Someone should check carefully.
One of these men is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
Just so as to confirm that no mistake has been made the Americans should ask their captive whether terrorists can ever have ‘serious moral goals’.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
15 comments to Have they got the right guy? |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Actually, as is a bit of a habit with him, Williams gets the soundbite point right. It’s perfectly correct to suggest that terrorism is a method, not an end in itself, and that the ends to which it is employed are not themselves invalidated by the fact that someone is prepared to use terrorism in an attempt to advance them.
Churchmen of a former era would have taken the contrary view, that violence is morally neutral, and what matters is the validity and moral force of the end to which it is employed. On the whole I prefer Williams’s.
It’s when he tries to analogise between states and private persons, and talks about international law as if it were the same sort of thing as a Measure of the Church of England, that he comes off the rails spectacularly. On that topic Saddam’s position is to be preferred.
Given the choice of living in a country ruled by Saddam or Williams, then of course I’d prefer to be under Williams. But between a world of sovereign nations with the potential for several Saddams at any time, and a Williams world of binding International Law, a supra-national state where when (not if) the thugs are in charge, there is no escape? It should be obvious to everyone that the risk of local monsters is preferable to the risk of a global one.
But it clearly isn’t. I fear the Wilsonian/Williamsian notion of international moral order is winning. And that with power and a sense of their moral rightness, the justice of the means employed by supranational powers already seems less important to internationalists than the ends.
Add to the lineup Karl Marx, Ted Kaczynski, Rasputin, and there seems to be a pattern forming.
Also Castro on a bad hair day.
I think the photo on the right strongly resembles an unflattering, candid picture of the late actor Walter Matthau, which I once saw in an issue of the National Enquirer. Too bad Matthau is dead; were he still with us, he could probably give an uncanny portrayal of “run-to-ground-Saddam” (sounds like a collector’s action figure, doesn’t it?).
the ends to which it is employed are not themselves invalidated by the fact that someone is prepared to use terrorism in an attempt to advance them.
This may be true in theory, but:
(a) why is it that terrorists are always seeking to seize the levers of state power, a goal that is just barely reputable in the best of circumstances?
(b) the use of terrorism to pursue this goal tends to signal that the people seeking the power of the state are unlikely to wield it in a humane manner.
(c) odd, that the overwhelming majority of terrorism on hte world stage these days is committed by folks who are not committed to a legitimate goal at all – the establishment of an Islamic theocracy over the whole planet.
Kill ’em all, I say – there are plenty of other people to man the desks of the bureaucracy.
From the comments section on the BBC website.
The “What should we do with saddam?” page
“Saddam’s trial may well be a mixed blessing for the US. He will undoubtedly (and embarrassingly) reveal how he was helped to power and supplied with WMD by the US government. And if the WMD still fail to turn up, the grounds and legality for the war will be clearly be in doubt.
Trevor Davis, Guildford, UK”
Can anyone see the flaw in this guys argument?
Well both the Arsebishop of Canterbury and Saddam are terrorist enablers, so they do have something in common. One wonder when the Arsebishop will make some inane comment about Saddam’s trial.
Mainstream Protestant Christianity: turning the Blood of Christ into Milk of Magnesia. One must admire the clergy’s ability to be obtuse in the face of all reason.
Can anyone see the flaw in this guys argument?
Yeah – it is wholly disconnected from reality. It wasn’ the US that supported Saddam’s WMD program, it was France (who sold him a whole freaking nuclear reactor), Germany, and the Russians.
I think he got one whole vial of over-the-counter anthrax spores from the US. There might have been a little more than that, but US “support” for Hussein has always paled in comaprison to that of the Axis of Weasels, even when we were playing Saddam and the mullahs off against each other. Saddam’s primary patrons were always the Axis of Weasels, not the US.
The legality of the war does not rest in any way on WMD. The US Congress approved the war (twice – once in 1991 and once in 2002), making US participation in it legal. No one else has jurisdiction over US warmaking; certainly not the UN.
For what its worth, the UN also approved the war multiple times, also dating back to 1991. Legally, the “original” Gulf War never ended. We had a green light to invade Iraq since shortly after the first campaign ended in 1991, when Saddam violated his side of the cease-fire.
Rich – well, firstly it was the US that captured Saddam, if we were quaking in our boots about what he might reveal don’t you think we’d have found a way to dispatch him rather than taking him alive?
Secondly, this whole business about how the US put him in power and supplied him is silly – if we supplied him with all his weapons (hint we didn’t)
they why didn’t his armies use those American made/supplied weapons on the battlefield instead of the ones they actually did use (which were primarily of Russian origin)?
There’s no doubt we did have dealings with Saddam in the past and without a doubt took his side in the war against Iran but if he’s got something more damaging on us I’m all for hearing it. Correcting ones mistakes always begins with an honest evaluation of the facts, bring ’em on.
“Correcting ones mistakes always begins with an honest evaluation of the facts, bring ’em on.”
Agreed. But an honest evaluation of the facts is not on the agenda of the BBC. I saw a short history piece on BBC World just after the capture. The commentator (read propagandist) dwelt at length on how Saddam was a “close allie” of Britian and the U.S. in the 1980’s. No mention of Russia, Germany and France.
I’ve checked the photo carefully.
It’s Trigger from the BBC TV series “Only Fools and Horses”
I’d wondered what he was doing these days 🙂
SADDAM IS TALKING
“But during interviews he said the captive (Saddam) often looked over towards US officials “as if he was asking the Americans to protect him”.
He added: “He felt safer with the Americans. I think that indicates that probably he is cooperating with the Americans.””
Somehow I think this may cause a few EU heads of state a sleepless night or two.
How will the moonbats cope when it comes out that yes, he did have WMD and no, they didn’t come from the US, rather from those peace loving Europeans.
How will the moonbats cope when it comes out that yes, he did have WMD and no, they didn’t come from the US, rather from those peace loving Europeans.
Since ample evidence of all of this is already part of the public record, the moonbats will simply write off further corroboration from Saddam by saying he was coerced, or said so to curry favor, or that they always thought he was a congenital liar (except when he was denying that he had WMD, of course).
Does anyone have a picture of Cardinal Martino?
Has anyone done an inventory of the communion wine?
I’m not implying anything, mind you, but maybe we should have the incense tested for drugs as well.
There has to be an explaination.