Women's work

How big a problem is discrimination based on gender in 2008? Most of us would, I think, concede that great strides have been made on gender equality in the past few decades, but at the same time would acknowledge that we're a long way from the end goal. I'll admit that sometimes I'm seduced by the idea that we're closer than we are. Then something like this comes along. 

Here's the Coles Notes version: The U.S. Supreme Court overturned a jury decision that called for Goodyear to pay a former employee, Lilly Ledbetter, $3.5 million. Ledbetter had brought suit against the company after discovering, following her retirement, that she had been paid far less than men in similar positions for the duration of her 19-year career. I'll leave you to parse out the legal jargon on your own (it's all there in the above link and the subsequent links), but essentially the Supreme Court based its decision on Ledbetter waiting too long to file suit.

This ruling is inflammatory and profoundly disappointing, not just because it is unjust, but also because so many elements of the rationale reek of condescension - not to mention favouring the rights of corporations over the individual. 

For a blistering critique of the verdict, check out this article from (where else?) Slate.

And for a little evidence of why this kind of backward motion on gender equality is so dangerous, hold your nose and read this post from a particularly noxious conservative blogger, who chides Ledbetter for being slow to figure out the pay discrepancy but conveniently fails to mention that Goodyear forbids employees from sharing salary information.

Brutal.

State of the Union

A couple of years ago, as I was finishing up my final year of journalism school at Ryerson, I tossed off a comment in conversation with some of my Ryerson Review colleagues about a potential TTC strike (the TTC actually went on strike in May 2006, after graduation, but if memory serves the possibility of job action had been raised several weeks prior to the walkout). My comment went something along the lines of, "TTC workers are overpaid, rude and selfish for holding the public hostage, etc. etc." 

To which my professor slyly responded, "What kind of lefty are you?" referencing the fact that I had written and interned for the very liberal This Magazine. The question gave me pause - perhaps because I didn't realize how my comment trampled on traditional left-wing values, or perhaps because I didn't like being labeled as a lefty.

At any rate, the TTC and its union managed to raise the question again with another strike this weekend. This time, the union shut down service at midnight on a Friday, less than an hour after voting down a tentative deal. The decision left thousands of partygoers, shift workers and other stranded, and resulted in back-to-work legislation from the province. 

The TTC is back in operation today, but the whole affair has been yet another PR disaster for the union. The general feeling among the public, I think, reflects the kind of sentiments I expressed to my Ryerson colleagues a couple of years back. For a sampling of what some folks are saying, check out this Toronto Star forum.

Majority opinion aside, my professor's question is still a tough one. Support of unions is a pillar of left-wing politics, after all, and there is a part of me that feels I should be on the workers' side in this dispute regardless of any personal inconvenience. On the other hand, unions don't seem to stand for the same things they used to. In fact, they don't seem to operate any differently than the most piggish capitalist corporation, motivated exclusively by self-interest and greed and unable to grasp the concept of having "enough."

Two years ago, had I been quick enough, I might have responded to my professor with a question of my own: is the union an outdated concept? After the latest TTC strike, I find myself leaning toward an answer that might not please the dyed-in-the-wool lefties in the crowd. But I would defend that position by pointing out that, while unions were once a necessary tool for workers to protect themselves against abusive and neglectful employers, too many of them exhibit the same characteristics as the "establishment" forces they're supposed to oppose. 

You know there's trouble in union-land when even the NDP tells you to get back to work. Looks like it's possible to be a lefty and a union skeptic at the same time.

More Obama

It's been a while, but I've had the pleasure of being in New York City for a couple of days and haven't had the chance to post. Nice, quaint little town worth visiting if you get the chance.

Another good comment from P's Blog regarding Obama and the perception of his racial makeup. I'm not entirely sure if P's challenging me on my suggestion that people with a biracial background (black/white in this case) identify themselves, and are identified by others, as more black than white, but I'll stick by my point for now - although I'll admit that it's based on intuition more than anything else. 

For better or worse, race matters in America. It matters to an awful lot of black Americans, who I think see Obama's candidacy, and the idea of an Obama presidency, as a point of pride. The last poll I read said something like 80-90% of black voters in the Democratic primaries had gone for him. Given that his policies don't differ tremendously from Clinton's, I think it's reasonable to suggest that racial identification has played a role in these results.

