Hedgemistress wrote:

http://www.theonion.com/onion3912/i_should_not_be.html

While I agree with anything that says we shouldn't be ignoring human rights abuses in all the other places they are occurring, I find that a disappointing Onion article. Unlike so much of their material, it's a bit too "on the nose" for me, lacking in that extra layer of commentary that often makes their stuff so brilliant.

If someone IS going to make direct arguments about us ignoring human rights abuses, which is valid, they should also note when we did live up to our responsibility, like in Bosnia. And our attempt to deal with basic human conditions in Somalia, even if it didn't ultimately go well.

In some cases there isn't much we can do about it (China, North Korea); in other cases (Kuwait) we had the opportunity and we decided not to do anything, which sucks.

In Afghanistan we have poured the money we agreed to in there, and we have a continuing presence to help with stability. Perhaps there is more we should be doing (I think so), but we have, I believe, lived up to what we promised to do.

Well said, and i think people can ask that quite freely, most people i know might give them a good answer and make them feel dumb, but they do have the right to ask, also the right to be wrong.

Dagolar wrote:

"Then she has missed the entire point of what a democracy means. That sounds like a view of a dictatorship."

Then you missed the entire point of what satire means.

Please allow me to take the liberty of quoting a satirical article and responding in an utterly humorless and non-ironic way...

Why do we purport to be fighting in the name of liberating the Iraqi people when we have no interest in violations of human rights—as evidenced by our habit of looking the other way when they occur in China, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Syria, Burma, Libya, and countless other countries? Why, of all the brutal regimes that regularly violate human rights, do we only intervene militarily in Iraq? Because the violation of human rights is not our true interest here. We just say it is as a convenient means of manipulating world opinion and making our cause seem more just.

Yes, we have used the brutality of Saddam's regime to enhance the arguments in favor of attacking Iraq. That doesn't mean that we wouldn't like to see human rights violations in other countries vanish as well. But, human beings being what they are, every new potential excursion will require a new round of justifications, and frankly, beyond a certain point it's just too much work.

This also is not the time to ask whether diplomacy was ever given a chance. Or why, for the last 10 years, Iraq has been our sworn archenemy, when during the 15 years preceding it we traded freely in armaments and military aircraft with the evil and despotic Saddam Hussein. This is the kind of question that, while utterly valid, should not be posed right now.

I may have been reading misleading documents, perhaps from the perfidious Fox News Channel or similarly biased pawns of neoconservatism, but from what I can tell, Iraq purchased most of its weapons from countries other than America. Of course, the charts I've seen only go up to the beginning of the first Gulf War, so it's entirely possible that we've been selling them arms left and right since then.

And I certainly will not point out our rapid loss of interest in the establishment of democracy in Afghanistan once our fighting in that country was over. We sure got out of that place in a hurry once it became clear that the problems were too complex to solve with cruise missiles.

Can't argue much with this one. There's little point in winning the war and losing the peace. On the other hand, it'd take a huge heap of nastiness to make the Afghans actually worse off than they were.

Here's another question I won't ask right now: Could this entire situation have been avoided in the early 1990s had then-U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie not been given sub rosa instructions by the Bush Administration to soft-pedal a cruel dictator?

The first Bush administration made a horrible mistake in not properly finishing the first Gulf War. Hopefully this administration won't repeat that mistake.

Is this, then, the appropriate time for me to ask if Operation Iraqi Freedom is an elaborate double-blind, sleight-of-hand misdirection ploy to con us out of inconvenient civil rights through Patriot Acts I and II? Should I wonder whether this war is an elaborate means of distracting the country while its economy bucks and lurches toward the brink of a full-blown depression? No and no.

I'm no fan of the PATRIOT Acts, so no argument from me on that point. As for depression, I don't think that's likely unless there are more terrorist acts on the scale of 9/11.

What good is our right to free speech if our soldiers are too demoralized to defend that right, thanks to disparaging remarks made about their commander-in-chief by the Dixie Chicks?

The soldiers will be fortified by the Dixie Chicks' sales figures.

When the Founding Fathers authored the Constitution that sets forth our nation's guiding principles, they made certain to guarantee us individual rights and freedoms. How dare we selfishly lay claim to those liberties at the very moment when our nation is in crisis, when it needs us to be our most selfless? We shame the memory of Thomas Jefferson by daring to mention Bush's outright lies about satellite photos that supposedly prove Iraq is developing nuclear weapons.

Time will tell.