Bushy
Bush is rolling towards Moscow and stirring up the Eastern Europeans along the way. Bush acknowledged the US involvement in the dividing up of Europe after WWII, and how the actions taken with Britain and Russia were not too cool, saying:"Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable [...] Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable."I haven't gone searching for any full texts of speeches, but from this I tenuously infer he's acknowledging the freedom of small nations is expendable. I know it sounds like he's saying that was a bad thing of the past and things are okay now, and the invasion of Iraq is a result of that. Sure the country of Iraq would be more 'stable' at the moment had the US not invaded, but they would have been sacrificing the Iraqi population's freedom for that stability. Instead, those Iraqi's are now free! No, we will not sacrifice their freedom for stability. We will sacrifice their stability for our definition of freedom.
I know this is a volatile topic, speculating on the merits of the invasion or whether the people would be better off if still under Saddam. I can't justify leaving Saddam in power based on the huge loss of individual freedom under his rule, but neither can I justify the invasion by saying that individual freedom has been 'restored' because the loss of basic social infrastructure is destroying, I think, more people's lives now. There's no question of what to do, though. Saddam is gone; more people are worse off than before he was gone; those people need serious help to make a comeback.
the earley edition - Posted by Dave @ 5/08/2005 01:04:00 am || ||
