Don't be anonymous

01.20.2003

Someone has twice posted a comment on my last brief post about Iraq that "wars are not 'won'". They posted anonymously, so I deleted it. Please don't post as anonymous; if you want to respond to my weblog, at least give a real name.

However ... the statement that "wars are not 'won'" is too simplistic a statement. What do you mean by that? Certainly all wars offer death, destruction, and suffering. So yes, war is bad. Is that all you were trying to say? If so, I agree. War is a bad thing. It'd be wonderful if wars didn't happen.

Nevertheless, it's too obvious that some wars are clearly "won" by one side or another (regardless of how we feel about "war" in abstract). Nazi Germany clearly didn't win the Second World War. Carthage certainly didn't win the Third Punic War. It's also clear that Iraq didn't win the Gulf War. Whatever your political opinion about the issue, no one can deny that Iraq didn't win that war. It lost; it was defeated.

The only reason I mentioned that in my post (please read it carefully anonymous poster) was that Hussein's statements insisting that Iraq "won" the Gulf War are clearly not true (if not downright delusional). Yes, perhaps no one "won" the war. But certainly, Iraq did not.

-----

BTW, my friend Lippy Lin posted a really funny make-believe email exchange between Iraq's Saddam Hussein and North Korea's Kim Jong Il.

Instapundit also has a great set of posts about a recent anti-war protest in DC. He links to bloggers from the left and the right who critically evaluate the rhetoric used in the protests. The best is a post by Eric Alterman (a leftist columnist for The Nation) chagrining at the radicalism of some protesters which actually ends up alienating many regular people who'd otherwise support a noble cause.

There's a funny story in The New York Times about how a group of anti-war protesters tried, unsuccessfully, to get arrested in DC. The protest drew somewhere between 30,000 and 500,000 (a wide discrepancy, I know) depending on who's counting. The Washington Post has an interesting story about that. ANSWER (the group organizing the protest) claims 500,000 ... although they had themselves earlier reported the number as 100,000. Perhaps by tomorrow it'll have been one million?

Posted by Miguel at 01:59 PM

Comments

As an addendum: here's a story from MSNBC that points out that ANSWER (the group organizing the anti-war protest) is linked to the Marxist-Leninist Worker's World Party. Of course, whether they are or aren't connected to a communist group is irrelevant (as the post points out) to whether anti-war sentimate is legitimate or even noble. But ANSWER does have some other controversial views (such as its support for Slobodan Milosovic) that many mainstream anti-war protesters might not know about.

Posted by: Miguel at January 20, 2003 08:03 PM