Shot For Wearing Shorts
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in The War On Terrorism, WarIt’s hard to report good news in Iraq when senseless violence like this is happening.
The coach of Iraq’s tennis team and two players were shot dead in Baghdad on Thursday, said Iraqi Olympic officials.[...]
Witnesses said the three were dressed in shorts and were killed days after militants issued a warning forbidding the wearing of shorts.
Other Iraqi athletes have been targeted in recent incidents.
There’s no doubt that a free Iraq is better than a Saddam ruled Iraq, but I still wouldn’t want to be the person to tell the family members of athletes that their loved ones got shot for wearing shorts. Because this is the Iraq that poor planning and willful ignorance has helped create, and I fear it will be this way for decades to come.
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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 27th, 2006 and is filed under The War On Terrorism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 27th, 2006 at 9:23 pm
Which is kind of like blaming lynchings on the 14th amendment.
May 28th, 2006 at 2:41 am
Blames lynching on due process? I’m sorry, I don’t get what you’re saying.
May 28th, 2006 at 11:00 am
-Googles for “lynchings 14th amendment”-
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/310.html
I assume this is what Callimachus meant?
May 29th, 2006 at 7:06 am
No, is it that difficult? I meant “the end of slavery and the elevation of blacks to full political equality” which completely overturned the social order in the South. And all consequences that followed, including lynching as a systematic attempt to establish a new social order. All as a result of the “poor planning and willful ignorance” of the Lincoln administration.
May 29th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
In fact I do blame lynching on the 14th Amendment and the War of Northern Aggression was poor planned, but maliciously willful. I’m one of those that believe economics pressures would have ultimately eliminated slavery through compromise by at least the end of 1880′s or 90′s. Instead, Lincoln the Dictator suspended habus corpus (sound familar Jose Padilla) and so thoroughly jackedup Reconstruction that it caused a century of and continuing racial strife that this country will probably never recovery from. If slavery had been handled such as in Brazil in which the inevitable economics of industrialization were allowed to extinguish slavery due to efficiency and cost, rather the bullets and death — we might have more harmony today between blacks and whites and various shades between.
May 29th, 2006 at 6:45 pm
There you go, Dos. What the man said. It’s actually one of the larger debates ongoing among historians: whether slavery was due to die or not. Seems clear that it would, though, since the bottom dropped out of the worldwide cotton market after Egypt and India came online with the stuff. Nobody foresaw that in ’61 though. There was a plan kicking around the 37th Congress (’61-’62) for a graduated emancipation to be completed in 1900.
Would you have taken that chance? Would you have told them to wait and endure? Or would you have gone to war “to make men free”?
May 30th, 2006 at 12:10 am
I would love to engage here, but we are tittering on the brink of what a majority of public universities would consider “hate speech” and I would hate to get banned before I was ever even invited. So lets stick to the meaning of JG original post: Things are very, very, very bad in Iraq.
But to answer your question in the context of Iraq;
Would you have taken that chance: Yes.
Would you have told them to wait and endure: Yes.
Or would you have gone to war “to make men free”: No.
At least as it stands now. I will happily whip myself for my ignorance if Iraq is free and peaceful in twenty years.
May 30th, 2006 at 12:57 am
And what if it’s not?
If I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a thousand times, when “the right thing to do” and “the free market” collide, always pick “the right thing to do.”
Oddly enough, the South nearly secured the backing of both England and France because they had Judah Benjamin lobbying that this war was merely a property dispute. So there’s definitely precedent even during the war for this argument. And correct me if I’m wrong here Cal, but wasn’t the South only one major victory away from getting those two countries backing? I know that was probably still at a desperate time, but there were receptive ears on the other side of the pond.
In any event, you can have a discussion about whether or not it would have been better for slaves to suffer through another 35 years of genocide, but something tells me that point of view wouldn’t be welcome hardly anywhere.
May 30th, 2006 at 9:14 am
Thanks Justin for proving my point.
35 years of genocide? I thought the whole idea of slavery was to maintain a viable, although physically forced, work force. Slavery is bad enough, you don’t really need to drop the G-bomb (which I believe would be a rather tortured definition if applied) to make your point. Would genocide in the context of American slavery be the equivalent of purposefully killing all of your live stock.
This is exactly the type of bullshit that irritates me to no end. One makes a historically speculative and reasoned argument that if the country had not gone to civil war, but allowed for the economic pressures of increasingly cheap European labor, a cotton recession and industrialization, plus political compromise — to supplant the rather the high price of maintaining slaves, lives could have been saved and race relations could have been much better — What is your retort: You support genocide!
Please Ward, grace us with your definition of “genocide” so that us unclean and obviously uneducated bastards might have a moral watermark in which to judge our inevitable damnation. And while your educating us, why don’t you explain to the black folks in 9th Ward NOLA how well the Civil War turned out — I’m sure they’ll be fascinated by your opinion.
Please Justin — since you’ve accused me of supporting 35 years of genocide, grace us with your definition of this “genocide”.
May 30th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
Yep. I couldn’t have said it better. Nobody starts conversations with African-American friends and neighbors by saying, “You know, we’d all be a lot better off now if you folks had stayed slaves for another two or three generations.”
Justin — the seriousness of the British threat of intervention in the ACW is still a much-debated topic. Hard to deal in “would haves.” Conventional wisdom, I think, still is that the Emancipation Proclamation preserved the North from the forces in the Palmerston government who wanted to intervene. But that has been attacked in the last decade. I don’t quite know where things now stand.
May 30th, 2006 at 10:28 pm
So apparently genocide and slavery do mean the same thing and are historically and morally equivalent in their repugnancy. I stand corrected. Sorry for going off you earlier Justin — I was working from a different dictionary and got offended.
Callimachus, do you think blacks and whites should be able to have this historical conversation? Do you think that such an open and frank discussion could facilitate more positive racial relations in this country?
May 31st, 2006 at 1:08 am
Thank for not thinking I’m trying to call you out. Heh.
Listen, genocide is genocide.
And I repeat…when “the right thing to do” intersects “market forces”, pick “the right thing to do.”
May 31st, 2006 at 1:13 am
By the way, thanks for the info Cal.
May 31st, 2006 at 1:41 am
It doesn’t matter what I think we should be able to talk about. It’s taken me long enough to learn to live in the world as it is.
You saw what happened to Fogle and Engermann with “Time on the Cross.” Even the question “was slavery profitable” turns into a flame war when white academics are asked to weigh in.
Personally, I think individual black and white folks can trust each other and talk about anything. But first you have to have the trust. And it’s not automatic.