Antiwar.com Blog

This is the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Marines. President Reagan sent in U.S. troops to try to help stabilize Lebanon after the Israeli invasion (and massacres by Israeli proxies in Palestinian refugee camps) the prior year. This was Reagan’s biggest antiterrorism debacle. He failed the Marines and he compounded the abuse by lying about it to the American people. But apologists for the U.S. warring continue to invoke the sacrifice of the Marines to vindicate practically any and all proposed U.S. invasions of foreign countries.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page today contains a piece implying that the Marines perished as a result of Democrats trying to limit the president’s power to intervene abroad. Robert Turner insists, “Had it not been for crass political partisanship, and efforts by Sen. Joe Biden and other congressional liberals to usurp the constitutional powers of the president, the loss of life in Beirut may have been avoided.” In reality, the folly and blame lies in those responsible for sending the troops to Lebanon, not for those trying to bring them home.

Turner then proceeds to blame 9/11 on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which attempted to limit the power of the president to wiretap any phone call he pleased. Turner implies that the only reason the 9/11 attacks were not detected was because U.S. government spies did not have boundless power to intrude on communications in America. This is tripe, as the reports of the Senate Intelligence Committee and 9/11 Commission showed. The subtitle on his article captures his message: “Liberal assaults on the executive branch have made us vulnerable.”

Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s national security advisor, has an article in the New York Times with a different song-and-dance on the anniversary. McFarlane says that the problem with the U.S. incursion into Lebanon was that the U.S. military did not plunge itself massively into the Lebanese civil war: “I urged the president to give the marines their traditional role — to deploy, at the invitation of the Lebanese government, into the mountains alongside the newly established Lebanese Army in an effort to secure the evacuation of Syrian and Israeli forces from Lebanon.” Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger recognized that it would be folly to commence a general war against Muslim forces.

I wrote about Reagan’s Lebanon debacle in Terrorism & Tyranny and for Counterpunch in 2003, looking at the Beirut debacle as a microcosm of the growing fiasco in Iraq. I concluded back then, “The Reagan administration paid no political price for its Beirut debacle. Reagan and Bush Sr. succeeded in falsifying, blustering, and smearing their way out of political trouble. Now, two decades later, the only ‘lesson’ that seems to be recalled is to stick resolutely to floundering policies – at least until the number of dead soldiers threatens to become politically toxic.” [cross-posted here]

For those interested, here is my debut in the American Conservative — a review of Justin Raimondo’s Reclaiming the American Right.

And Jim, I don’t know who these pro-Palin libertarians are, but I sure ain’t one!! In fact, I was an early detractor.

Is anyone closely tracking Sarah Palin’s continued popularity with libertarians?

Charles Murray, one of the Beltway’s favorite libertarians (ensconced at the manically pro-war American Enterprise Institute), told the New York Times that he is “truly and deeply in love” with Palin.

Joe Bast, the head of the Heartland Institute, said that Palin “was a great choice [for Vice President] for all the familiar reasons – she’s more free-market, has more executive experience, and is smarter than either McCain or Obama. What’s not to like? In a better world, she’d be running for president, not vice president.” Bast, writing in the October-November issue of the Heartland newsletter, also praises Palin’s “zero tolerance for government corruption.”

Has anyone compiled a list of other prominent libertarians who have gushed over America’s best-known moose hunter?

I continue to be mystified at how Palin could have become an instant saint for so many libertarians. The woman is and has long been a professional politician. Her performance in the debate with Joe Biden (another perfidious professional politician) should have shattered her halo once and for all – at least for anyone who doesn’t support perpetual U.S. warring around the globe. [Cross-posted here.]

I made a mistake and rush to correct it. The photo of the Afghan mujahadin does not include Gulbuddin Hekmatyar because, contrary to my contention in this post, he did not meet with Ronald Reagan in the White House. It was not for lack of an invitation, however. In fact, it was Hekmatyar who spurned the White House’s invitation.

Hekmatyar came to the U.S. in 1985 as part of a delegation of mujahadin leaders to lobby diplomats at the U.N. General Assembly. Despite enormous pressure by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which channeled a disproportionate amount of CIA and Saudi covert aid to him, Hekmatyar reportedly refused to meet with Reagan, arguing that any “palling around” with the leader of the Free World would be used by the Soviet Union and the Afghan secret police, the KHAD, to discredit his nationalist and religious credentials.

