You’d think that someone who wrote this article would be ready if he was going to appear on Antiwar Radio.
But Scott Horton kicks his butt when he comes on to defend his position that Americans would benefit from another 9/11 attack.
MP3 here. (18:08)
Last week Hitwise, a leading Internet traffic-rating service, announced their new rankings for political sites. Under the overall category of political websites, Antiwar.com was ranked #10 for the week ending August 4.
This morning, Hitwise announced their rankings for the week ending August 11, and Antiwar.com has moved up to #7!
A video has surfaced of Dick Cheney predicting an invasion of Iraq would lead to a “quagmire.”
In 1994, Cheney explained his reasons for not advocating an invasion of Iraq following the first gulf war:
Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.
It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families — it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.
Thanks to Grand Theft Country.
At first I though he was kidding, until I looked at some of his past writings.
Stu Bykofsky, columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, is hoping for another major terror attack on the US. He lists the likely targets for al-Qaeda, hoping they will take him up on his offerings: “The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago’s Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda.”
Bykofsky argues that we have lost the will to fight that united us after 9/11. He wants the hawks of the left and right to stop attacking each other and unite for bigger and better wars. And he sees an attack by al-Qaeda as the force that will do it. He is probably correct that such an attack will spur the War Party, but neither such an attack nor the resulting wars are things to hope for.
US officials keep insisting that the Iraqi government pass the laws the US wants. But what would happen if Iraqi legislators pass some of the laws the US has for itself.
Specifically the Third Amendment to the US Constitution: No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
An Associated Press story today highlights a plea by the director of Iraq’s National Library for US soldiers to leave the building:
Saad Eskander, who has overseen the restoration of the library after it was burned and looted following the 2003 invasion, claimed that U.S. and Iraqi soldiers forcibly entered the three-story building earlier this week as part of security preparations for a major Shi’ite pilgrimage.
The presence of foreign forces in the building could make it a target for insurgents, he said. He noted that the library’s collection had not suffered any damage, but said he holds U.S. and Iraqi forces “responsible for any damage inflicted on priceless documents or any human casualties due to this illegal operation. Any damage or theft will represent a cultural catastrophe along the lines of the looting of the Iraqi Museum after the fall of Baghdad in 2003,” he added.
But the most significant point of the article is this:
It is not uncommon for forces to temporarily commandeer houses and buildings as rest stops or lookout posts. (emphasis added)
I wonder how the US occupation forces would feel if the Iraqi government passed a similar law. Would they respect such a law? Perhaps Iraqi legislators will start turning to their actual constituency, the Iraqi people, and start passing laws to protect them, instead of catering to a foreign occupier.
Among the top political sites on the Web last week, according to HitWise, one of the top Internet rating services.
