Arthur Silber on our choice of war criminals
October 7, 2008 – 10:18 pm by JohnI imagine many of my friends and colleagues are watching the debate between two hideous megalomaniacs, two shameless scumbags, two proud war criminals, as I write this. I don’t imagine they would ever read anything as honest or powerful as Arthur Silber writes on a regular basis. I liked this description of our two monstrous choices for our supreme leader:
Almost no one in national political life, and almost no writer of prominence, will acknowledge the full meaning of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq: because Iraq never constituted a serious threat to the U.S., and because that fact was readily apparent in the winter and spring of 2002-2003 (even to an honest citizen with no “expert” specialized knowledge), the U.S. invasion was a criminal act of aggression, identical in principle to Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. This foundational fact has many further implications, and one of them is critical in evaluating the two major presidential candidates: since the invasion was a criminal act of aggression, the U.S. occupation of Iraq is similarly an ongoing series of monstrous war crimes. To vote to fund the continuing occupation is to be an accomplice to genocide and to the destruction of an entire nation and its peoples, and thus to be a war criminal.
Most Americans who vote this November, and probably many of you reading this, will vote for one of these war criminals. I no longer care what rationalizations people use to justify such a detestable choice—that one war criminal is not quite as bad as the other for some unspecified reason, that one of these bastards speechifies more prettily than the other and touches some inchoate, indefinable emotional chord in your stunted soul, that (as a friend recently observed to me privately, in condemning this version of the excuse) we’ve had white assholes governing this country for so long that it’s only “fair” to have a black asshole in charge for a change. I don’t give a damn what reason you give yourself for your embrace of evil, for only one fact matters:
If you vote for McCain or Obama, you’re voting for a war criminal.
