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Posted September 7, 2001
Warlord by Warlord
Tom Ambrose's column ["Raimondo's Wrong," WorldNetDaily, August 9] in WND is typical of most of the rubbish one finds there these days; another reason why I long ago stopped going to their website.
Ambrose reflects the neocon addiction to U.S. hegemonical belligerence and warfare. Truman was the epitome of the war criminal, sitting in his easy chair in D.C. ordering the deaths of thousands of totally innocent civilians, men, women, and children. How is that any different than sitting in an easy chair in Berlin or Moscow and ordering the deaths of thousands of innocent civilians, men, women, and children?
The
neocons at WND represent the media arm of the US global war machine.
They are performing their job with increasingly intense wartime rhetoric.
Another reason to support
Antiwar.com and help dismantle DC – warlord by warlord.
~ Dan Winterrowd
Justin Raimondo replies:
Thanks for your support, Dan, I really appreciate it. But I disagree with your assessment of WorldNetDaily. Editor Joe Farah has some views I don't agree with: but, as an internet journal, WND is, in my view, well above the average and often excellent.
Being an online publication, and not a political organization, WND features a variety of viewpoints – including material generated right here at Antiwar.com. During the Kosovo war, they did some real investigative reporting and uncovered the "interning" of US government employees ("psyops" division) at CNN. They run our very own Sascha Matuszak quite a bit, and also many of my articles have been posted on the WND site.
WND is, in short, very much like the conservative-libertarian movement itself: a mixed bag, with some real good stuff and some really bad stuff. My strategy is to use the good as leverage against the bad, so as to eventually eliminate the negative aspect entirely. We have, in my view, far more of an audience on the antigovernment Right than the pro-government Left when it comes to pushing for a noninterventionist foreign policy, which is why I consider the matter important enough to expostulate here at length.
Partition
Instead of being a model democracy and multiethnic state, Macedonia is being set up for partition. They're being called "Slavs," and "hard-line nationalist" and pretty soon the war crimes allegations will be issued.... Just like in Kosovo. One simply cannot defend one's country any more. Ethnic rebels are today's"radical chic" just like the Black Panthers once were.
Macedonia, like Kosovo before it and like Bosnia before it, just happens to be in the way. In the way of the great oil pipelines that will take the black gold from the landlocked Caspian Sea to western markets. In the way of the multinationals looking to exploit Kosovo's mineral wealth. In the way of the West looking for vassal states to secure their interests. In the way of the globalists looking to remake the world according to their utopias, the Balkans being the proving grounds.
~ Sean Scallon, East Ellsworth, WI
Domestic Considerations
Is US policy imperial? On the ground in the Balkans it may look that way. Here is another explanation by way of G.F. Kennan's lecture at Grinnell College February 1984 (from At a Century's Ending: Reflections, 1982-1995 by George F. Kennan, W.W. Norton & Company, 1996, pp. 134-136):
"...A given statement or action will be rated as a triumph in Washington if it is applauded at home in those particular domestic circles at which it is aimed, even if it is quite ineffective or even self-defeating in its external effects...."
"This situation is not new. We have only to recall Tocqueville's words, written 150 years ago, to the effect that 'it is in the nature of democracies to have, for the most part, the most confused or erroneous ideas on external affairs, and to decide questions of foreign policy on purely domestic considerations'. ...The tendency seems to be carried to greater extremes here than elsewhere. This may be partly explained by the nature of the constituency to which the American statesman sees himself as appealing. In the European parliamentary systems, the constituency is normally the parliament, because the ministry can fall from office if it loses parliamentary support. In our country, unhappily, the constituencies are more likely to consist of particularly aggressive and vociferous minorities or lobbies; and these, for some curious reason, seem more often than not to be on the militaristic and chauvinistic side...."
Americans need to wake up to the dangers of the deficiencies mentioned. Kennan mentions lobbies – not just jingoistic demagoguery.
In a recent CNN online poll an overwhelming majority voted that the USA should attend the conference on racism in Durban in spite of the conference's stand on Israel being racist. Yet our government resisted attending. The lobby was more important than the people, more important than racism!
The USA will give somewhere around $5 billion in "aid" to Israel this year. It is so difficult to cite any realistic, credible justification for this aid that our government does everything it can to hide any public discussion of it. The funds are needed here. The government does not care.
Special Forces
[Regarding M.P.'s letter of September 4, "Kurdish Terrorists Need to Be Wiped-Out":]
Is this guy telling us that US special forces worked with the Turks to suppress the Kurds?
~ A. Vucelic