My proposal is to load Jeremi Suri in a missile and launch him into the Pacific Ocean. There he can drown. And we can lose the life of one culpable moron instead of the lives of an incalculable number of innocent people who never recommended starting a war with a nuclear-armed country backed by an even better nuclear-armed country.
If Jeremi Suri is allowed to live it will be an act of mercy. But he should then be forced to wear a Depend Adult Undergarment at all times for the rest of his life.
Didn’t we learn during the Cuban Missile Crisis that bedwetters are worse than communists and will get us all killed if we let them write editorials in the New York Times?
Sickening. Just sickening.
“Jeremi Suri, a professor of history and public affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, is the author of ‘Liberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building From the Founders to Obama.’ “
He’s an Imperialist.
Nothing to see here.
What’s sickening is that the NY Times gave him prime op-ed space to promote war.
I read his shitty column and instantly wanted to kick him in the dick.
Why is this in the Times? Don’t the screen this stuff? Publish a letter, sure. But why is this a kind of guest editorial?
Didn’t we learn during the Cuban Missile Crisis that bedwetters are worse than communists and will get us all killed if we let them write editorials in the New York Times?
Yes, but you don’t have to go back to The Cuban Missile Crisis on this one. The NYT is, after all, the same paper whose false “reporting” by Ms. Miller helped get us into the Iraq war because, “WMD.”
My favorite line in this POS editorial is “The North Korean government would certainly view the American strike as a provocation, but it is unlikely that Mr. Kim would retaliate by attacking South Korea, as many fear.”
And when “Mr. Kim” does attack, then we can all say, “Well it seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, ‘a professor of history and public affairs at the University of Texas, Austin,” said he wouldn’t.”
Absurd, simply absurd.
Invading Iraq didn’t risk getting us all killed. Bombing North Korea does risk that. We can hope that North Korea wouldn’t respond and we can hope that China would show restraint. But that’s all it is…hope.
I met Suri a few times when we were starting our scholarly careers. He is a born and bred technocratic, “masters of the universe” hedge-fund style of liberal who is convinced that the world can and should be wisely managed by a benevolent ruling class of Ivy League elites.
If you haven’t spent time around this class, as I hadn’t, it’s a striking thing to encounter, the sense of privilege, of mastery over all one sees, that comes with being Really Fucking Smart and having lived a life of privilege around the elite of the academic elite, people who politically identify as cosmopolitan, internationalist liberals, but as clumsy around the lesser-offs as a Romney and as convinced of their powers to transform the world as a neo-con. He gave me a very uneasy feeling a decade ago, and now I realize why…
I, of course, grew up in the that culture and had to unlearn it as best as I could.
I’d just like to point out that it’s not like we’ve been minding our own business here:
North Korea ‘Rattles Sabres’; Meanwhile, U.S. Pretends to Drop Nuclear Bombs on Them
And Jimmy Carter tells the truth about Bush throwing the treaty he negotiated in the trash on Jon Stewart. Speaking for just me, I feel like Carter’s image is going to be much healthier among my generation. “Everyone” over 40 sees him as History’s Greatest Monster, whereas a lot of people in their 20’s and 30’s see him as a massively underrated president who told America a truth they didn’t want to hear:
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-april-9-2013/jimmy-carter-pt–2?xrs=share_copy
Carter was a good man. He is a good man.
But Teddy Kennedy primaried him for a reason. Considering that the Democrats controlled Congress, Carter was a stunningly ineffective president. Granted, he was handed a shit economy and an even worse foreign policy legacy. But he’s the one who decided to arm the talibs and radical Arabs and send them on a Holy War against the Soviets. Every year that passes, Carter looks better because it helps people focus on the man, not his presidency.
Also included in Maher’s latest:
For those that can’t or prefer not to view the video:
He did, however, oversee the selling of arms to plenty of other people, mostly unsavory, who thoroughly enjoyed “firing a shot.” The Indonesian dictator Suharto was particularly busy on Carter’s dime (in East Timor and elsewhere), but there were plenty of other dictators Carter helped keep in power, and blood, even as he scolded them after the more visible massacres. Also, if Zbigniew Bfzezinski – who ran Carter’s foreign policy, and was (and is) basically Cheney’s soulmate – is to be believed, the Carter administration intentionally worked to lure the USSR into invading Afghanistan. And his presidency ultimately failed because he was so unwilling to distance himself from the brutal Shah that it triggered the hostage crisis.
He may not have had regular US troops firing the shots, but Carter has just as much blood on his hands as any post-WWII American president. He was the rare president who actually talked about human rights, and he’s been working hard (and admirably) to atone for his presidential misdeeds ever since, but none of that changes the historical record.
How do you equate Brzezinski and Cheney? I don’t think they’re soul mates at all. Helsinki is just about the opposite of Cheneyism.
Brzezinski is not someone who I consider an ally; he was and still continues to be a critic of the pacifists, and even the McGovern (Feingold?) wing of the Democratic Party. But Cheney? No.
He’s a Pole, and he hates the Russians. It’s not any more complicated than that.
I have seen the same attitudes among a number of older progressives, even some to the left of progressive Democrats. To my mind, some of it is impatience that after 60 years there has not been a settlement in Korea (an impatience that seems lacking with regards to Israel and Palestine BTW). And some of it is the result of the comic caricatures of North Korean leaders, which has been promoted as a form of marginalization. But most of it has to do with American arrogance: why won’t North Korea just capitulate to US demands and power?
As usual in our dealings with other countries we are remaining indignantly and self-righteously ignorant of those elements of our behavior that just might be the reasons for the crisis. Even as we use the crisis to try to provoke the change we want to see, which often is self-defeating for US interests.
The North Korean leadership is thuggish, but they are not stupid, and they are not crazy (as is frequently suggested in so-called “objective” US reporting). There’s a context and a reason for everything they do. And people who wonder why they’re so bellicose in their rhetoric toward the US tend to forget that we’ve worked hard to isolate them internationally and had tens of thousands of troops on their border for 60 years, following a war in which US troops pushed the North Koreans practically to the Yalu River (their border with China) before China intervened on their behalf. We may think that’s all ancient history, but cultures like Korea (or Iraq or Iran) that have been around for thousands of years tend to see things in a much, much longer time frame than Americans do.
Oh, yeah, and the US has a lot more nukes pointed at North Korea than they have pointed as us (or anyone else), and we’re the country with a history of using them. In East Asia.
All of which is to say that while the North Korean government is repugnant, they’re not irrational, and the dynamics of the situation are much, much more complicated than we’re hearing in US media. As usual.
The list of lessons we haven’t learned is a long one.
I don’t really see how anyone can be scared of Kim Jong-un anyway. To me he’s just a child playing with his new toys. The problem of course is that he’s capable of getting a lot of people killed, but then preemptively killing a bunch of people is not a particularly good solution to that problem.
just stop the warmongering.
period
There is an enormous dead zone in the North Pacific, where lack of oxygen in the water, a result of pollution and acidification, has left the ocean unable to support any life.
The missile with Jeremi Suri on it should be aimed there. It’s only fitting.