This doesn’t undermine the central point of the post, however: Reagan had intended to publicly meet with and presumably praise Hekmatyar as a “freedom fighter” — the moniker he used to describe the mujahadin depicted in the photo — at the White House and had invited him there for that purpose. But it was Hekmatyar, whose use of terrorism over more than three decades is undisputed, who turned Reagan down.

A propos, did anyone notice the elevation (due in major part to pressure from western embassies in Kabul, according to the New York Times) of a former KHAD special forces officer, Hanif Atmar, to head the Interior Ministry under President Hamid Karzai? What goes around comes around; one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. In any event, I apologize for the mistaken identity.

I didn’t want the week to go by completely without noting the revealing interview given by Likud Party leader and former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to the Financial Times and published in its October 7 edition. The interview makes clear that Netanyahu, who, according to recent polls, would be the front-runner in Israel if new elections were held today, has no interest in a two-state solution and would prefer to lead his country and the Palestinian territories under its control into a de facto apartheid state, bantustans and all. To quote from the FT:

“…Mr. Netanyahu wants to see the West Bank divided into a collection of disconnected economic zones with dedicated business projects.

“The ancient town of Jericho, for instance, should capitalise on its proximity to the Jordan River to attract Baptist tourists from the US — a location which the hawkish leader of the Israeli opposition says is ‘easily worth tens of thousands of jobs.’”

“The Palestinians, Mr. Netanyahu adds, would be allowed to hold on to their population centres. Other parts of the West Bank, such as the Judean desert and the Jordan Valley, should not leave Israeli control. ‘These areas are very significant for us because they are our strategic security belt,’ he says.

“…’It is not so much that peace brings prosperity – it is that prosperity brings peace,’ he says.”

All this sounds, of course, a lot like a recipe for setting up Bantustans. Instead of casinos in Sun City in Bophuthatswana, Netanyahu proposes Biblical tourism for Christian Zionists as a possible economic engine for Palestinian development.

Netanyahu goes on to offer his worldview, one that demonstrates clearly what the neo-conservatives have tried to do since 9/11 — subordinate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a “clash of civilizations” in which the U.S. and the West would naturally have to support Israel. Quoting again from the FT:

“Resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians …is a second-order issue for the Likud leader. ‘The issue for me is not the Palestinian problem. I think that conflict has been replaced by the battle between radical Islam and the western world,’ he says.” [Editor’s note: Is there any doubt that distribution of ‘Obsession’ in the U.S. and abroad serves Likud’s purposes exceptionally well?]

“Handing back control of the Israeli-occupied West Bank to the Palestinians as part of a peace deal, argues Mr. Netanyahu, would strengthen the hand of Iran. ‘Any area we withdraw from will be taken over by Iran and its proxies,’ he claims, pointing to the takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group, last year. ‘Both Lebanon and Gaza have become Iranian bases and they would get a third one if we retreat from the West Bank.’”

So, if Netanyahu somehow regains the premiership and has sufficient political power (and U.S. backing) to follow through on his current views, the inevitable result will be a de facto apartheid Israel and, one way or another, the end of a state that is both Jewish and democratic. Indeed, the biggest threat to Israel’s existence clearly lies not with Iran and its allies, but rather from Netanyahu the Likud and those who support them abroad, particularly in the U.S.

Speaking of which, check out a bizarre story in the current issue of The Forward about a U.S. group called “Stand Up America” led by two retired U.S. generals who have retained a U.S. attorney to represent former Israeli defense minister Gen. Shaul Mofaz in any legal effort to reverse his defeat last month in the Kadima primary election by Tzipi Livni. Mofaz, of course, represents the right wing of the centrist party, although, historically, his views are virtually indistinguishable from Netanyahu’s, Mofaz’ former mentor in Likud. (It was Mofaz whose threats against Iran last spring contributed substantially to the biggest daily spike in the global price of oil in its historic rise through the summer.)

The two generals are Thomas McInerney and Paul Vallely who have long advocated a military attack on Iran and have been members of the Iraq Policy Committee, a group that has lobbied hard (and so far unsuccessfully) for taking the cultish Mujahadin-e-Khalq (MeK) off the State Department’s terrorism and for providing it with loads of assistance as leader of the “democratic opposition” to the theocracy. Stand Up America, according to McInerny, is to “protect America and let people understand the danger of radical Islam and the seriousness of global jihad.”

“We do not want a government in Israel that will support appeasement,” McInerney told The Forward. “…We believe it is 1938 and everyone is going on, in denial.”

The two generals’ last trip to Israel was sponsored by the American Israel Education Foundation, an affiliate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).