Norman Mailer: Against the Empire

The death of author Norman Mailer stills an eloquent voice in defense of the old America — the pre-9/11, pre-neocon -dominated America, which disdained the idea of empire. During the Vietnam war, whilst in attendance at Truman Capote’s famous “Black and White Ball,” he went up to McGeorge Bundy, Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy advisor, and demanded that he step outside so they could settle accounts like two gentlemen. Here’s an excerpt from his remarkably prescient 2003 op ed:

“There is a subtext to what the Bushites are doing as they prepare for war in Iraq. My hypothesis is that President George W. Bush and many conservatives have come to the conclusion that the only way they can save America and get if off its present downslope is to become a regime with a greater military presence and drive toward empire. My fear is that Americans might lose their democracy in the process.

” … Iraq is the excuse for moving in an imperial direction. War with Iraq, as they originally conceived it, would be a quick, dramatic step that would enable them to control the Near East as a powerful base – not least because of the oil there, as well as the water supplies from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers – to build a world empire.”

He elaborated on his view of the US as a developing world empire in a fascinating interview with the editors of The American Conservative, in which he explains why he called himself a “left-conservative. Here’s a fascinating snippet: 

There is just this kind of mad-eyed mystique in Americans: the idea that we Americans can do anything. So, say flag conservatives, we will be able to handle what comes. Our know-how, our can-do, will dominate all obstacles. They truly believe America is not only fit to run the world but that it must run the world. Otherwise, we will lose ourselves. If there is not a new seriousness in American affairs, the country is going to go down the drain. That, I am fully ready to speculate, is the subtext beneath the Iraqi subtext, and they may not even be wholly aware of it themselves, not all of them.” 

And here’s one for the road: “The White Man Unburdened,” his 2003 antiwar essay in the New York Review of Books.

Smearing Scheuer

If you want to see the true heart and soul of the neoconservative style, go on over to Commentary — where else? — and direct your attention to one Gabriel Schoenfeld, senior editor, who is calling for former CIA honcho Michael Scheuer to be … jailed!

Why? Well, you see, they jailed Larry Franklin, didn’t they? And Larry was just engaging in a little harmless espionage on Israel’s behalf — nothing serious, according to Senor Schoenfeld. Why, every body in Washington does it! Scheuer, on the other hand, did an interview with Politiken, a Danish newspaper, wherein he discussed the “renditioning” of a suspected terrorist, who had been granted asylum in Denmark and kidnapped by Rummy’s Rangers whilst in Croatia. According to Schoenfeld, this amounts to divulging secret information — just like Franklin, and his two of his cohorts: Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s top Washington lobbyist for many years, and Keith Weissman, AIPAC’s Iran expert, scheduled to go on trial in January.

The only problem for Schoenfeld, as Scheuer has pointed out, is that the Danish rendition case was public knowledge and well known: a little research, and perhaps some familiarity with a web site known as Google.com, would have been helpful.

At first Schoenfeld admitted his error, seemed to apologize — and then changed his mind, after “someone in Washington” sent him a missive saying maybe there’s hope for jailing Scheuer after all. He doesn’t even bother to hide his viciousness: it’s bared fangs all the way.

The Forward was moved to remark on”Schoenfeld’s penchant for demonizing those with whom he is in disagreement,” and it’s true, but then this has always been the Commentary style under the reign of Podhoretz I, and Podhoretz II promises to be even worse. The AIPAC spy scandal is a disaster for the neocons, who are being outed as Israeli assets as well as prodigious liars.

As the Rosen-Weissman trial date approaches, and the defense threatens to blow the whistle on AIPAC’s behind-the-scenes machinations in Washington — including espionage, coupled with an unusually aggressive effort to influence on US foreign policy — the Lobby’s partisans are going a little crazy, as evidenced by the level of vituperation in Schoenfeld’s many posts on this subject. The latest is directed at me, and, in reiterating his litany of smears, once again sets himself up to look foolish.

Schoenfeld pretends that he saw Scheuer’s work on some obscure web site of dubious provenance — “The Jingoist,” of all things — when he knows perfectly well it appeared on Antiwar.com, a website with 100,000-plus readers daily, and then does his demonization act:

“Readers can judge for themselves. For if The Jingoist is in Holocaust-denial territory, anti-war.com is not far behind. A good place to begin is the long series that anti-war.com has devoted to the many Israeli “art students” who in the run-up to September 11 came to our country ostensibly to sketch, draw, and paint, but were actually working deep under cover, spying on Americans.”

