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November 25, 2008
Middle Climate trashed
George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian, offers some metaphors about our President:
George Bush is behaving like a furious defaulter whose home is about to be repossessed. Smashing the porcelain, ripping the doors off their hinges, he is determined that there will be nothing worth owning by the time the bastards kick him out. His midnight regulations, opening America's wilderness to logging and mining, trashing pollution controls, tearing up conservation laws, will do almost as much damage in the last 60 days of his presidency as he achieved in the foregoing 3,000.That rhetoric suggests that the buzzards are already circling around the Middle Climate--those Iraqis aren't coming back from the dead, after all. Later he concludes "Can we do it? Search me. Reviewing the new evidence, I have to admit that we might have left it too late." He goes on, of course, to affirm that we must try, but I think he fails to appreciate that we are approaching a policy consensus. Global Warming skeptics don't feel we need to do anything. Global Warming true-believers have grave doubts that anything can be done. So let's not do anything. We'll still have a motivation to develop alternate energy sources just to keep the world's wealth out of the hands of the Saudis, and most of the envisioned alternate energy sources involve less carbon emissions anyway. So let's concentrate on the economy.His backers - among them the nastiest pollutocrats in America - are calling in their favours. But this last binge of vandalism is also the Bush presidency reduced to its essentials. Destruction is not an accidental product of its ideology. Destruction is the ideology. Neoconservatism is power expressed by showing that you can reduce any part of the world to rubble.
If it is too late to prevent runaway climate change, the Bush team must carry much of the blame. His wilful trashing of the Middle Climate - the interlude of benign temperatures which allowed human civilisation to flourish - makes the mass murder he engineered in Iraq only the second of his crimes against humanity. [...]
Crossposted on Judeopundit
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"makes the mass murder he engineered in Iraq only the second of his crimes against humanity. [...]
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This is a repugnant, sick and twisted remark to make. So according to this hideous monbiot, Bush is guilty of mass murder and crimes against humanity for freeing Iraqis from the tyrant who really was guilty of crimes against humaity and mass murder
Of course we didn't invade Iraq to liberate the people of Iraq. If we were in the liberation business, we would have knocked Castro (arguably a worse dictator in some ways) into the Carribean 4 decades ago, or in any event in the last 15 years. The Havana metropolitan area would almost border Miami's were it a land border rather than a sea border; we could have called it "Operation Backyard Cleanup."
We did it for the oil and the geopolitical strategic reasons, and did it quite arguably illegally since Iraq did not contribute to the attack on our country any more than Cuba did. But that doesn't make Bush guilty of crimes against humanity, only of self-destructive imperialist expansion through war and occupation.
It's like accusing the Soviet Union of "crimes against humanity" merely for invading Afghanistan; Soviet crimes against humanity were numerous, domestic and catastrophic, but their arguably illegal invasion of Afghanistan's hideously mountainous terrain was not among them.
Posted by: Bruce at November 26, 2008 8:44 PMOf course we didn't invade Iraq to liberate the people of Iraq.
Her point is not about US motives. We did, in fact, liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein. Iraq was a major supporter of terror. 9/11 highlighted the problem of terror-supporting states. If we were out for "imperialist expansion," Cuba would be good addition to our empire also.
Posted by: Yitzchak Goodman at November 27, 2008 12:31 AMThe liberal illuminati is has been nothing but mean in talking about him. This is just another example of something that has been used to rip Bush to shreds.
Posted by: ew at November 28, 2008 11:17 AM