavily in the chewing of the narcotic plant. I had seen them buying Khat from women on the street feverishly every afternoon but Thursday was the mother of all euphoria.
“We don’t care if it all goes to Hell. Lets just get out of here!” That is what the Senate seems to be saying when it voted this week its non-binding bill to partition Iraq. The truth is Iraq is already partitioned and, as a result, has already gone to Hell. There is no viable sovereign central government in Iraq.
It occurred to me a while back that George W. Bush and his neo-con friends have a lot more in common with Marxism than they would like to think. The Communists always said that politics should be in control; that the base of society should mold the infrastructure or what they could call ‘perceptible reality’.
KazoDaily 