Similarly, there are Americans who have a viscerally negative reaction to the idea of a black president, a view that could be borne out of guilt, ignorance, or out-and-out racism. That Obama's racial background is mixed makes him a unique candidate, one that both black and white voters can "claim" as one of their own. This is one of the reasons he's been so effective in talking about race. He can frame the issue for whites and blacks in a credible way, because he is both white and black, and at the same time neither.

He's been less successful talking about class issues, because he's the kind of well-off, highly educated liberal that historically chafes working-class voters. However, if he does win the nomination, he'll have a lot of time to recalibrate his approach to this demographic.

Speaking of the nomination, Clinton winning Pennsylvania just delays the inevitable. She almost literally cannot win without convincing superdelegates to vote against the will of the primary voters, who have turned out in record numbers during this campaign. It's time for her to get out of this race. Her attacks on Obama are creating a blueprint for McCain to go after him in the general election, and if she does manage to convince the superdelegates to overturn Obama's near-certain pledged delegate and popular vote win, a lot of pissed-off Obama Democrats are going to turn into McCain supporters. Either way, she's hurting the party.

Mr. Whiteside

A comment suggests that too much is being made of Obama's recent slip-up, and that it has undeservingly knocked Hillary Clinton's grossly exaggerated (and repeated) tales of being shot at in Bosnia out of the news cycle. A great point, and certainly one of many reasons to believe that the endless campaign for president reduces everyone - candidates, media, voters - to numb, dull-witted versions of their actual selves.

The point I was trying, and perhaps failed, to make, is that in the past few decades Democratic candidates - and, in fact, left-leaning candidates in countries like Canada - have had trouble connecting with voters because they haven't found a way to express their ideas in ways that aren't condescending. Voters seem to have much more time for the candidate or party whose policies actually hurt them than they do for the candidate or party whose policies are better, but are explained in a "Father knows best" kind of way. Whether or not Obama's "cling" comments will hurt him (and most polls so far seem to show the damage isn't that bad), he must be wary of coming across as too superior. This has been the downfall of too many bright candidates in the recent past.

P's Blog also suggests that "biracial" is a more accurate description of Obama than "black" or "African-American," which, of course, is true. But isn't it fair to say that in Western culture, the experience of being biracial (black/white, specifically) is much more similar to the black experience than the white experience? For example, having Kansas roots isn't going to keep the police officer who can clearly see your Kenyan side from pulling you over for no reason.

I'm not so cynical that I think most Americans will make their electoral choices based on race, but I do suspect that, like most people of mixed-race, Obama's life and candidacy have probably been more defined by his "black side" than his "white side." I'd also bet that more people perceive him as black than as white, or as biracial for that matter.

Bullet meets foot, foot meets mouth

Barack Obama has done an admirable job of positioning himself as a uniter of people and a principled candidate who disdains tawdry attack-dog politics. But the U.S. presidential campaign is an 18-month marathon, a grueling process that inevitably scuffs up even the squeakiest of squeaky-clean politicians. This week, Obama carved a deep gouge in his own beatific public image after telling a group of well-heeled San Francisco campaign donors that working-class voters in small towns suffering from economic malaise often "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." For a more complete account of Obama's comments, his (unimpressive) attempt to clarify them, and of the reaction of the Hillary Clinton and John McCain camps, go here.

Well. Where to begin? A month after delivering one of the finest, most insightful, most mature and honest speeches in American political history on the subject of race, Obama serves up grist to his political opponents and gives at least one blogger an opportunity to mix metaphors about shooting and feet and mouths in his subject line, all in the space of a couple of sentences. A man whose main selling point is that he is a bridge between Americans of all stripes arrogantly alienates a huge segment of voters - the segment he most needs to win over by November - by essentially telling them that they are backward, Bible-thumping gun nuts ignorant to the true cause of their troubles. To this point, Obama's campaign machine has thrummed along with power and efficiency. Now, for some reason, he has thrown a grenade under the hood.

Without a doubt, there are those out there who might read Obama's comments and conclude that his biggest mistake was in telling the truth. Blunt truth-telling, after all, is almost always a dangerous tactic for politicians. Obama himself seems to think that the error was in his choice of words, not the content of his message. 

