Shad O. Graff
With Washington's warmongers pushing us toward a war in Syria, sometimes the people I grow most weary of are the moderate liberals I know who accept at face value the proclamation that we would be intervening for humanitarian reasons, and that somehow airstrikes make human rights problems magically disappear.
Strangely, a lot of conservatives seem to have become antiwar lately. The token conservatives who connect with me through Facebook are some of the most outspoken against the possibility of military involvement in Syria. Of course, they've become antiwar for all of the wrong reasons. To them, virtually anything Obama does is by definition wrong, even if it's engaging in the beloved conservative institution of slaughtering brown people. If Democrats wanted to make the GOP obsolete, it would be pretty easy: just have Obama endorse every popular GOP political hopeful across the U.S.
Part of me is a pragmatist when it comes to conservative opposition to intervention in Syria; as long as they're opposing it, I could care less why. But I don't know where to start with the moderate liberals who say, "But we have to do something!" Why do they think airstrikes are the correct "something" to do? What about an airstrike makes human rights problems come to a halt?
Here's what I think would happen: we'd have the same human rights problems in Syria, plus an additional body count from airstrikes. Military interventions have a poor track record of improving anything. We intervened in Korea and left dictatorships in both the north and south. We intervened in Vietnam and so devastated the country's economy that no amount of democracy could have made it a paradise for its citizens. We flexed our military muscle in Latin America, and the region has since enjoyed such treasures of liberty as police abuse, death squads, and anti-union violence. We intervened in Iraq and created a massive refugee problem, dysfunctional water and power supplies, and an epidemic of birth defects from depleted uranium munitions, among other blessings.
I'm just sick of how people think we should respond to barbarians by being better barbarians.
In better news, things seem to be getting less hectic at my office. I was worried that coming back from my travels would be hell, but things actually went well. A new person starts Monday, and she'll be taking over some of the most time-consuming work I've been doing since May.
Things have been so intense the last several weeks that I've had almost no down time at work, losing not only the latitude for the occasional breather of screw-off time, but also finding myself working early, working late, and often working through meal breaks. That usually meant that when I got home, I didn't want to spend much time at my desk. I totally gave up on writing for the Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona Blog. Hopefully I can get back into that groove before too long. I made an ILL request for the book American Psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral History, so that I can write something about the 40th anniversary of the APA's declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder (and both the progress and lack of progress we've seen since then).
I should take a shower now.
Strangely, a lot of conservatives seem to have become antiwar lately. The token conservatives who connect with me through Facebook are some of the most outspoken against the possibility of military involvement in Syria. Of course, they've become antiwar for all of the wrong reasons. To them, virtually anything Obama does is by definition wrong, even if it's engaging in the beloved conservative institution of slaughtering brown people. If Democrats wanted to make the GOP obsolete, it would be pretty easy: just have Obama endorse every popular GOP political hopeful across the U.S.
Part of me is a pragmatist when it comes to conservative opposition to intervention in Syria; as long as they're opposing it, I could care less why. But I don't know where to start with the moderate liberals who say, "But we have to do something!" Why do they think airstrikes are the correct "something" to do? What about an airstrike makes human rights problems come to a halt?
Here's what I think would happen: we'd have the same human rights problems in Syria, plus an additional body count from airstrikes. Military interventions have a poor track record of improving anything. We intervened in Korea and left dictatorships in both the north and south. We intervened in Vietnam and so devastated the country's economy that no amount of democracy could have made it a paradise for its citizens. We flexed our military muscle in Latin America, and the region has since enjoyed such treasures of liberty as police abuse, death squads, and anti-union violence. We intervened in Iraq and created a massive refugee problem, dysfunctional water and power supplies, and an epidemic of birth defects from depleted uranium munitions, among other blessings.
I'm just sick of how people think we should respond to barbarians by being better barbarians.
In better news, things seem to be getting less hectic at my office. I was worried that coming back from my travels would be hell, but things actually went well. A new person starts Monday, and she'll be taking over some of the most time-consuming work I've been doing since May.
Things have been so intense the last several weeks that I've had almost no down time at work, losing not only the latitude for the occasional breather of screw-off time, but also finding myself working early, working late, and often working through meal breaks. That usually meant that when I got home, I didn't want to spend much time at my desk. I totally gave up on writing for the Planned Parenthood Advocates of Arizona Blog. Hopefully I can get back into that groove before too long. I made an ILL request for the book American Psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral History, so that I can write something about the 40th anniversary of the APA's declassification of homosexuality as a mental disorder (and both the progress and lack of progress we've seen since then).
I should take a shower now.