Angelina Jolie: Stay the Course
Will she ever eat lunch in Hollywood again?
My visit left me even more deeply convinced that we not only have a moral obligation to help displaced Iraqi families, but also a serious, long-term, national security interest in ending this crisis.
Today’s humanitarian crisis in Iraq — and the potential consequences for our national security — are great. Can the United States afford to gamble that 4 million or more poor and displaced people, in the heart of Middle East, won’t explode in violent desperation, sending the whole region into further disorder?
What we cannot afford, in my view, is to squander the progress that has been made. In fact, we should step up our financial and material assistance. UNHCR has appealed for $261 million this year to provide for refugees and internally displaced persons. That is not a small amount of money — but it is less than the U.S. spends each day to fight the war in Iraq. I would like to call on each of the presidential candidates and congressional leaders to announce a comprehensive refugee plan with a specific timeline and budget as part of their Iraq strategy.
As for the question of whether the surge is working, I can only state what I witnessed: U.N. staff and those of non-governmental organizations seem to feel they have the right set of circumstances to attempt to scale up their programs. And when I asked the troops if they wanted to go home as soon as possible, they said that they miss home but feel invested in Iraq. They have lost many friends and want to be a part of the humanitarian progress they now feel is possible.
It seems to me that now is the moment to address the humanitarian side of this situation. Without the right support, we could miss an opportunity to do some of the good we always stated we intended to do. [Angelina Jolie in the Washington Post]
Jolie’s opinion wouldn’t have much significance if it weren’t so utterly against the grain of prevailing Hollywood views, and I commend her courage and independence in speaking it. There is nothing humanitarian or compassionate about abandoning a nation to terror and genocide without giving that nation the opportunity to establish basic social order. We did not break Iraq, but we accepted the responsibility to help Iraq fix itself. Critics rightly attacked the Bush Administration’s failure to foresee the immense task of reestablishing that order. Many of those same critics are even more short-sighted for their own failure to consider the consequences of surrender to Al Qaeda.
A related interesting fact is that McCain outpolls Obama by ten points on who would handle the Iraq war best. Even the famously liberal Pew Institute shows growing optimism. Americans wish they had never become involved in Iraq, but by a margin of 53-39, they now believe that our effort there will suceed. Pray that it continues to be justified. Public opinion does tend to lag well behind events on the ground when the news media are so reluctant to report on how those events have changed.
do you think jolie will ever comment on the humanitarian crisis in NK? just wondering.
“We did not break Iraq”
Yes… much like how the Soviet Union and US did not divide Korea, because if you go back a few more years, it was all the fault of Japan. And if you go back a few hundred years, it was all the fault of China. And if you go back a few million years, if was the fault of the tectonic plates moving unfavorably.
You broke Iraq.
Angelina Jolie can have lunch (or dinner) with me anytime she wants!
Right. Under Saddam, they played in chocolate fountains, rode to work in private mag-lev cars, and had 24-hour electricity fueled by all of the garbage that wasn’t on the streets.
With respect to Yu’s comment above about the partition of Korea in August 1945, can anyone tell me why the US and the USSR, as principal victors in the war, would not have divided Korea into respective spheres of influence? That is, why they should NOT have partitioned Japan’s colony? I am not in any way defending the partition, which was undertaken in a haphazard, condescending way. I am merely pointing to the inability of the Korean people to win independence for themselves at that time, despite decades of valiant struggle, as well as the positive effects of saving at least half of Korea from communism.
To Korean leftists and communist-sympathizers, the partition plan suggested by the US to Stalin is the original sin committed by the US. Everything that is wrong with the Korean peninsula today, including the KJI family criminal regime, has its roots in the US action in 1945. And to support their views they say, “Wouldn’t a unified communist Korea–maybe like unified Vietnam–have been better than the present mess, and would it not have thwarted the devastating Korean War?” On the first hypothetical question my answer is a definite “no.” On the second, “probably,” the likelihood of a violent communist revolution, purges, and half-a-century of gulags notwithstanding.
My point is: laying the blame on the US for all that is wrong with the Korean peninsula today unwittingly parodies the pattern of rhetoric that the commenter Yu employs. Yank on the causal chain a little harder, and you might end up the British empire or perhaps even the Romans as the root cause of US imperialism (but, no, it’s always the evil Americans, can’t you see?). What happens when you reach at the end of the chain–God? To echo John Stuart Mills, “Who created God?” Oh, I know: GWB.
Here in New York there aren’t any chocolate fountains either, so I guess that means its okay for Russia to come across the ocean and ram his big Slavic dick up Uncle Sam’s ass. Because, hey, America is pretty fucked up in the first place–why not send a bull to trash the entire fucking china shop when a few dishes were broken in the first place–and then bitch about how it’s all the porcelain’s fault for being so gosh darn fragile.
Once the place has been trashed, at least take some responsibility like a man, and drop the “ohhh, it wasn’t paradise in the first place, so how could we be blamed for turning it into hell” and the feel-good “haloed American” claptrap bullshit like “well, even though it wasn’t our fault, we the great and compassionate US of A will accept the responsibility of the cleanup job out of the kindness of our collective hearts.”
Fair enough?
The issue you contested was whether “we broke Iraq,” ie., the condition of its infrastructure. Now you’re shifting the issue to the justification for invasion because you can’t defend your first position. Plenty of our justifications didn’t hold up once Saddam’s veils were lifted from the ground truth, but the condition of Iraq’s sewage and sanitation certainly weren’t the reasons we invaded.
Not that I should strain so to find coherence in your “arguments,” but unless you just like talking big Slavic dicks, Russia probably isn’t the best example you could cite.
And to support their views they say, “Wouldn’t a unified communist Korea–maybe like unified Vietnam–have been better than the present mess, and would it not have thwarted the devastating Korean War?â€
Whenever Koreans would employ the Vietnam metaphor, I would remind them that, just as Dorothy could always go home to Kansas if she clicked her red shoes three times, South Koreans could always have reunification – on the North’s terms – which is what would have happened if the US had not intervened on the peninsula. “It’s complicated,” Koreans would reply.
Kim Il Sung and Jong Il in control of the whole Korea? Better off than North Korea is today????
I doubt it….
How long would the Soviets have kept pumping tons of resources into the North if the US had not been in a South Korea???
Would the whole of Korea be as bad off as the North is today under Kim?
It would have been just as closed a society with constant oppression.
It would be one of the poorest.
It probably never would have gotten enough material development to sustain city-sized concentration camps.
My guess —- it would look like some of the worst places in Africa — with the oppression, poverty, and hunger.