But if Obama believes this, and if most Democrats and Democratic voters agree with him, it would not bode well for the chances of the candidate and the party this fall. Obama's remarks go right to the heart of why Democrats have so rarely tasted electoral success in the past four decades. Which is to say, the would-be party of the people has so often condescended to the people, fielding a series of hyper-educated, urbane candidates who arrogantly toss off theories about the behaviour of the unwashed masses. 

Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are the only Democrats to have been elected president since 1968, and there is no coincidence in that. Both were successful populists, highly intelligent men who were nonetheless able to forge a credible bond with working-class voters. 

It is crucial that left-wing politicians and activists understand the importance of this. While the policies of the left may be more beneficial to lower-income voters than those of the tax-cutting right wing, no one likes to be told "I know what's best for you" by a candidate that does not share their experience. 

A month ago, Barack Obama eloquently proposed a new way to talk about and bridge the divisions between Americans. Last week's gaffe, however, suggested that while his ear is finely tuned to racial issues, he is tone deaf about class divisions. If he does not repair the damage caused by his comments, he may find that voters tune him out in November. For Democrats, that would be the same old song.

Post-Race (Race Post?)

One of the benefits of the newfangled digital universe is that information can be transferred almost in real time via things such as, you know, blogs. In that spirit, I'm going to address a speech that Barack Obama gave a month ago. It's a brave new world, folks, and in this corner of it, we apparently move even slower than print magazines.

The speech I'm referring to, of course, is the 45-minute sermon about race in America that Obama delivered in Philadelphia, the text of which you can read here. If you want to skip to the most vital chunks, the ones that got the most play in the media, go here for a sample. The most-repeated paragraph is in the fourth section of that page, where Obama says he could not disown his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, for Wright's racially inflammatory remarks, any more than he could disown his white grandmother for her fear of young black men. 

It was a brave speech, to be sure. Wright's comments (among others, that 9/11 was a case of the "chickens coming home to roost" and calling America the "USKKK") were damaging to Obama, but he could have easily shunned the pastor in public, then hope that the issue died quietly. Instead, Obama addressed the matter head-on in a speech that many pundits have placed alongside the best work of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in the pantheon of great oratory.

The most artful element of the speech was its emphasis on forgiveness. Obama managed to forgive black Americans for their ongoing anger at "white America," reminding us that it stemmed from centuries of varying degrees of discrimination. Even super-conservative former Republican candidate Mike Huckabee was impressed by this argument. In fact, Huckabee added to it (about 5:55 on the linked video).

But Obama also - more critically, for his presidential aspirations - forgave white Americans for their fear and distrust of young black men. For decades discussions of race have been characterized by knee-jerk outrage on both sides. While this outrage has served some purpose, helping to move the needle on some critical racial issues, it has also frozen many people out of the conversation. Namely, white people who can't reconcile their liberal intellectual views with their visceral fear of black people. The genius of Obama's speech was that he told these people that their having these fears did not necessarily make them raving racists. He invited them back into a discussion that they had been shamed out of. 

I am not trying to cast white Americans as the victims, merely saying that Obama was wise to acknowledge their fears. He needs white voters, and he needs to convince them that the first black president will not be driven by the desire to "even the score" on behalf of the black community. It's a political and mathematical reality.

But the idea of victimhood is a curious one. Canvas a group of more openly racist whites and you will likely encounter the belief, on their part, that they are indeed the victims. Victims of affirmative action, victims of liberals who make them feel bad for their opposition to it, and so on. From their perch, this sort of white person sees all kinds of benefits to being a visible minority, of being an "oppressed victim," and wants a piece of the action. Thus, we have clowns like this, who think being a white, Christian male is the lousiest gig in America.

The victim mentality, while it has become more and more fashionable, is dangerous - all the more so for those who have more legitimate claim to it. Black people in North America, for example, must struggle not only against actual racism, but also against a culture that perpetually reflects their own victim status back at them. This notion of inevitable victimhood, this sense that struggling against an inherently racist society is ultimately pointless, suspends a lot of black youth in a state of hopelessness and stalls progress toward a racially egalitarian society. It's a vicious cycle - a black man can rightfully claim to be a victim of racism, but his acquiescence to the victim mindset dooms him to a second-class existence.

Easy enough for me to say as a white man, of course. Harder, though, for Obama, who must hang on to black voters while courting white ones. What he has suggested, though, is that both sides move acknowledge the outrage while moving past it, that whites and blacks and all other shades take responsibility for crimes past and present and collaborate on a future of greater understanding between racial groups. Naively utopian, sure, but also daring - Obama has dared Americans to act like grown-ups. Now it's on the people to prove themselves worthy of that respect.

