On this unthinkable day, it felt good reading this.  In the face of how crazymaking the world is, Freundlich's radio commentary, in nailing the illogic of these times, helps me cling to sanity.

Commentary: Illogical Reasoning of a War Against Iraq

NPR's All Things Considered: March 13, 2003

PETER FREUNDLICH:

All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We are going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We're going to wage war to preserve the UN's ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that the UN's word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word to guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is too important not to take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right?

Further, if the o­nly way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the democracy of the Security Council, then we are honor-bound to do that too, because democracy, as we define it, is too important to be stopped by a little thing like democracy as they define it.

Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at home, we cannot afford dissension among ourselves. We must speak with o­ne voice against Saddam Hussein's failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that might does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does. And we are twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us oust a regime that twists the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in power a dictator who ignores his own people. And if our people, and people elsewhere in the world, fail to understand that, then we have no choice but to ignore them.

Listen. Don't misunderstand. I think it is a good thing that the members of the Bush administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I o­nly wish someone had pointed out that “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass” are meditations o­n paradox and puzzle and illogic and o­n the strangeness of things, not templates for foreign policy. It is amusing for the Mad Hatter to say something like, `We must make war o­n him because he is a threat to peace,' but not amusing for someone who actually commands an army to say that.

As a collector of laughable arguments, I'd be enjoying all this were it not for the fact that I know–we all know–that lives are going to be lost in what amounts to a freak, circular reasoning accident.

I wouldn't have thought the piece I would post o­n this infamous day, would be from Arab News but this moves me deeply. It's a resonance with my Arab brothers and sisters — I could have written it. This is the voice of a people, and it can be sounded by any of them for all the rest. Be sure you get to the astonishing ending.

I would add a few thoughts. I cannot shake the picture of it being some mix-up here, where we lost a distinction between games and for real. How can we be playing war games with weapons that actually kill? This morning, o­n the Today Show, they were talking about tanks having a hard time in cities — they were built for the battlefield. Part of the story involved video simulations that the tank occupants practice o­n. What in true hell is this that we would play this game for real?

As I grasp for the world adding up, I keep thinking the powers that be must know something I don't know. Otherwise, how could you add up the certain horrors of war, plus its possible horrors, and have that come out to be less awful than Hussein staying in power? How can we provoke the use of weapons of mass destruction and have that not be as bad as o­ne vicious head of state, among others — o­ne who is feared by his people rather than supported by them and who has minimal military might — staying in power?

 On TV, they talk of rebuilding Iraq. After we destroy it. Great. Our schools are for shit, people don't have medical coverage, and our money will go to rebuild Iraq.

As Brian Swimme, my big-picture person, talks about, there are threshold moments in evolution where things could have gone o­ne way or the other — sometimes they have gone to doom and extinction rather than to flowering in more abundance. This is the threshold we are o­n. This war is like taunting the devil. Who in their right mind would put us here? It is not, however, a simplistic argument between war and peace, which peaceful people have a tendency to get somewhat lost in. “No war” has to go along with a complex alternative. But that is indeed what sane people need to be dealing with.

I would like someone who really knows that war is best to make more sense of this than that Hussein is a monster who kills his own people and invades his neighbors (we helped with both, to make matters more absurd). So what? How does that translate to an immediate threat to an unstable world that's vulnerable to attack by an aggressor that already got us? An army against terrorists was bizarre enough — now an army against a sleeping giant is beyond belief.

Thanks to David Langer for sending this…

An Illegal and Immoral War Arab News Editorial, 3/18/03

When American Secretary of State Colin Powell stated yesterday that the Security Council had failed to pass a test set by the United States, a new Gulf War became inevitable.