Iran and Israel at War

[LittleGrizzly]

There will be no peace there untill Isrealies destroys Iran and her toublesome neghiobrs.

I think the problem with that is the non troublesome neighbours may become troublesome neighbours, by the end of that road your wiping out a continent..

[The Black Ship]

The Israeli air force has already shown what it can do to double-digit Russian SAMs and integrated air defences, you have merely to look up Syria's nascient nuclear weapons program, or should I say extinct program.

No, the difficulty lies in the number of sites to strike this time as well as the uncertainty of Israeli's ability to "bunker-bust". Noone's shown the ability to bunker-bust the type of facilities that Iran has developed, at least not to the level of destruction necessary to totally destroy an atomic program which has obtained the theoretical expertise necessary to develop a weapon. That requires a decapitation of knowlegeable personnel too.

[Tribesman]

There will be no peace there untill Isrealies destroys Iran and her toublesome neghiobrs.

So you are on the same page as the fundamentalist nuts .

[Louis VI the Fat]

Democracies can be just as irrational as autocracies. All are given to mistakes. However, no state in history ever wanted 'to end it all'.

The situation that came closest to having a madman in control of a nuclear arsenal would be the democratically elected Richard Nixon in his final years in office. He was paranoid, permapissed and extremely angry.

Come on, Louis; either you agree with me, or you must be barking mad.

Pah! You are stuck in a Cold War frame of mind. Back when Western adversaries were indeed not barking mad irrational states, but technological and socially advandced states with a rational state apparatus.

And Nixon the closest a madman has ever come to a nuclear arsenal? Hah! I've got a tenner on Sarko nuking Dublin for ruining his EU-presidency.

[Louis VI the Fat]

How delicious. No-one has implied my neo-con tendencies for some time now.

I believe that the natural state of Mankind is to be free. So yes, remove these governments and the nations of the Middle East will tend towards their natural state.

Your straw man is to suggest that I would encourage outsiders to effect this change, rather than to allow those people to discover liberty themselves.

Straw man? What straw man?

It was just a belligerent tone to encourage disagreement, that's what it is. All you neocons see enemies and strawmen everywhere.

Anyway, I'll add to your axis of strawmen: current Western notions of freedom are recent. Non-western cultures may not share them at all. What's more devastating, is that I am more and more beginning to believe that our notions of individual freedom, individual dignity are the outcome of very specific historical and social circumstance, which have unduly been generalised into universal values. For example, I can well imagine some counties prefering nuclear annihilation over Beirut's Pink Floyd concert. My anti-cultural relativistic worldview is beginning to crumble.

Devastating, because I could accept that someone would with his whole heart thinks his society's ultimate goal lays in subordination to faith, or a more social concept of freedom, or what not, while still believing that they had it all wrong and that the natural state of mankind is to be free.

This dichotomy is hidden in the language of non-western cultural emancipationalists as well. How often have we not heard expressed ideas like 'freedom for Afghani women is to wear the hijab', or, 'freedom in our society is collective, not individualistic'. The point here is that they use the word 'freedom' in this deceitful manner, where the more proper phrase would be 'by any fulfilment of our society's deepest values and norms'. That is, they have taken over the normative value of the word freedom, without the material aspect. Because they have been thought through a western dominated discourse that freedom is the highest good.

Something similar is going on with the word 'democracy'. Why on earth does Mugabe even pretend to be democratically elected? Surely, voting at the tip of a sword is the complete opposite of a democratic and free vote. Mugabe does it, because he too, confuses, or deceits through hope of this confusion, the nominal and material value of the status of democracy.

One of my main problems lays in my newfound understanding that western freedom is a progressive notion of freedom. Not progressive in a political sense, but in a social sense. It requires the notion of a changing society. But, as a society necessarily changes over time, then so too must its values. Hence, the impossibility of naming these values universal.

More worryingly, I notice that once again I find myself unable to post a cohesive essay in the time remotely acceptable for a forum post. Rewriting the above rubble into comprehensible English and something vaguely resembling a meaningful structure would take me hours. I need to hone my writing skills. Or learn to structure my thoughts. Or simply get an eduction.

[Louis VI the Fat]

For a more specific and immensely more practical point of view related to the above post, here's a fine article from the NYT.

The erroneous assumption was a relic from the liberal past: the doctrine that freedom is a natural part of the human condition.

A disastrously simple-minded argument followed from this: that because freedom is instinctively “written in the hearts” of all peoples, all that is required for its spontaneous flowering in a country that has known only tyranny is the forceful removal of the tyrant and his party.

Once President Bush was beguiled by this argument he began to sound like a late-blooming schoolboy who had just discovered John Locke, the 17th-century founder of liberalism. In his second inaugural speech, Mr. Bush declared “complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom ... because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.” Later an Arab-American audience was told, “No matter what your faith, freedom is God’s gift to every person in every nation.” Another speech more explicitly laid out the neoconservative agenda: “We believe that freedom can advance and change lives in the greater Middle East.”

A basic flaw in the approach of the president and his neoliberal (a k a neoconservative) advisers was their failure to distinguish Western beliefs about freedom from those critical features of it that non-Western peoples were likely to embrace.