The bloodthirsty “conservative” warmongers at National Review have now all but admitted that The War on Terror will never end. This is from the September 11th issue:
“Ladies and gentlemen: Our Problems are here, there, and everythere. They will last our lifetime. You have heard of the Thirty Years’ War. This is ours—if not our Hundred Years’ War.”
Ann Berg surveys the history of fascism and concludes this ain’t it.
Jon Basil Utley explains why Americans aren’t cut out for empire.
Steve Vujacic ponders how far Tony Blair will go to salvage his legacy.
And as always, be sure to check out our Friday regulars Justin Raimondo and Doug Bandow.
Okay, you have an extra month to write that insightful essay you know you have inside you! The Antiwar.com essay contest for middle and high school students is drawing to a close – but as this is our first such contest and we want to make sure everyone who wants to enter has the chance to do so, we are extending the deadline through October 31.
This contest has significant monetary rewards and numerous less materialistic benefits – so check out the contest information. This is not a difficult contest, but one we hope is thought-provoking for our younger readers and their peers. One very important goal of the Randolph Bourne Institute and Antiwar.com is the education and involvement of young people: please help spread the word about this contest to any potential writer.
Brendan O’Neill has an Antiwar.com exclusive on today’s page, “Hooked on a Failing,” about the West’s War on Drugs, that will be of interest to folks of many foreign-policy stripes.
If someone makes a practical argument for torture, are you under any intellectual obligation to respond with a practical argument against? There are plenty of those, but as Lindsay Beyerstein puts it:
It’s sort of like writing rape-prevention posts about how you shouldn’t rape people, because it’s not going to be as much fun as you think, and you might drive your victim into the arms of radical feminists, etc. It seems either obscene or otiose to explain to would-be rapists why rape is a poor means to their ends.
There [is] something morally distasteful about being patient or reasonable with rapists. Same with torturers. I suppose that if I thought I could convince people not to rape with good arguments, I would try. Maybe the mistake is assuming that torturers are motivated by rationality any more than rapists.
The debate over who benefits from our invasion of Iraq entered a new phase with the publication of a research paper by Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, written by two prominent foreign policy scholars from the “realist” camp, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “Israel and U.S. Foreign Policy.” The paper not only examined the pervasive power of the Israel lobby in the U.S., but identified “the Lobby” — as they call it — as the decisive (if not the only) factor that set us on the road to war:
“Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure.”
The Lobby struck back at Mearsheimer and Walt, smearing these two distinguished scholars as “anti-Semites,” but now we see, as the chorus crying for war with Iran hikes up the volume, that the same forces are gathering to support a U.S. strike against Tehran. Furthermore, one cannot help but note that, although the U.S. is clearly not benefitting from an occupation that is draining American resources and destroying our credibility worldwide, Israel clearly is gaining — by establishing a military outpost in Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq. Seymour Hersh did the initial reporting on this development, and now the BBC has the pictures — a stunning video showing Israeli “ex”-military personnel training Kurdish pershmerga and setting up a base in Kurdistan. The idea is to establish an outpost from which Israeli planes can strike at Iran’s alleged nuclear facilities, and also create a presence on the ground that can strike, at will, across the Kurdish-Iranian border.
The war in Iraq, in this context, has to be seen as a necessary preparatory step before the real target — Iran — could be attacked. And now that they are getting ready to do it, we can see more clearly that Israel, and not the U.S., was and is the main beneficiary of American military operations in the region.
NOTE: The original version of this post had the wrong link for the BBC video, which has since been corrected.
