Pro War in Iraq
I do not subscribe to the fashionable notion of moral equivalence between all deeply-held beliefs. I believe in the rights of the individual over the collective. I believe democracy is better than dictatorship, both morally and practically. Not necessarily democracy as we or the Americans or the French practice it, but the idea that in every possible practical way, you should let people make their own decisions, and if these decisions need to be circumscribed in any way, then you should only do it with the explicit approval of a majority of the people in question. And above all that a people must be able to change governments and leaders without resorting to force. So my ongoing position is that I am not comfortable …show more content…

In the hands of a dictator, they render people susceptible, easy meat for indoctrination. So susceptible, indeed, that when the Iranian people did rise up against the Shah, they were fooled into supporting just another dictatorship, which they are only now showing signs of being ready to cast off. As for foreign adventures and scapegoats, sooner or later in any dictatorship evidence emerges of how the elite is benefiting at the expense of the people > such evidence, which it can no longer be suppressed, must be explained. It can be laid at the feet of an unpopular, or it can be blamed on surrounding states. This sort of scapegoating is insidious. So you have a whole region or Arab states living under dictatorships of varying levels of brutality; sustained by an ideology that had been hijacked and put to use in order to sustain a system which has no moral foundation; and using international adventures and blaming Israel and America to explain its failures. Do we simply accept this situation? In a world of expensive travel, rigid borders, poor communications, conventional weapons, one could say it was a shame, but not our problem. Personally, I think that hundreds of millions of people living under brutality is always everyone's problem. But in particular, in an age of ever easier and cheaper travel, permeable borders, rapid communications and unconventional weapons, walking away form the