But won't somebody please think of the children? 

Okay, then. And for bonus points, let's talk about Canadian children. Earlier this year, the Toronto District School Board voted to approve black-focused schools. This is a troubling decision. On the one hand, it is evident that public schools are doing an inadequate job of teaching black children, and that these children may indeed benefit from an education more attuned to their specific needs. But by sending children to an Afro-centric school, are not parents underlining the point for these kids that they are "different?" Or worse, suggesting that they are less capable than those who go to a "regular" school? The question is not how the parents see it, but how the children see it. I can't pretend to know the answer.

That any ethnic group would voluntary choose this kind of segregation indicates the abject failure of the public school system to adapt to the new realities of Canada, to evolve out of the Euro-centric basis of our education system and into one that better reflects our country. But segregated schools only let existing public schools off the hook. If a black child can attend a "black" school, where is the incentive for the public school system to become more inclusive?

Canada is hardly immune to racial inequities, although we often like to think so. And while Obama's speech offered sound suggestions about proceeding toward a truly equal, "post-racial" society, it has never been and will never be easy. In Canada and the U.S., race is the elephant that everyone wants to boot out of the room. But it keeps stomping back in. 

Mendacity?

Obama and race in America, Zeitgeist and 9/11, all still on the to-do list because they require actual thinking I'm not especially capable of right now. But I can still read, and I just read a good article (from Slate, where else?) about Bush's latest speech on Iraq. It's a pretty thorough deconstruction. It also made me look up the word "mendacity."

The key nugget that you don't hear in many mainstream news outlets is that while Bush's "surge," the addition of five additional combat brigades that began a little over a year ago, has tamped down on much of the violence in the region, that success isn't the reason that five brigades are being withdrawn in July. Even if the surge had been a horrible failure, those five brigades would be returning this summer because their 15-month tours of duty are up - and there are no more brigades ready to replace them. 

This withdrawal to pre-2007 troop levels wasn't a decision based on anything that has or has not happened in Iraq. It was a mathematical inevitability.

The "truth" is out there

One of these days I'll get to my attempted debunking of the Zeitgeist film, the one that suggests, among other things, that 9/11 was not perpetrated by al-Qaeda but was actually the product of a U.S. government conspiracy. That post is going to require a lot of links to other pages, and it also might require that I take a Valium to maintain calm while I'm writing - suffice to say, the whole conspiracy theory makes my blood boil. For reasons that I will get into in that later post, I think it's an irresponsible and intellectually lazy thing to believe in. I also don't understand how many of the same people who don't believe George W. Bush is smart enough to tie his own shoelaces somehow do believe that he's capable of organizing a mass-murder conspiracy consisting of thousands of moving parts and keeping it a secret in a country where a much smarter president can't even get an Oval Office blowjob without the whole world finding out about it. But hey, in a post- X-Files society, I guess it's sexier to believe in this implausible scenario than it is to believe that a group that has committed dozens of confirmed terrorist attacks and proudly shouted responsibility for 9/11 actually is responsible.

Argh. Didn't mean to write this much about 9/11and Zeitgeist. I actually wanted to talk about the Clinton-Obama primary battle and, more specifically, Obama's speech a couple of weeks ago that addressed race in America. But that's going to have to wait until later today or tomorrow. 

Out of the mouths of Bushes

I'm going to go all-in behind a bet that George W. Bush will not be remembered as one of history's wiser figures. But even the proverbial million monkeys clacking away at a million typewriters will eventually string together a few sage words.

Give Dubya his due. His monkey-typewriter moment arrived last month, and proved that he is at least in theory capable of some self-reflection. It should also be required reading for anyone stricken with a case of blind Obamania.

Let's get interactive

Great comment here in response to one of last week's posts about the anti-war movement. This is one of the most cogent arguments for Canada to withdraw from Afghanistan, and can easily be adapted to address the U.S.-Iraq situation. 

The commenter points out (and hopefully doesn't mind my paraphrasing and extrapolating a bit) that Canadian and U.S. governments have asked the public to simply assume that the troops are in Afghanistan in Iraq for the right reasons, and that they're on the way to victory, without offering much in the way of proof. Commenter rightly wonders when we're ever going to find out how "victory" is to be defined in these conflicts and what benchmarks are in place to measure progress toward our objectives, and suggests that until our government(s) come clean with the public about these things, they have little claim on our support.

