Right and Wrong

Commenter Juan Kerr on the aforementioned Bill Whittle piece lists his requirements for a Just War, including this gem:

War can only be waged with the right intention. Correcting a suffered wrong is considered a right intention, while material gain is not. Thus a war that would normally be just for all other reasons would be made unjust by a bad intention. Right intention requires that democratic statesmen accept the decision of their nations' courts and electorates on the legitimacy and the justice of their action.

This is the left playing the old Heads I win, tails you lose game again.

Because even if we state that our intent is to rid a country of its oppressors, even if we actually do so at great cost to ourselves, even when the country elects a representative government while we defend the fledgling democracy from predators who would destroy or enslave it, all they have to do is deny that this was our true intent, and they can claim that the war was unjust, and that we, the liberators, are the true oppressors, and that the vilest and blackest of murderers are actually freedom fighters, even while the people they murder are their own countrymen.

Even though our actions match our intent, even though the outcome matches our intent, they choose to deny the entirety of our sacrifice and a people's liberation just so that they can also deny a success to their ideological opponents.

That's why Abu Ghraib resonates so strongly with the left. One incident of abuse (not torture, not to anyone with access to a dictionary), at one location, on one day, involving a small handful of under-supervised idiots. But it reflects their inverted worldview, when no other part of more than three years of effort in Afghanistan and Iraq does. To them, Abu Ghraib is true; everything else that has happened in the process of liberating those two countries is false. And the real murder and torture and rape that took place in Abu Ghraib prior to the liberation of Iraq simply does not register. It isn't part of the script. It's not that it's unimportant, it's that it's irrelevant, as if it happened in a story rather than the real world.

And they call themselves the reality-based community. Well, I have something to tell you: We aren't based on reality, we actually live there. You, with your reality-based giant puppet heads and your reality-based baby-eating soldiers, your sacred cows and your eternal paranoia, are based on reality just as a made-for-TV movie is based on a true story.

Which is to say, not at all.

The problem is, you have created these bubbles, and sealed yourselves away from the real world, from any sort of understanding or responsibility. And we can't reach you to help you. Not until something punctures your bubble, and that either requires an effort on your part, or an act in the real world so violent that we would sooner endure your continued estrangement. September 11 woke some people up, but who among us would not rather you had continued your slumber? And for those who did not wake, what would it take? For the Chomskys and the Moores, what appalling shock or tragedy would it take to make them finally acknowledge the real world?

Because argument won't work; we know that. Argument by logic and fact is a tool for debate among people who share a common reality; it serves no purpose for those who have repudiated the world in favour of a phantasm. In the end, Bill's posts, and mine, and Glenn's and Tim's and Ace's and Susie's and Jen's and Ted's and those of thousands of other bloggers are for us and for the people we share this world with, and not for you.

Because what it comes down to is that you are insane, and there's no point talking to you. And the cost of shock therapy is too high to bear. We'd feel pity, except that you chose your insanity, and that's inexcusable.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:50 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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