Hell freezes over - and again, if Bush agrees.

[theweaselking]

Daniel Ortega to the US: "Please fund the Contras again."

For those of you who missed the 1980s, the Contras were the terrorist army paid for by Ronald Reagan's government to overthrow Nicaragua's democratically elected but socialist government, and one of their specific goals was to kill Daniel Ortega. Now, Ortega is suggesting that since the USA, as the world's largest exporter of state-sponsored terrorism, created the problem 20 years ago, they should help pay to clean it up now.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Daniel Ortega -- huevos grandes, amigo.

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

yeah, go Danny!

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

Danny es mi Gallo! Yep, I guess being a election-buying strongman with a taste for nonconsensual incest brings out the best in all of us. Hey, now that he's president of Nicaragua, maybe he can give Lynndie England a visa and make her his Minister of Justice?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I guess being a election-buying strongman with a taste for nonconsensual incest brings out the best in all of us.

It's working so far for Stephen Harper!

[mcfnord.livejournal.com]

yeah good causes to finance terrorist subversion of a democratic state

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. It certainly would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives lives if the US had put Jonas Savimbi back in his bottle quicker, or Alfonse Dhlakama, or... Saddam Hussein. William Blum's Killing Hope is a good reader in this regard. Mind you, Cuba didn't move too quick to stab Laurent Kabila in his fat, murderous, embezzling ass either... Russia never reigned in its Chechen prodigies... the Soviets left Mengistu to his happy devices... hmm... pattern? Nah, probably not.

Observation: you don't seem to enjoy responding to comments on these political posts of yours. Don't have the time, or don't have the inclination? Really, I'm just curious about people's various takes on 'legitimate' use of LJ's semi-public space.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I don't spend a lot of time responding to anything. It's partly lack of time, and partly because I rarely have much to say about the comments.

And while you are almost certainly right that stopping your hired terrorists sooner saves lives, it is my considered but non-expert opinion that not funding terrorists in the first place is fundamentally a better option.

(And Saddam Hussein? The US has killed more Iraqis in the last four years than Hussein ever did.)

[ex-wytchfyn.livejournal.com]

I agree, and perhaps we should formulate it as follows: don't use proxy forces. But if you do, have the decency to clean up your mess afterwards. Sadly, the last time I can think of anyone doing this is the Treaty of Utrecht. Governments have learned to get away with it.

As to the second half, I must say that I find body counts as irrelevant in arguing against war as they are in arguing for it. Leaving Bagasoro, Milosevic, Botha, Amin, Pol Pot etc. unmolested will always cost less than killing them and their supporters, if only because the very decision to fight costs lives and drives tyrants to bring out their A game. Beyond that, we will only be able to assess the kind of corpse calculus you are talking about in Iraq when (if) the current war ends, we draw some kind of final line under its human cost, and we compare that to predictions of the number of people Hussein or a Hussein-derived regime would have been able to kill in the next ten years of its tenure. And even once we had that - would it really matter? Should the death of 400 000 people instead of 500 000 make anyone sleep better at night?

Finally, and lest I come across as overly even-handed here, I will also point out that such a comparison assumes that the death of a handful of fedayeen, mixed in with the usual innocent bystanders, is as much of a loss to humanity as the death of a handful anti-Baath organizers or Kuwaiti resistance, plus the same crowd of bystanders. Even if the Iraqis and Americans are both killing 10 civilians for every 'enemy,' the nature of the enemy alone tips the balance away from equivalency.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I'm saying that the death of a whole lot of innocent people, even if you got a few people who were trying to kill you *because you invaded their country and kidnapped, tortured, and murdered their civilians* in the process, is a bad thing, and that more innocent people killed = more bad.