No argument here, and I think commenter has cut to the heart of what has made Afghanistan and Iraq so controversial and in some cases catastrophic. While I happen to think there were some good, principled reasons for intervention in both cases, Canada and the U.S.-led Coalition has thoroughly squandered the opportunity to do much good to this point. Furthermore, these governments have poisoned any future attempt at positive intervention with their incompetent and dishonest attempts to both wage these wars and sell them to the public.

The commenter's argument seems to be more about practice - how the interventionist West has gone about its missions - than an objection to intervention in principle. This is a fair and necessary line of attack, one that Bush, Harper and company should be forced to confront. It's also the kind of reasoned argument that tends to get buried under too much reflexive "give peace a chance" sloganeering.

Vindication for a human camel

An interesting article at Slate (one day I'll link to something that's not from Slate) says that drinking eight glasses of water a day isn't a necessary. Turns out, the whole idea is a myth. As someone who hardly ever drinks water, I find this very comforting.

Apparently, the myth has folky origins but has, through the years, been reinforced by governments and corporations. A conspiracy to make us chug water filled with mysterious chemicals that turn us into obedient consumers, maybe? That might sound silly, but no doubt there's a conspiracy theorist out there who could imagine, then believe in it.

With that in mind, I want to set up my next - or at least a future - post that will examine the online conspiracy film Zeitgeist. In it, the unnamed filmmaker asserts that Christianity is plagiarized from pagan religions, an evil capitalist consortium controls the world, and that 9/11 was an inside job. If "you" are out there and you haven't seen it yet, have a look for yourself. 

Hopefully we can chat about it in a couple of days. Perhaps in a darkened underground parking lot at night, shrouded in cigarette smoke. My secret codename will be Linda Lovelace.

Out in the Cold

Back to the weighty and political.

In the interest of deferring to much smarter writers regarding the question of how the Western world, specifically the U.S., should use its power internationally, I want to link to this article by Slate's Fred Kaplan. 

The first couple of paragraphs lay out an interesting - and, it seems to me, pretty sensible - theory about why the U.S. has had such difficulty with its military missions since the fall of the Soviet Union. The gist of it is that, by winning the Cold War, America actually became a weaker player on the international stage, because the old bi-polar geopolitical system - where nations had to line up behind either the U.S. or the Soviets - made it easier to rally allies. 

Bush used to be fond of saying "you're either with us or against us" when talking about his "war on terror." But now, more than ever, individual countries don't have to make such a stark choice.

There Will Be Ham

I want to divert from the weighty and political for a moment, and instead aim my pretension at something lighter.

Finally caught up to There Will Be Blood last night, and I'm happy to find myself still chewing over its meaning today. Not chewing quite as hungrily as Daniel Day-Lewis chews scenery, but definitely savouring some of the thematic bits still stuck between my teeth.

In terms of execution, what I found most interesting was how relatively calm it was, compared to most of Paul Thomas Anderson's previous movies. After the giant ensemble casts, complex plotting and restless camerawork of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, he seemed, with Punch Drunk Love, to have shifted into more intimate territory, focusing on a few central characters and relying more on gorgeous compositions than trick photography. With There Will Be Blood, he manages to combine the epic feel of his earlier movies with the intimacy of Punch Drunk Love, and it's pretty impressive.

I'm a little conflicted about Day-Lewis' performance, though. He paints the character of Daniel Plainview using the broadest strokes imaginable, especially in the film's climactic scene, where his affected gate and bug-eyed rage veer into self-parody. Day-Lewis won the Oscar, but his task in There Will Be Blood didn't require him to thread the same fine needle as, say, George Clooney in Michael Clayton.

However, I give Anderson the benefit of the doubt for getting exactly what he wanted out of his lead actor, and Day-Lewis enough credit for not hamming it up for ham's sake. There's a purpose to it all, even in that ending that seems to puncture the fairly serious mood of the previous two hours. 

I'm guessing the idea is that Plainview has been driven utterly bonkers by his own hyper-competitive nature. The best scenes in the movie show how, once he is fabulously wealthy, he doesn't have an outlet for that part of him that relishes the act of crushing a competitor even more than counting the money that comes from doing it. So at the end, he crushes his rival just to feel the sensation of eliminating him.