He links to and quotes from this piece, and then avers:

“What happened to these art students? And how did they make their escape? Why did all the Jewish employees stay at home on the day that the Twin Towers were destroyed? Is anti-war.com fringe or mainstream? Connecting the Dots is eager to know.”

Legitimacy is something that the neocons have always prized, and their main conceit is that they are the final arbiters of who is “mainstream” and who is to be relegated to the “fringe.” Well, then, since he raises the issue of news sources and their legitimacy, then what about Fox News? Some would say that this is not really a news channel at all, but a propaganda outlet for the neocons, or, at least, for the Bush administration. Yet that is the source of the contention that the Israelis did indeed know something about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and was the theme of a special four-part series by Carl Cameron. (By the way, in bringing up the canard that no Jews showed up for work at the World Trade Building on the morning of 9/11, he is attributing to me remarks I never made, nor gave any credence to: this is typical, however, of the neocon method — muddy the issue with a stream of unsourced invective, in the hope that the sheer volume of lies will obscure the reality.)

Schoenfeld’s Commentary blog is called “Connect the Dots,” and all I have to say to him is connect these dots, buster.

Gabriel Schoenfeld is an Ass-hat

How dumb is Gabriel Schoenfeld? Pretty damned dumb, if we take his recent series of blog posts at Commentary as indicative of his mental capacity: he’s written a whole series of posts directed at former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, the latest one entitled (for some reason”) “The Cheese Danish Affair and Ron Paul,” which, in his rush to spill his bile on his target, manages to get everything wrong:  instead of smearing Scheuer, he only manages to  embarrass himself (and Commentary).

For the past week, Schoenfeld has been asserting that Scheuer had “spilled the beans” on the kidnapping by the CIA of Talat Fouad Qassem, an Egyptian Islamist who had been granted asylum in Denmark and was subjected to “extraordinary rendition,” as Schoenfeld put it, while on a trip to Croatia, sent to Egypt, and executed. This is hardly a secret, as anyone familiar with Google could have easily discovered, but Senor Schoenfeld already knew what he wanted to “prove” — that Scheuer had revealed the “secret” rendition to the Danish publication Politiken, and therefore is liable for prosecution for revealing “secrets” — and so didn’t bother to do any research: instead, he rushed to demand that Scheuer be charged,  and jailed. After all, if poor “innocent” Larry Franklin — who got 12 years in prison for stealing US secrets for Israel — could be so charged with revealing classified information, he “reasoned,” then why not Scheuer?

Scheuer answered him in the pages of Antiwar.com, here, showing that the Qassem rendition was public knowledge, and had been for quite some time. Yet that didn’t stop Schoenfeld, who now admitted he “will happily acknowledge” that he was “remiss in having raised a question about our hero to which the answer turned out to be readily available in the public domain.  Let us give Scheuer his due. He is right about this matter and [I] was wrong in suggesting that he had done something wrong and/or illegal with regard to the Danish affair.” Okay, fine and good: but, unfortunately, Schoenfeld doesn’t leave it at that — he just keeps digging a hole from which there is no extrication. He makes the mistake of making a big deal about the web site on which he first noticed Scheuer’s answer, an obscure blog known as “The Jingoist,” which nobody has ever heard of:

“As I predicted, he has been compelled to move from the mainstream to the margins. The latest sighting has occurred not in one of the mass-media outlets where until recently he had regularly appeared, but on a website called The Jingoist: When the Righteous Make the Wicked.”

Schoenfeld then goes on for three paragraphs, ranting about the content of “The Jingoist,” which apparently involves a lot of references to Jews as the Secret Masters of the Universe, and then avers: “Now that we illuminati have illuminated the stage from which our hero wishes to speak, let us turn to the substance of his comments.” Except that Schoenfeld illuminates nothing but his own cluelessness, because “The Jingoist” simply appropriated Scheuer’s piece, without permission from anyone: to tar Scheuer with what is posted on “The Jingoist” is utter nonsense. People take copyrighted material and post it on their own little web sites all the time: for example, here is a piece by Schoenfeld that originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times, posted on a web site that seems dubious at best. Did Schoenfeld post it there? I doubt it. Is Schoenfeld — who, after all, has had his work purloined – really responsible for the thief’s political views? Of course not: not even by Senor Schoenfeld’s rather dubious morality.

