Staying with the Iraq war (and the accompanying bullshit) Robin Shepherd, a Director at the Henry Jackson Society, proffers his view of the invasion…
…the US-led coalition removed one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships in nothing flat. If Iraqis couldn’t build a secure democracy without years of bloodshed, that was their fault. They were given the chance and they blew it.
This reminds me of the time I saved a woman from her wife-beater of a husband. I kicked that bastard out the door and still the ungrateful bint was going on about how I’d “trodden on her baby”. Well, there’s always going to be collateral damage! Oh, and then she whined about how I’d smashed the windows and let thieves sneak in and rob the place. Well, I didn’t invite them. The thankless slag even complained about how I was taking snacks from her fridge. What an ingrate! Honestly, if she couldn’t build a secure household it’s her fault.
Is this the level of “interventionist” thought? Does Shepherd really lack the brains to see it’s hard to fashion a “secure democracy” from the smoking, corpe-studded rubble of a state, let alone the soul to recognise the U.S. and U.K.’s responsibility? I don’t know. But his fondness for screwing with other people’s nations doesn’t seem to be premised on concern for those people. He’s downright contemptuous.
May 14, 2011 at 11:18 am
If Iraqis couldn’t build a secure democracy without years of bloodshed, that was their fault. They were given the chance and they blew it.
The swine! It makes you wondered why you bothered, really.
May 14, 2011 at 11:33 am
Let’s remember, Shepherd and his colleagues are victims here. Oh, sure, Iraqis lost their lives, limbs and loved ones but they’ve seen the collapse of what’s most valuable to them: their ideology!
May 14, 2011 at 12:35 pm
Can’t they just paint it pink and install an SEP field generator?
May 14, 2011 at 12:41 pm
Haha!
May 14, 2011 at 1:27 pm
There was an interesting exchange between the Henry Jacksonite George Grant and Prof. David Chandler over Sri Lanka on channel 4. The HJS position seems to be “its far away and no one gives a s**t, let’s talk about how great we are for bombing Libya instead, if you’re going to have a civil war please would you have it in a more strategic position and have some nice natural resources as well.”
May 14, 2011 at 4:09 pm
I’m not sure they’ve worked out who the force of good and evil are. What fun is a war without a moral dichotomy?
May 15, 2011 at 4:16 pm
The HJS really are clowns. They seem never to have thought about how much work is involved in building a functioning democratic society.
I don’t know why the Labour Party allows Gisela Stuart and Denis MacShane to be members, and to consider them knowledgable about foreign affairs.
May 15, 2011 at 8:58 pm
Does anyone actually consider disgraced MP Denis MacShane knowledgable about anything? he’s perfectly suited to be a member of the HJS.
May 15, 2011 at 9:08 pm
Self-promotion?
I thought he was facing a police investigation…
May 15, 2011 at 10:15 pm
So how is the police investigation coming along?
I don’t consider MacShane to be particularly knowledgable: he usually writes the same article every time, about how everything is due to anti-semitism or zenophobia. But the Labour Party must think that he knows something if they allow him to write so often in the press.
Stuart got herself on the Foreign Affairs Committee, so presumably her Party thinks she knows something about the subject. Once there she voted against the report that said that relations with the Americans should be less obsequious.
May 16, 2011 at 11:18 am
I’ve no idea, actually. No one seems to have mentioned it since last October.
This is my favourite example of MacShane’s blundering.
February 14, 2013 at 4:03 am
[...] Andrew McCarthy. “If Iraqis couldn’t build a secure democracy without years of bloodshed,” sniffed Robin Shepherd of the Henry Jackson Society, “That was their fault”. Dana Rohrabacher, a [...]