President Obama is reportedly engaging in intense debate and deliberation on the eight-year American military involvement in Afghanistan. Perhaps history and intellectuals can offer input on changing the mission of our project over there—the site of a human rights catastrophe.
The anti-war movement is "insignificant...(and)...irrelevant," composed of some "5 percent" of the populace including artists and intellectuals and one Noam Chomsky, in whom past liberal allies "now recognize clinical symptoms that have been obvious to everyone else for years."
- Jacob Weisberg. "Left Behind," December 4, 2001; Slate magazine
"Liberal intellectuals have lined up in support of the war machine in the familiar style -- discussed, for example, by Randolph Bourne in classic essays -- and since they know they do not have the intellectual competence to deal with those who refuse to go along, resort to what comes natural to the educated classes: hysterical tantrums, lies, and abuse. ... There are ... important things to do--such as continue to falsify their increasingly desperate claim that everyone is following them in their depraved subordination to power."
- Noam Chomsky on the pro-war liberal line vis a vis the American peace movement against war in Afghanistan; April 2002, CounterPunch
"To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war, it has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the crisis in which America found herself. Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have vied with each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a hundred million more of the world's people."
- Randolph Bourne. Seven Arts, 1917, opposing American involvement in World War I
- President Obama on Afghanistan, October 2009 ... As debate continues, we are unsure of what the president will do with our troops. Speculation is that the Yanks aren't coming home.
- FRONTLINE
- via mal contends
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