Posted March 15, 2002

Leaked

It took Justin Raimondo's "Doomsday Doctrine" to bring home a rather disturbing gesture by Condaleeza Rice during her Fox News Sunday appearance on March 10th. When Tony Snow asked her about the Los Angeles Times piece on the leaked report about the establishment of a nuclear strategy, she gave a smug, rather knowing little chuckle and said something to the effect that the report was a "selective leak," and blabbed on about why the U.S. needs this "deterrence" measure and why Iraq needs to be taken out of the equation. I didn't read that much into when I heard it, but it stood out after reading Justin's column asking the question as to whether the administration intentionally leaked the information.

~ J. Gritt

Maelstrom

Thanks to Justin for articulating so clearly the maelstrom we are all entering at this time. There is only one country in the world that has used nuclear weapons against others in time of war, and that is the US The US has never really come to grips with its use of these weapons of mass destruction during World War II. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both civilian targets, possessing no military significance whatsoever. In the case of Hiroshima, there was a large population of slave laborers (mostly from Korea) who were consumed in the conflagration. The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of pure destruction.

Notice that it is always the conservatives, the group allegedly against big government, who defend the use of nuclear weapons. This is yet another reason why I contend that the conservative movement in the US has never been about limited government. For conservatives, limited government is just rhetoric, without any actual meaning. If conservatives can justify the use of nuclear weapons against civilian populations, then why should it come as a surprise when they approve secret trials, holding people without charge, and in general intimidating the whole world, both in the US and elsewhere?

~ Jim Wilson

Grisly Gang

It's difficult these days to read the neocon press, what with the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard and even the Washington Times frenziedly beating the drums of war. NRO under Lowry and Goldberg is a sad joke. So thank God for Antiwar.com and particularly for the commentary of Justin Raimondo. His brilliant analysis of the Doomsday Doctrine makes it clear, clearer than it has ever been, that our leaders have lost their minds. Dubya was so disarming when he promised us a more "humble" foreign policy. Now we have him and his grisly gang of advisors embracing the Strangelovian doctrine: Do what we say or we'll kill you and your entire nation. We'll make your land uninhabitable and rain deadly radioactivity over whole regions of the earth.

To think we can blast Israel's enemies into oblivion and live happily ever after is a conceit so monumental it should frighten every thinking American. Unhappily, one finds very few thinking Americans these days.

~ Robert S., Baltimore

Evil

[Regarding Justin Raimondo's column of March 11, "The Doomsday Doctrine":]

Nice work. The only thing is, once you reach the point of explaining our leaders' actions as a product of evil, it gets harder to offer policy alternatives. Actually, the very last piece I published in The Nation, now about two years ago, concluded pretty much the same thing in the same words: our leaders are evil. And after that I kind of ran out of things to say about it. Or interest.

Seriously, I think the only rational approach is to see the problem as structural, e.g., the system allows evil people to take over, and until the system is changed fundamentally there's not much that helps. My preferred solution would be to increase the size of the House about five fold (in the first days of the Republic we had about 80,000 constituents per congressional district, now its about 700,000, which is neither democratic nor representative). And then work towards regional decentralization of the government with an eye towards possible regional secessions, e.g., the northeast, the southwest, etc. And so forth, on to the second American republic.

Otherwise, in the long term, I think we're headed towards a complete breakdown of the Federal government's moral authority and possibly a series of military coups.

~ George Kenney

Ugly Joke

President Bush and Colin Powell are sitting in a bar.

A guy walks in and asks the bartender, "Isn't that Bush and Powell sitting over there?"

Bartender says, "Yep, that's them."

So the guy walks over and says, "Wow, this is a real honor. What are you guys doing in here?"

Bush says, "We're planning World War III."

And the guy says, "Really? What's going to happen?"

Bush says, "Well, we're going to kill 25 million Iraqis this time and one bicycle repairman."

The guy exclaimed, "A bicycle repairman? Why kill a bicycle repairman?"

Bush turns to Powell, punches him on the shoulder and says, "See, smart ass?! I told you no one would give a sh*t about the 25 million Iraqis!"

~ SN

Divine Intervention

Incredible article ("The Doomsday Doctrine")! We traditional Catholics who have been beaten underground agree with you about Divine intervention being the only solution. What you might not realize is that God will probably leave us to ourselves until there are enough saints ("Gandalfs," if you will) praying for His mercy and intercession, thus our hope is in personal holiness. Then, He will inspire the pope to finally do the consecration of Russia to Our Lady's Immaculate Heart (correctly...), as per her request at Fatima in 1917 (at which approximate time a lot of this coincidentally can be traced back to -- Israel, World War I, Balfour agreement, Red Cross, attacks on the monarchies and Church, etc.).

~ Virginia T., California

1945

Justin had some confusion in deciding which emotion he felt upon reading about the nuclear plans of the idiots in our present administration. There is no question of my own emotion. It was a knot of sickness deep in my own gut.

After that reaction I was mentally transported back to September of 1945. The Second Marine Division had been assigned the occupation Kyushu with the Division headquarters in Nagasaki. Having more freedom than the average Marine (I was in the Public Information section) allowed me to roam around the city, or at least, what was left of it. It is too bad that most other Americans cannot make the mental trip that I made on Saturday last. Those persons, still alive, had looks in their eyes that I shall never forget. It was if the light had gone out behind the eye balls. It was as if they still could not comprehend what had happened to them. The physical damage to the city was beyond description. I did become friendly with a Caucasian family who had lived through the horror of the night of the bombing, the Walker family. Even from their vantage point description was limited to their own home area. The rest was something they could not tell me.

There are two quotations about that event that shall always remain with me. In the Honolulu Advertiser was a quote from the Manchester Guardian, "Man has at last found the means to destroy himself, ultimately and completely." The other was from a speech by Adlai Stevenson to the Association of Editors and Publishers, just after he had lost to Dwight Eisenhower for the second time, "I know that all of you have dreamed of writing the headline about the end of the world, but who will be left to read it?"

~ J. Philip Schediwy, California