The other day, I got into a pretty heated message board discussion with someone who disagrees with me about the war in Iraq and the value of free trade. Our argument started me thinking about the bigger-picture issues his perspective presented. Although I don’t want to reopen old wounds or rehash the rhetoric of our exchange, I need to provide a bit of detail as context to the bigger issues of this essay:
This particular poster and I crossed swords early last week regarding the morality of free trade policies. He made the argument that free trade was a bad thing, and essentially accused anyone who supported free trade policies of being some sort of evil capitalist tool. As a free-trade proponent who considers himself neither evil nor beholden to any capitalist cabal to rule the world through oppression of the working class, I took exception to his argument. But this was just a skirmish.
My antagonist more or less opened full hostilities (although he accuses me of firing the first shot) with a post asking why the United States had not invaded North Korea or even Tibet if one of its major goals in invading Iraq was freeing the Iraqi people from a brutally repressive dictatorship. To be perfectly honest, I have grown tired of this particular argument, and I responded more harshly than the poster deserved, accusing his argument of betraying a lack of understanding of military reality, basic geopolitics, resource constraint, and other important factors. Although I still think his “Why not Tibet?” and “Why not North Korea?” arguments suffer from all of these flaws and more, my post was condescending, and my tone was arrogant. I apologized for this in a subsequent post, but can only assume from what followed that he either did not read or did not accept my apology.
The next day, I wandered into a thread about Fareed Zakaria’s Newsweek piece arguing that the UN inspectors had the best intelligence regarding Iraq’s weapons programs. I posted a tongue-in-cheek response meant solely to point out that, contrary to the assertion of the poster who linked the article, you don’t have to be a “right-wing red-stater” to have supported the war in Iraq. Needless to say, I was more than a bit surprised when I came back later and discovered that my “Why not Tibet?” debating partner had chosen the Zakaria thread as a perfect opportunity to savage me on both the war in Iraq and free trade. I’ll describe his attacks, and offer my response, in the next post.
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