There Will Be Blood might be Anderson's best yet, but like all of his films, its execution is just skewed enough - and its meaning just elusive enough - to keep it out of reach of the big awards.

Love that Jonny Greenwood horror-movie score, too.

View from the other side

Okay, enough pacifist-bashing. A significant part of me wants to agree with that point of view, and I'd describe myself as generally against war. But if we truly want to stand for a progressive and civilized way of life, we have to be able to stomach the fact that such a stand might sometimes require crude and primitive means of enforcing those values.

Whether the Western world actually lives up to the values it professes to champion, however, is another question, and a legitimate one at that. From my point of view, there is no better societal system than a pluralistic democracy fueled by a market economy, with the inevitable inequities caused by the latter reined in by prudent dashes of social responsibility. In principle, this describes countries such as Canada, Japan, the U.S. and most of Europe, among many others. Specific practices (for example, what constitutes a "prudent dash of social responsibility) vary, but the idea is the same - physical, intellectual and economic freedom.

Which brings me to what is arguably the greatest tragedy resulting from the "war on terror" and the Iraq occupation: America's abdication of its own value system. Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and warrantless wiretapping all reveal the fundamental lie in the Bush administration's argument that the terror war is a fight for freedom. A government that tasks its legal counsel with developing a constitutional argument for torture cannot expect to be taken seriously when it denounces the atrocities of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. 

The war hawks often talk about preserving the "American way of life," but by stripping away the freedoms of their own citizens, they've done more damage to American values than any terrorist ever could. That's the tragedy of the Iraq war and the "war on terror" so far - a country so bent on protecting self-preservation that it's destroying itself from the inside out.

Anti-war clarity

Reading the previous post, one might get the idea that I'm a bomb-loving hawk, or at very least a Christopher Hitchens disciple arrogantly dismissing the anti-war argument. Well, maybe I am a bit of a Hitch disciple, but unlike him, I don't dismiss the anti-war argument out of hand. I just want to have a better sense of what's motivating people - whether it's about protecting the lives of Coalition soldiers or Iraqi (or Afghani) citizens. Seems to me that, given the situations on the ground in those countries, it can't be both.

Afghanistan, and Canada's involvement in it, might actually be an even more curious example. There is definitely an anti-Afghan war movement in Canada, and it's strong enough that the country's military commitment to Afghanistan is constantly being reviewed and debated by national politicians. That there is an ongoing debate at the highest political levels is an encouraging sign of Canadian democracy.

But when it comes to the anti-Afghan war movement, I find myself even more frustrated than I am with the anti-Iraq war crowd. The dedicated pacifists seem to be okay with Canadian troops being stationed in Afghanistan, providing they don't serve a combat function and concern themselves more with reconstruction efforts. Sounds grand, but it's awfully difficult to reconstruct a country when there are people shooting at you and trying to blow up everything you build. That there are actually Taliban fighters working in violent opposition to reconstruction efforts, and trying to take back the country itself, is a fact either ignored or unrecognized by the anti-war groups. 

A lot of this goes to the question of how powerful countries such as the U.S. and Canada should use that power on the international stage. Should we mind our own business and let other countries engage in all manner of rights abuses, or do we have an obligation to intervene when another state crosses a moral boundary? Many of the people who would argue the latter - who would argue that the non-intervention in Rwanda was, and the non-intervention in Darfur is, an example of gross moral negligence - are nevertheless screaming for troops to be recalled from Afghanistan and Iraq. We can't have it both ways. Standing up to injustice often involves killing and dying, and we cannot be squeamish about this if we are to serve this function.

Many people who are against both wars, particularly Iraq, point out the dishonest rationale for invasion and the woeful lack of planning in the occupation(s). I agree that, in practice, Iraq has been a disaster (Afghanistan much less so). But that doesn't negate the moral justification for intervening in the first place. There were genuine and courageous reasons to exert military strength in both countries, even if those reasons weren't foremost in the Bush administration's thinking.

Do people in the West accept the job of serving as global police officers, or do we accept the injustices that will take place if we don't take on that role? Those questions have to be answered, especially by people who oppose the Iraq and Afghan wars, because the lack of clarity in their position undermines their ability to question the very real and tragic mistakes made by the West in the prosecution of the current military efforts.