Rhinocrisy

I had an interesting conversation after my kung fu class this morning where I found myself arguing against the anti-war position. It’s not uncommon for me to swap sides in a debate out of irritation at weaknesses in someone’s arguments (since, after all, knowing how to think is more important than knowing what to think). But this did underscore for me how conflicted I am about the fundamentals of the Bush invasion and occupation of Iraq. If, in spite of the terror of occupation and bombing, in spite of the American’s efforts to manipulate events in Iraq to their benefit, the end product is a stable and relatively democratic regime, how will I feel about it? And I don’t consider this to be a mere flight of fancy - it’s a real enough possibility. Things may turn out okay. And if they do, then what? Does that mean that the ends justify the means? That it is morally acceptably, maybe even correct, to use force to depose dictatorships and replace them with democracies?

The facile answer is a clear “no”, which is the response I’m supposed to give as an anti-imperialist. But the waters seem a bit muddied, to me. Yes, the intent in Iraq was mistaken, and at every step the Bush administration has demonstrated that they do NOT understand what democracy means, that they will push American advantage in disgusting and underhanded ways. But I’ve never seen a convincing refutation of the idea that inaction is morally indefensible, that allowing dictatorships to persist is tantamount to supporting oppression. And if the effective result of George W. Bush’s interventionist policy is not imperialism, but rather the replacement of the bad with the good, on what leg does the anti-war argument stand?

I went for jury duty today, which was rather uneventful (I got to read “Slaughterhouse Five” some), but did lead me to observe that my jury pool was overwhelmingly white. There were about a hundred-odd people in the room, maybe more, and only a handful of them were “of color” - maybe two black people, one asian guy (me) and this or that. Since the Edward J. Sullivan courthouse draws its pool from Cambridge, I imagine it ought to reflect the racial makeup of Cambridge, which is, roughly, 68% white, 12% black and 12% asian*. The fact that it doesn’t suggests something funky. Of course, statistical error is possible, but my hunch was confirmed a little later when they made us answer a questionnaire which had only two questions: “What is your race?” (with the same stupid categorization), and “Do you consider yourself Hispanic or Latino?”

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*I’ll take this moment to complain about racial groups, which are especially silly for Asians, since it puts Gujaratis and Han Chinese into the same “group”. Of course, considering that the African population as a whole has more genetic variation than the rest of the world combined, “Black” as a group is probably even sillier. Even “Afrocentrism” is sort of annoying that way - can you imagine trying to cultivate some agglomerated “Asian” or “European” identity?