Antiwar.com Blog

I’m not about to give up my Pundit Guild card yet but I’m here to own up to some bad prognosticatin’. Early this year I wrote a series of blog posts arguing that the Democratic Party (which I’ve viewed as the lesser evil, in this era of “Red State Fascism“) was risking losing the election by running either a woman or black person. I wrote, for example, the intentionally overconfident title “The Coming McCain Victory’s Lesson for Antiwar Democrats,” and gave Obama a one-in-four chance of winning. So what went wrong (or, rather, right)? Obviously there was the collapse of the stock market, the drop in real estate prices, the bank failures, and the federal bailouts. McCain had a brief post-convention lead in the polls and then just before the election came the deluge of terrible news, which was blamed largely on the Republicans. Still, in retrospect, I think my analysis was flawed. I noted that Bush won every state in Dixie in both 2000 and 2004, while losing big in non-Dixie America. And I noted that Dixie-as-kingmaker was a new phenomenon. But somehow I failed to realize that this Republican regionalism was a weakness, particularly considering Bush’s narrow victory in 2000, when he ran as a moderate, Gore ran as a not-very-believable populist, and Nader ran as a liberal vote magnet. I now believe that Bush’s 2004 victory was probably largely due to voters’ desire to  appear resolute after the 9/11 attacks, and during two deadly military occupations. I just hope I was right about the “lesser evil” part….

A guest post by fellow Inter Press Service columnist Eli Clifton:

We have followed the campaign behind Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West since it first emerged in 2005. IPS has published two articles on its producers and distribution here and here. This new rebuttal by JewsOnFirst is one of the most comprehensive attempts to dismantle the arguments presented in the film.

JewsOnFirst, an organization, “dedicated to the protection of the separation of church and state under the First Amendment,” has published Rebutting Obsession: Historical Facts Topple Film’s Premise that Violent Muslim Fundamentalists are Nazis’ Heirs, Expose its Fear-mongering, a devastating critique of Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West. Obsession, a 2005 film that, in the name of exposing violent fundamentalism, casts suspicion on all Muslims, experienced increased exposure this fall, when the mysterious Clarion Fund initiated the unsolicited distribution of millions of DVD inserts inside swing state newspapers.

In support of the rebuttal, JewsOnFirst also offers a web-based slide presentation summarizing the key arguments, as well as profiles of the supposed experts interviewed in the film. (The slide presentation will soon be available for download as a PowerPoint presentation next week.)

Key arguments made in JewsOnFirst’s Rebutting Obsession are:

• Obsession and the “expert” viewpoints presented in it represent the ideology of the far right wing within the Republican Party, which seeks to intervene in the Presidential election with a distraction from the current economic turmoil.

• Obsession ignores the geopolitical environment in which radical Islam was cultured, and makes a baseless argument that such fundamentalism is the ideological descendent of Nazism.

• Obsession seeks, at a time of economic pain and cultural division to permit the viewer to project all real or imaginary fears and anxieties onto Muslims, as an alien and externalized enemy. This propaganda mirrors the situation faced by Japanese Americans during World War II and non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants in the 20th century. Such divisiveness actually weakens America by threatening our principles of cultural coexistence and religious freedom.

• The “experts” presented in Obsession have limited experience in the Middle East, few speak Arabic or Farsi and most have limited or no academic background in Islam or the Koran. They represent a fringe group of Middle East “specialists” who align themselves with the Likud party in Israel and Christian evangelical and pro-settler lobbies in the United States.

• Finally, Obsession, despite its half-hearted disclaimer that radical Muslims are a small minority, seeks to promote the concept of a violent clash of civilizations instead of cultural coexistence and religious pluralism.

The full project can be viewed at http://www.jewsonfirst.org/obsession/.

On October 31, Sarah Palin said that in the first 100 days of the McCain administration, we would “shore up the strategies that we need over in Iraq and Iran to win these wars.” (About 17 seconds into the clip.)

After Georgetown University decided against renewing his contract, a brief stay as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and his efforts to get a post at the Brookings Institution came to naught, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have found a new home at the Hudson Institute, another predominantly neo-conservative “think tank” that tends to lie in the shadow of the much more media-prominent American Enterprise Institute (AEI). According to Hudson’s latest News & Review, Feith, whose self-serving memoir, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism pretty much bombed with the few credible critics who reviewed it, will be the Institute’s Director for National Security Strategies.

Hudson, of course, was the first refuge of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby after his 2005 indictment for perjury, but he apparently left after his conviction (and despite Bush’s commutation), and I’ve completely lost track of him now. (Does anyone know what he’s doing?)

Feith will join other leading Likudist lights at Hudson, including Meyrav Wurmser (wife of former Cheney aide David Wurmser), who heads the Institute’s Middle East Studies department; Hillel Fradkin; Laurent Murawiec; Anne Bayefsky; Norman Podhoretz (not in residence); and Nina Shea, among others. It’s interesting to note that the two Wurmsers, as well as Feith and another Hudson Senior Fellow, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., made up half of the eight members of the task force sponsored by the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies (IASPS) that produced the 1996 “Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” paper for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that many analysts believe helped plant the seed for the Iraq invasion eight years later. (That alone suggests how dangerous it might be to put Feith in charge of developing any kinds of “strategies,” as Hudson seems to have done.) The other task force members included IASPS’s highly eccentric (check its website) president, Robert Loewenberg, James Colbert, then-Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) researcher Jonathan Torop; and the nominal chairman, Richard Perle, from whom not much has been heard lately — another sign that, with the exception of Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and the Kagan boys, neo-cons have been lying rather low during the election campaign.

Feith’s former boss, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, has also not been heard from recently, which in many ways is very strange, given that his last public post was president of the World Bank and his official at AEI (where he has been a Visiting Scholar since his ignominious resignation 18 months ago) stresses his interest in development and trade. You would think that, given the current financial crisis and its potentially disastrous ripple effects on emerging economies and poor countries (for which he has expressed particular sympathy in the past), he would not have been shy about offering his advice about how to protect them. But, apart from his advocacy of business and defense ties with Taiwan (he’s chairman of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council), he seems to have largely disappeared from the public sphere. In the realm of economic development and aid, Hudson has acquired a far more credible figure in the person of former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios, who joined the Institute at the same time as Feith.