Cindy White

I heard this the other day on NPR and thought Mr. Freundlich hit the
nail on the head. For those of you who might not have heard it, I
wanted to share. What follows is the transcript from NPR.



Cindy





National Public Radio
All Things Considered

March 13, 2003

Commentary: Illogical reasoning of a war against Iraq

Edition: 9:00-10:00 PM

Estimated printed pages: 2

Article Text:

MICHELE NORRIS, host:

The deliberations at the UN over possible military action in Iraq have
featured thousands of pages of documents and hours and hours of debate,
not to mention all the press conferences, Op-Ed articles and pure
speculation that have filled the airwaves in the last few months. But
even after all of that evidence and discussion, commentator Peter
Freundlich still wants to express the trouble he's having trying to make
sense of the argument to go to war.

PETER FREUNDLICH:

All right, let me see if I understand the logic of this correctly. We
are going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam
Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We're going to wage
war to preserve the UN's ability to avert war. The paramount principle
is that the UN's word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert
its word to guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is too
important not to take up arms to defend. Am I getting this right?

Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the
democracy of the Security Council, then we are honor-bound to do that
too, because democracy, as we define it, is too important to be stopped
by a little thing like democracy as they define it.

Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at home, we cannot
afford dissension among ourselves. We must speak with one voice against
Saddam Hussein's failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are
sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that
might does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does. And
we are twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us
oust a regime that twists the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in
power a dictator who ignores his own people. And if our people, and
people elsewhere in the world, fail to understand that, then we have no
choice but to ignore them.

Listen. Don't misunderstand. I think it is a good thing that the members
of the Bush administration seem to have been reading Lewis Carroll. I
only wish someone had pointed out that "Alice in Wonderland" and
"Through the Looking Glass" are meditations on paradox and puzzle and
illogic and on the strangeness of things, not templates for foreign
policy. It is amusing for the Mad Hatter to say something like, `We must
make war on him because he is a threat to peace,' but not amusing for
someone who actually commands an army to say that.

As a collector of laughable arguments, I'd be enjoying all this were it
not for the fact that I know--we all know--that lives are going to be
lost in what amounts to a freak, circular reasoning accident.

NORRIS: Peter Freundlich is a freelance journalist in New York.
Tomorrow, we will hear a different view about the appropriate use of
military force.

Copyright C2003 National Public RadioR. All rights reserved. No quotes
from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without
attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript may not be
reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission. For
further information, please contact NPR's Permissions Coordinator at
(202) 513-2000.
Record Number: 200303132108



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Fetteroll

PLEASE!

They are painful to families with loved ones who may be involved.

Joyce
Unschooling-dotcom moderator