"Someone else's blood" and "we were right to be wrong"

from tony judt, writing at the nyt, via atrios...

Tony Judt is director of the Remarque Institute at New York University and the author of “Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945.”

Yes, [the liberal hawks] concede, President Bush messed up his (our) war. But even if the war was a mistake, it was a brave and good mistake and we were right to make it, just as we were right to advocate intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. (“The difference between Kosovo and Iraq isn’t between a country that wanted peace and one that didn’t,” the Slate editor and onetime war cheerleader Jacob Weisberg, now tells us. “It was a matter of better management and better luck.”) We were right to be wrong — and that’s why you should listen to us now.

[...]

[R]emember what Albert Camus had to say about his fellow intellectuals’ propensity for encouraging violence to others at a safe distance from themselves. “Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed,” he wrote, “but in every case it is someone else’s blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.”

the big mistake the war supporting dems and r's, the neocons and the liberal hawks, make is thinking that why our country invaded iraq was actually in support of higher principles... well, yes, that's true, it WAS in support of higher principles, just not the ones they would like to think... those who truly call the shots in the united states (and in many places around the world), the moneyed elites, serve the twin principles of money and power... democracy, freedom from oppression and basic human dignity have no meaning for them except as slogans to serve their own ends... war, particularly in the context of modern warfare and weaponry, is the largest profit generation machine the world has ever seen, and it's being used to maximum benefit by those who stand to gain the most... when i read about liberal hawks and necons and their support for "just wars," i can only shake my head ruefully and think just how badly they've been suckered into believing the bullshit they've been fed...

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