--- Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > You talked about Gautam thinking in black and white > terms. Having debated > with him over the years, I know that isn't true. A > number of conservatives > do; he doesn't. > Dan M.
I wanted to thank Dan for his kind words, congratulate his excellent post, and continue with a thought. I see the comment on "shades of gray" a lot. It has always struck me as profoundly ironic, and Dan's post finally made me understand why I thought of it that way. The United States has done lots of bad things in its history. Also lots of good things. In my opinion the good far outweighs the bad. In the case of Iraq, it certainly launched a war of choice based on evidence that, we now know, was incorrect. This is, at best, unfortunate. That doesn't make the war a bad idea or mean that the outcome is bad or will be , but it's hardly optimal either. It's still possible - even likely - that the final outcome for the people of Iraq will be highly positive - that is, they will end up with a government vastly superior to the one that they had (in Mark Steyn's perfect description, they will probably be the "least badly-governed state in the Arab world"). It's also possible - and also likely, in my opinion, although less likely than the previous outcome - that, in the long run, the war will be seen to have been in the interests of the United States and its allies. The Saddam Hussein regime was all bad. In a world of shades of gray, it was just black. It had no redeeming features in any meaninful sense, with the possible exception that it did maintain Iraq as one state. That's about it, though. It was just all bad. For the sake of shades of grey people, I will say that it is a shade of grey so dark as to be indistinguishable from black with the naked eye. The debate here isn't between people who see the world in black and white (the US, good, Saddam, bad). It's between people who can distinguish between different shades of grey and those who can't or won't. Just because the world is about shades of grey _doesn't mean that we should be neutral between different greys_. That's an abdication of our most profound moral responsibilities - and that, it seems to me, is what people who talk about "it's not all black and white" too often advocate. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
