Author: Eric Garris

Among the top political sites on the Web last week, according to HitWise, one of the top Internet rating services.

The State Department has had enough!

They see the recent sparring over the issue of whether to nuke or invade Pakistan, or to nuke Saudi Arabia, as irresponsible. (I guess making irresponsible comments on foreign policy is the private domain of the White House.)

The State Department would rather that neither citizens of other nations nor the American people should find out what the future leader of the US proposes to drag us into.

From the August 6 edition of The Army Times (print edition only, not online):

Washington

Surprise fave among troops

WHAT’S UP: Among Republicans running for president, the anti-war candidate — Texas Rep. Ron Paul — has the highest total of campaign contributionns from service members, according to the most recent Federal Election Commission reports. Paul collected $14,840 from service members, slightly more than the $14,775 collected by Arizona Sen. John McCain, a supporter of the war in Iraq. The other Republican candidates got $2,600 or less from contributors who identified themselves as service members.

WHAT’S NEXT: Paul, who served as a flight surgeon in the Air Force in the 1960s, and McCain, a Navy pilot who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, could not be further apart in their views of the Iraq war, which is the biggest military issue so far in the 2008 campaign that is just beginning. The current front-runner in the race, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, received $2,550 from military contributors, the FEC report shows.

For the first time ever, Iraq won the Asian Cup football (soccer) title, beating Saudi Arabia in a match held in Jakarta, Indonesia. Violence has been down the last couple of days as Sunnis, Shi’ites, and Kurds came together in a unity that trumps politics.

Iraqis are hoping that George Bush won’t try to take credit for the win, as he did in August 2004 when he claimed that the Iraqi football success in the Olympics was proof that the U.S.-led occupation was benefiting Iraq.

“This is a game that Iraq won, and I hope Bush won’t now say, look, I made them win that match,” a member of the Iraqi Olympics Federation in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS. “He did it once and we hated him even more for that because it was our boys who won despite the miserable support we are getting from the Americans and our government.”

After the 2004 Olympics win, Iraqi football star Salih Sadir told reporters, “Iraq as a team doesn’t want Mr. Bush to use us (in an ad) for the presidential campaign…we don’t wish for the presence of the Americans in our country. We want them to go away.” Iraq’s football coach Adnan Hamad Majeed had then said: “(My problems) are with what America has done in Iraq: destroy everything. The American Army has killed so many people in Iraq.”

Rod Dreher, a former National Review champion of the war, explains that the colossal failure of the Iraq War has “shattered his illusions” about government.

Among his reflections:

I no longer implicitly trust governmental institutions, including the military — neither in their honesty nor their competence.

I no longer have confidence in the ability of our military, or any military, to solve deep cultural and civilizational problems through force alone.

Keep reading…

Thanks to Lew Rockwell.

Antiwar.com’s editorial director Justin Raimondo appeared last Wednesday on “The Sloan Ranger Show,” on WGNU-AM in St. Louis.

Listen to the audio archive.