The Humanitarian Justification
By Callimachus | Related entries in Ideas, The War On Terrorism, WarAlan Johnson, has launched a new free online review of books called Democratiya. Via this site, I read a review of A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq,” a book which “brings together 23 voices of critical support for the liberation of Iraq from both sides of the Atlantic.” Based on a quick glance at the contributors’ list, I recognize them as the writers and leaders whose words were most influential with me in 2002-03 in shifting me from tentative opposition to a war on Saddam to tentative support for it.
By “influential,” I mean not that they implanted foreign notions in my head, but that they appealed to virtues and ideals I already felt, like humanitarianism and anti-anti-Americanism, and drew them into the picture of the world then before us all. People like Jose Ramos-Horta, Ann Clwyd, and Adam Michnik.
Also on the Democratiya site is a review by the wonderfully named Marko Attila Hoare of the recent book “Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network,” which explores the degree of Islamist infiltration in the Bosnian civil war of the 1990s and, apparently, explodes the canard that the U.S. opposition to the Serbs strengthened the worldwide mujahedin.
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