Iraqi Blogs and Election

[Black Dog]

I laughed too when I saw that it was from Chomsky. So cliche. The pied piper of ideological college students.

What make m e chuckle is how many intellectual featherweights on the right like to tut tut Chomsky, yet no one's ever actually able to prove the man wrong.

Maybe you should try actually reading him.

[Shakeyhands]

perhaps O'Reilly will author a Chomsky companion book, thats the only way our friends on the right will read anything to do with Chomsky, the ideas are waaaaaay too radical....

[I miss Reagan]

Oh I've read a little Chomsky from time to time. But mostly I find it difficult to read material opposing US opperations in Cambodia and Vietnam from an author who extols the virtues of genocidal manics like Pol Pot and Mao.

[Black Dog]

Oh I've read a little Chomsky from time to time. But mostly I find it difficult to read material opposing US opperations in Cambodia and Vietnam from an author who extols the virtues of genocidal manics like Pol Pot and Mao.

Proooove it, boyo.

And that means a full citation.

[Guest eureka]

Perhaps you read some of his works on Linguistics: they are heavy slogging.

Try some of his eye-opening revelations about US Foreign operations.

[Black Dog]

Iraq: purple or black and blue?

When armed guerrillas roam the countryside, even a free and fair democratic vote may be irrelevant to the outcome. According to a New York Times article from 1967, the Johnson administration was pleased as punch then about an 83 percent voter turnout in South Vietnamese elections. We all know how that conflict turned out: the majority went to the polls and the armed minority eventually went to the halls of power.

...

If the president and the Republican Congress really wanted to do the Iraqi people a favor—after authorizing an unneeded invasion, which caused widespread chaos and violence against Iraqis—they would abandon the illusion that merely allowing the Iraqis to vote will eventually make them free and prosperous.

...

Genuine self-determination that would probably lead to such decentralized governance—accompanied by a rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces—would likely take the fire out of the insurgency. The foreign occupier would be gone and no strong central government would exist to threaten to oppress groups that didn’t control it. Security could be provided locally, rather than nationally, using existing Kurdish and Shiite militias and insurgents converted to security forces in Sunni areas. Some argue that such decentralization would lead to a civil war because clean lines do not exist among the various groups in certain areas of the country—for example, in some large cities. But in a confederation, cities could compose their own autonomous units. Or if partition ensued, the areas in new states would not have to be contiguous. After all, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin islands are not contiguous with the continental United States.

So instead of engaging in publicity stunts by dying their fingers purple, members of Congress could better spend their time pushing the Bush administration to give the Iraqis a real chance to end the violence that is making their country black and blue. Real freedom for the people of Iraq, which would most likely decentralize Iraqi governance, offers the best hope for long-term stability and prosperity there.