Top 10 Ways Neera Tanden Has Been Misunderstood
https://davidswanson.org/top-10-ways-neera-tanden-has-been-misunderstood/
When Neera Tanden emailed her colleagues in support of forcing Libya to pay for the privilege of having been bombed, many misunderstood, including one of her colleagues who emailed back objecting to creating what he supposed was an obvious financial incentive for bombing more countries.
Now that Tanden has been nominated for high office and will face confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate, we have an obligation to get this right. The top ways in which Tanden has been misunderstood are:
1. Tanden
had already supported bombing Libya. The damage was done. It
was her responsibility to find some source of funding to pay
for it, and she was simply not as free as you ordinary
schmucks might be to propose taxing billionaires or
corporations because she was running a think tank funded and
controlled by them.
2. Tanden actually got the idea from
a handful of deranged Republicans, and there is nothing
whatsoever more respectable than right-wing figures labeled
leftists in the media seeking common ground with right-wing
figures labeled right-wing in the media. You can’t
complain about the shortage of such outreach and then object
when it happens!
3. Libya at this point was becoming a
hell on earth, a weapons bizarre, a host to open-air slave
markets. No money left in Libya was possibly going to be
used for anything good or decent. It was far more moral and
sensible to try to steal some of Libya’s money to fund the
government that had brought Libya to that
state.
4. Tanden’s scheme, surpassing your miserable
understanding, was to give oil profits a bad name without
offending the brutal oil dictatorships funding her think
tank. But you had to pretend you understood these subtleties
and stick your nose in and muck it all up with your
tree-hugging bleeding-heart opposition to incentivizing
bombing people. Didn’t you?
5. Tanden loves the troops.
If she didn’t rescue the financial balance of Operation
F— the Libyans or Operation Freedom Falcon or whatever it
was called, pressure could have grown to reduce the military
budget, and how exactly would that have helped in electing
Democrats in a nation where most people want to reduce the
military budget? Think a little, why don’t you! This is
why we need think tanks.
6. Tanden actually explained her
motives in the email in question, but nobody chose to
understand. If wars didn’t pay for themselves, Tanden
feared, the U.S. government would not engage in the world in
any way. Since diplomacy and trade and international
institutions and cooperation on non-deadly enterprises
don’t really exist outside of cult fiction, it’s either
wars that pay for themselves or total and dreadful
isolation. Plus, there is no way to pay for things like
healthcare unless wars pay for them, and the health
insurance companies that make healthcare so expensive are
needed to make people as angry and desperate as they need to
be to support the wars, which also generate a significant
percentage of the need for the healthcare. You shouldn’t
try to understand these complex and interlocking matters if
you lack the proper degrees.
7. The email in which Tanden
explained her admirable positions was fake and created by
Russia or leaked by Russia which obligates you not to read
it. Sorry.
8. Oh, OK, it was leaked to The
Intercept, but the Intercept was created by
Russia. Or it could have been, is what I heard has been
assessed with a high degree of confidence.
9. Are you a
sexist or a racist or an anti-Semite?
10. You love Trump,
don’t you?
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David Swanson is an
author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is director
of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign
coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson's books include War Is A Lie. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org and WarIsACrime.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. He
is a 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 Nobel Peace Prize Nominee.
Swanson was awarded the 2018 Peace Prize by the U.S. Peace
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