<div style='font: 10pt Arial; text-align: left; '><I>No, I don't believe in a black-white political mentality, but if somebody actually supports the war BEFORE and AFTER the war occurs, that just steers his political spectrum about 100 points to the right.</I>
Once again you're conflating a particular stance on a specific issue with a person's entire political outlook. This is a classic case of guilt by association. Let's use an example: Suppose I am left-leaning on most issues of domestic social policy such as welfare reform, abortion, gay marriage, and nationalized health care. Suppose further that I support the removal of Saddam Hussein out of principled opposition to tyrannical, murderous regimes. Does this put me in agreement with a large number of conservatives who also support the Iraq War? Yes. However, all other things being equal, <I>it does not follow that I am a conservative merely because I hold a position that many conservatives agree with.</I>
Let's examine a more fundamental assumption of yours: that a stance supporting the Iraq War before and after its occurrence is on some basic level essentially "conservative." Did you ever consider that a liberal case for the Iraq War might exist? I suppose it never occurred to you that a major center-left intellectual organ like The New Republic (
www.tnr.com) could support the Iraq War for both pragmatic and humanitarian reasons. No wonder, if your conception of the American Left exists only in the hermetic vacuum of Noam Chomsky's treatises, Michael Moore's documentaries, and MoveOn.org's noisy agitprop.
<I>No sane person can say, at least now, that the war was justified.</I>
Leaving aside your arbitrary assigning of medical terms, I think the above has demonstrably proved this statement false.
<I>The only one reason people are clinging on to is the taking-out-a-dictatorship angle, and if we're doing that, then we have a lot of fucking work to do.</I>
The world is a nasty place and there are plenty of dictators to go around. The United States, powerful as it is, cannot reasonably be expected to pursue a course of global politics that would have it flailing at every local or regional tyrant at every opportunity. Even if such an approach were possible, it would cost trillions of dollars and require millions of soldiers.
Now, before you go off half-cocked and wail about U.S. support of its own dictatorships--yes, I know, thank you. There's no need to launch into a tirade about Columbia. If you want to have that debate some other time, fine. But let me just point out that one can hold a principled stance against dictatorships in general while still allowing for pragmatic concerns to at least partially dictate the terms and circumstances most conducive to taking the hard steps to physically remove a dictator. A gradualist approach, to me, is preferable to an all-or-nothing one.
<I>If he's said he would do it again, he should put his fucking money where his mouth is. I'm not going to believe that he's going to do "a good deal of marching and public speaking about Vietnam, Chile, South Africa, Palestine and East Timor", fucking ignore Iraq (at least in the direction of how wrong the war was), and then go back to his podum, ranting about the evils of government-sponsored terrorism.</I>
Because the situation in Iraq involves a different set of factors and circumstances than did Vietnam, Chile, South Africa and East Timor.
Leaving that aside, let's take your rationale and apply it to you. Why don't you "put [your] fucking money where [your] mouth is" and undertake some MEANINGFUL protest against the U.S.'s Iraq policy. Or do you consider an occasional diatribe on an Internet message board to constitute meaningful protest?</div>
