He recalls his initial (defeatist's) reaction to the events of 9/11/01 and believes either the "madness" of the attackers or the deaths of thousands of innocents - I can't tell which - shouldn't matter:
I wrote that the horror I could see unfolding on my television screen was a madness of which the world had never been free and would never be free. But beyond the personal tragedies - and they occur somewhere every hour of the day - it did not and should not be allowed to "matter".Then comes the outrageous assertion that America, as the world's sole remaining superpower, should expect such attacks and learn to live with them:
Democracy was not damaged by the attack. Those who chose to take up the "white man's burden" and prescribe solutions to the world's problems - as had America since the fall of the Soviet empire - must accept that there would be prices to pay.Read the whole th-- wait...on second thought, don't bother.
2 comments:
I'm sorry but you don't get it do you. It is easy to read Simon Jenkins thinkpiece and think, this is a liberal paper and this guy is really yanking my chain. The fact is that Simon Jenkins is a Conservative. He used to work for the Times and the Sunday Times owned by Citizen Murdoch with whom other works NY Post, Fox News you are aware. He has a weekly column and I have to wonder how this conservative stuff gets in there. But there is a strand of British Conservative thinking which is deeply anti American. In fact the last time Howard came over Karl Rove wouldn't even let him come through the front door. The Conservative team came round the back door with the pizza delivery. The line of thought is that the whole world was so behind the U.S after 9/11 that with a bit of persausion you could have had Bin Laden's head on a stick. But the terrorists knew the American response would be to bomb the stuff out of Afghanistan which is what took place. As for Iraq my own view is that it was the right war for the wrong reasons. Look forward to your comment. By the way your comments made the Guardian on 9/16. Which is how I found your blog in the first place.
What's there to get? I neither know nor care if Jenkins is a liberal or a conservative. It's his pea-brained assertions I take issue with, not his politics.
For the record, I agree with your opinion that Iraq was the right war for the wrong reasons, specifically, I thought it was a bad idea hanging everything on WMD when there were enough other good reasons to get rid of the bastard.
Do you have a link to the comments at the Guardian from 9/16? Call me vain. :-)
Post a Comment