NH Voters Thought McCain Opposed the Iraq War?

CNN crunched the exit poll data from yesterday’s New Hampshire primary and found that “among the 34 percent [of Republican primary voters] who said they disapproved of the war, McCain had a wide advantage over the GOP field — even over Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the sole advocate of a U.S. withdrawal in the Republican field.” (hat tip to Think Progress).

Perhaps such voters did not realize the temporal difference between exiting Iraq “now” (in Ron Paul’s case) versus 10,000 years from now (in McCain’s case, according to his comment on CBS’s Face the Nation last week).

McCain has rarely missed a chance to grovel at Bush’s feet to support the Iraq war.

Why were so many voters who claimed to oppose the war so ignorant?

The History of the Anti-Interventionist Right

The first installment of my review-essay of Murray N. Rothbard’s The Betrayal of the American Right, entitled “The Real American Right,” is now up at Taki’s Top Drawer. The second installment is up tomorrow, and the third on Wednesday.

I have to say that I’m really jazzed about this particular piece, and had great fun writing it. Today’s “conservative” movement is a caricature — and, in many ways, an inversion — of what it used to be. In my essay, I examine the historical roots of the “Old Right,” the anti-interventionist, pro-liberty movement that grew up in opposition to the war-mongering collectivist currents of the 1930s.

Oh, and I’ve been doing a lot of Paul-blogging over there: go and check it out.

UPDATE: Part II of the series appears here.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Part III is here.

The War Party Never Rests

As I warned during last year’s incident with the British sailors and the Iranians in the Gulf, an indeterminate border between Iraq and Iran in that area is eventually bound to lead to more incidents, and now it’s happening:

“Iranian Revolutionary Guard gunboats harassed three U.S. Navy warships in the Strait of Hormuz Sunday, in what the U.S. military considers a ‘significant provocative act.’ Military officials told NBC News that two U.S. Navy destroyers and one frigate were heading into the Persian Gulf through the international waters of the Strait of Hormuz when five armed ‘fast boats’ of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard approached a high speed, darting in and out of the formation. At one point a radio message from one of the Iranian boats warned, ‘You are going to blow up within minutes.'”

The hopes of many that the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program — i.e. there is no such program– may have averted war, are, as I predicted, a bit too optimistic. The War Party’s slogan, when it comes to Iran, is “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” As long as we’re in the Middle East, and specifically in Iraq, the prospects for war with Tehran proliferae by the day.

 

 

The AIPAC Spy Trial: A Case of Prosecutus Interruptus

I’ve been covering the AIPAC spy case since CBS broke the story of US secrets stolen by top officials of Israel’s number one Washington lobbyist, way back in late summer of 2004. Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, AIPAC honcho Steven Rosen, and the Lobby‘s number one Iran specialist, Keith Weissman, were indicted on August 4, 2005. Franklin pleaded guilty, and, in a deal with the government, promised to testify at the trial of his co-conspirators, Rosen and Weissman, in exchange for leniency: depending on his performance at the upcoming trial, he may get his 12-year sentence reduced considerably.

That is, if the trial ever takes place. I’ve been on this case since day one, but even I’ve lost count of how many times the trial has been delayed, for one made-up-sounding reason or another. Rosen and Weissman are certainly getting the best defense lawyers: their legal costs, already running into the millions before the trial has even begun, must have set some kind of record. Rosen and Weissman are the Lobby’s Sacco and Vanzetti, and they are certainly getting excellent legal representation. As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports:

“An April 29 trial date was set in the classified information case against two former AIPAC staffers. Judge T.S. Ellis III of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., told prosecutors and defense lawyers that the date he set Thursday was final, sources said. Ellis’ office confirmed the date, at least the fifth such date since Steve Rosen, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s foreign policy chief, and Keith Weissman, its Iran analyst, were indicted in August 2005.”

I see I’m not the only one to have lost count of the postponements. The defense deftly delayed on every imaginable ground, and was indulged by a noticeably sympathetic judge, who forced the government to produce top secret information — the very information Israel’s AIPAC spy nest had gleaned from sympathizers inside our government. Furthermore, he has granted the defense demand to subpoena top government officials, including Condoleezza Rice. In addition to this new — and supposedly “final” — trial date, the JTA reports an interesting development: 

“Separately, the prosecution announced three expert witnesses it would call to show that the classified information allegedly handled by Rosen and Weissman damaged the national interest: Maj. Gen. Paul Dettmer, the Pentagon’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; William McNair, a CIA official; and Dale Watson, the FBI’s former executive assistant director for counterterrorism and counterintelligence, who headed the agency’s investigation into the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.”

“The defense has not announced its experts.”

It will no doubt be difficult to find anyone in the military or intelligence communities who would tesitfy that the treason of Franklin, Weissman, and Rosen served the national interest, rather than damaged it, but there’s a whole platoon of neoconservative writers and publicists who have been rallying to the defense, and claiming that the prosecution is motivated by “anti-Semites” within the Justice Department, including Joel Mowbray, Commentary editor Gabriel Schoenfeld, and the inimitably laconic Charles Johnson, who disdained the whole matter as a mere “kerfluffle.” Let them take the stand, raise their right hands, and swear that it’s good for America that the Israelis are stealing our secrets with one hand, even as they take in billions per year from the US Treasury with the other.

What’s so important about the AIPAC spy case? After all, nations spy on each other all the time, so what’s the big deal with this particular incident?

The story of two top AIPAC employees who acted as couriers, funneling US intelligence gleaned from Franklin to their Israeli handlers, dramatizes the thesis of professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, in The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, their monumental study of how groups like AIPAC distort the policy-making process. Franklin, in his guilty plea, admitted to the crime, but maintained his ideological innocence to the end, claiming that he had only wanted to help Israel and thought its concerns were not being sufficiently heeded by US government officials.

The Lobby, in spite of its zeal on behalf of Israel, has always maintained that Israeli and American interests are perfectly congruent. The exposure of key figures in their top leadership as spies for Israel is a case of zeal gone too far — and a perfect refutation of the perfect congruence argument.

McCain Means War

Matt Yglesias captures the spirit of John McCain as the essence of militarism:

“For McCain, a certain culture of honor, militarism, and nationalism are their own reward. The military is to be celebrated and supported not for what it does but for what it is. Thus, a given military venture doesn’t need to have a real purpose or be ‘worth it’ in any particular sense. It is what it is, and what we need to do is keep on doing it for as long as ‘it’ takes and it doesn’t matter if ‘it’ is pointless or futile or even if ‘it’ isn’t anything in particular at all. The war is its own rationale.”

War is the religion of the post-Bush blood-and-soil GOP, and McCain is auditioning for the role of high priest.

He’s scarier even than Giuliani, whose vision of unremitting aggression seems pretty much limited to the Middle East, as per the Israeli-centric perspective of his foreign policy advisors. McCain’s belligerence is more all-inclusive: I remember he once went to Georgia, the former Soviet republic, and declared that South Ossetia — which has risen up in rebellion against the tyrannical Georgian regime — is “sovereign Georgian soil.” No part of the world is exempt from the McCaniac purview.