Pligget
Little to say for myself


Thursday, April 03, 2003  

Safe and Sound

Understandably the US media is going to town reporting the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch by US special forces. Here she is - young, female, badly wounded - saved from Saddam's clutches by a daring raid involving fire-fights, decoy ops, the lot. It seems that she had spent 9 days in captivity, and had 3 broken limbs and multiple gun-shot wounds. I can imagine agents all over Hollywood going ape-shit as I write this. I reckon it's going to be a toss-up between Mena Suvari and Christina Ricci.

Anyway, I read (towards the very end of this article) that some people had heard that there was a tip-off from someone else that she had limped to the hospital with just a gun-shot wound, and that whilst there she was tortured - the implication being that most of her injuries were sustained while in captivity. I find that very hard to believe, because if it were true it wouldn't be relegated to the closing paragraphs of the story. Imagine the propaganda value of such an outrage.

I suggest (and fervently hope) that she had actually been cared for sufficiently well to survive what sound to me to be life-threatening injuries. It would have been fairly straightforward for her captors to add another bullet-hole and turn to more pressing matters, so maybe decency still exists within the Axis of Evil. Perhaps I'm just an optimist.

posted by Plig | 15:26 |

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Forget the sentimental notion that foreign policy is a struggle between virtue and vice, with virtue bound to win.
Forget the utopian notion that a brave new world without power politics will follow the unconditional surrender of wicked nations.
Forget the crusading notion that any nation, however virtuous and powerful, can have the mission to make the world in its own image.
Remember that diplomacy without power is feeble, and power without diplomacy is destructive and blind.
Remember that no nation's power is without limits, and hence that its policies must respect the power and interests of others.
Hans Morgenthau

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts
Bertrand Russell

The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one
Albert Einstein

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative
Martin Luther King Jr.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man
Bertrand Russell

I think it would be a good idea
Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization

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Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it
Mahatma Gandhi

Always make new mistakes
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