• buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    https://web.archive.org/web/20230426221600/https://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/04/opinion/our-new-baby.html

    By Thomas L. Friedman

    May 4, 2003

    We are talking about one of the biggest nation-building projects the U.S. has ever undertaken, the mother of all long hauls. We now have a 51st state of 23 million people. We just adopted a baby called Baghdad – and this is no time for the parents to get a divorce.

    There was a lot of this type of discourse at the time. Libs have no memory.

    • GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Rhetoric aside though, since Iraq isn’t sending 2 Senators to Congress, I would have gone with the route of

      “No, we just installed a friendlier government with a constitution we wrote, totally different”

      • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Lots of parts of the American empire don’t get to send senators, like Puerto Rico and DC. Iraq is brown enough that even if we had annexed it officially we’d have done so in a nonvoting kind of way

        • GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          They do actually send Senators, but they don’t vote. I think that it would be harder in the present day (maybe less so now with the number of reactionary judges, but American judicial precedent had been trending since the 60s to be more democratic and free for people until the 90s) to pull off another American Samoa.

          I say this because there are Trump-appointee judges reviving long-defunct legal precedents to support their ideological crusade to reshape America from some semblance of a liberal democracy into a fascist dictatorship – citing decisions upholding the Japanese Exclusion Act to uphold laws like Florida’s that ban Chinese people from buying property.

            • GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Right, I think I said Senators because I thought it was the same as DC. Not that a non-voting representative or senator matters either way – but the fact that you pointed it out should demonstrate that I wasn’t unreasonable for pointing out the initial difference in the US not actually annexing Iraq (although I fully believe that ~90 years earlier, the US probably would have pulled a Philippines, but I think that the UN, especially as more former colonies joined, caused superpowers to engage in more proxy wars over outright wars over who owns the dirt).

      • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        A more honest and direct rhetorical shortcut would be “we’re turning Iraq into another Japan”. US written constitution, controlled friendly government, military occupation. The works.

        • GivingEuropeASpook@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Wow, factually accurate rhetoric that still effectively conveys why something is wrong? Nothing like proving someone doesn’t need to rely on oversimplistic hyperbole to make a point.

    • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      See also McCain’s “100 years in Iraq” comment in the 2008 election. Had things gone differently we would have happily made it our British Raj.

      • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        He said that in two thousand fucking eight McCain just loved killing foreigners so much

        “As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, it’s fine with me”