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A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq

Book by Jose Ramos-Horta · 3 quotes · Iraq, Iraq War, War

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A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq Quotes

“If the Bahreini royal family can have an embassy, a state, and a seat at the UN, why should the twenty-five million Kurds not have a claim to autonomy? The alleviation of their suffering and the assertion of their self-government is one of the few unarguable benefits of regime change in Iraq. It is not a position from which any moral retreat would be allowable.”

MoralityIraqAutonomyRoyaltyIraq WarKurdistanBahrainStatehoodKurdish PeopleAl Khalifa Family
Book:A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq
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“Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed—and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed—and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug—opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.”

LawJusticeUnited StatesMoralityIraqSocialismLiberalismIraq WarNatoInternational LawLeftismStalinismAnti War MovementGeorge W BushSaddam HusseinAnti AmericanismBa Ath PartyBa Athist IraqOpposition To The Iraq WarBa AthismPro War Left
Book:A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq
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