VOICE OF REASON

I’m delighted that Camille Paglia has come out of the cloisters of academia long enough to pontificate on Iraq with Salon.com (http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2003/02/07/paglia/index.html). Say what you want about her intellectual pretentiousness (and her side-comment on the shuttle disaster as a Greek-style omen of the ill-advisability of invading Iraq was troubling), this woman is articulate, informed, rhetoric-free and scrupulously politically impartial. Here’s some of what she had to say:
I think that Bush administration officials are genuinely convinced of the rightness of their positions, although their biblical piety is cloying. I think they do intend the best for the American people. It’s not just a covert grab for oil to placate corporate interests. But I also think that their current course of action in Iraq is disastrous for long-term world safety. After 9/11, what should have been perfectly clear is that we need a long, slow process of reeducating the peoples of the world, to try to convince Muslims of the fundamental benevolence of American intentions…
I’m disgusted at the Democratic Party — what a bunch of weasels. The senators laid down flat in the weeks before the fall election and voted without a full debate over Iraq. That was the moment for a searching national discussion, no matter what the outcome…
If we do go to war, I pray it’s a brief incursion. But this idea of occupying Iraq! When we need those billions here. Our medical care system is staggering, inner-city education is still a mess, the elderly are in straitened circumstances, and Social Security is in jeopardy, and we’re going to spend all this money not only in bombing Iraq but then building it again from the rubble and governing it? This is madness!

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