Schoenfeld then asks, at the end of his dumb-ass peroration, a number of questions which I will answer here:

“1. What does Michael Scheuer’s posting on The Jingoist tell us about him?”

Answer: Absolutely nothing, since Scheuer did not post anything on “The Jingoist.” Instead, this tells us a lot about Schoenfeld, starting with the rather obvious fact that a) he knows nothing about the Internet, and b) he’s a vicious nut-bar who is obsessed with defending a convicted Israeli spy and smearing a patriotic man.

“2. What does it tell us about the officials at the CIA who put him in charge of countering Osama bin Laden?”

Again: it tells us nothing about Scheuer, and everything we care to know about Schoenfeld.

“3. What does it tell us about the television networks that continue to employ him as an expert consultant?”

It tells us that they know how to do basic research, and Schoenfeld doesn’t care to know.

“4. Is Scheuer currently an official or unofficial adviser to Ron Paul?”

Neither — and what does Rep.  Paul have to do with any of this? Answer: Absolutely nada. But, hey, what the heck: why not throw in another gratuitous fantasy-based smear, just for the heck of it?

“5. If elected, would President Paul appoint Scheuer to run the CIA?”

Schoenfeld really hates doing research, doesn’t he? Because, as anyone who knows the slightest thing about Ron Paul can tell you — and I include his enemies as well as his friends — there wouldn’t be a CIA if Rep. Paul had anything to say about it.

Research, Gabe — research!

 

Tim Dickinson

Bush’s Lapdog IGs

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/scott/07_11_07_dickinson.mp3]

Tim Dickinson, contributing editor at Rolling Stone, discusses his recent article “Bush’s Lapdogs: What Happened to DC’s Watchdogs?” How the dozens of Inspectors General appointed by Bush have changed their positions from auditor watchdogs to complicit lapdogs, how they suppress governmental crimes and get fired if they do their real jobs.

MP3 here. (26:39)

Tim Dickinson was an editor at Mother Jones from 1998 to 2005 and is now a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine. He is the author of Rollingstone.com’s political blog, National Affairs Daily.

New Pro-US Sunni Militia Group

IraqSlogger reports:

A pro-US Sunni paramilitary force has been announced in a notoriously rough area of Eastern Baghdad, local sources tell IraqSlogger.

In the Sulaikh area, a “Sulaikh Awakening” (Sahwat al-Sulaikh) group has been formed, locals report, which is cooperating with the Iraqi government against Sunni extremist groups in Sulaikh and surrounding areas. Locals in Sulaikh report that members of extremist groups related to al-Qa’ida in Iraq traveled from neighboring Adhamiya to raid Suleikh, kidnapping 10 civilians. This event prompted locals to begin cooperating with the Iraqi security forces, residents report, and information is flowing to the Iraqi government regarding the whereabouts and activities of al-Qa’ida in Iraq-related operatives.

Eric Margolis

Conflict in Pakistan and Kurdistan

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/scott/07_11_05_margolis.mp3]

Eric Margolis, foreign correspondent for Sun National Media and the American Conservative magazine, discusses the state of emergency in Pakistan, the history of the Musharraf dictatorship, his relationship with Dick Cheney, the return of Benazir Bhutto, her accusation that Musharraf was behind the recent suicide bomb attacks, the Islamists in Waziristan, the cause of their insurgency, Pakistan’s feudal system and the slim chance that crazies could get their hands on the nukes, the tension between Pakistan and India, the collision course coming this way as the Kurdish PKK attacks Turkey and vice versa, the U.S. and Israel’s policy of splitting off Kurdistan Iraq while simultaneously backing the Turks, U.S. support for Kurdish terrorism against Iran and the plan for long term occupation of Iraq.

MP3 here. (43:13)

Award winning author, columnist, and broadcaster Eric S. Margolis has covered 14 wars and is a leading authority on military affairs, the Middle East, South Asia, and Islamic movements.