Antiwar.com Blog

Bush today vigorously opposed a congressional resolution to finally recognize as genocide the Turkish slaughter of more than a million Armenian Christians.  Bush declared: “We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915. This resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings, and its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror.”

It’s a helluva thing when a war on terror supposedly requires the U.S. Congress to pretend that genocide didn’t occur.  Bush’s assertion that “we all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people” is a lie.   Most people either don’t know or don’t care about the carnage.  And Bush apparently wants to keep it that way.

The Washington Post editorial page was even more contemptible than Bush. They railed this morning that the resolution “endangers present-day U.S. security.”  The Post states, “The subject is a serious one — more than 1 million Armenians may have died at the hands of the Young Turk regime between 1915 and the early 1920s.”

May have?  Oh.  Perhaps it was all a misundertanding.

Ironically, Bush and the Washington Post editorial page are gung-ho on threatening massive bombing of Iran in part because the Iranian president is  seen as denying the Nazi Holocaust.

The U.S. government is supposedly obliged to help the Turkish government cover up its sordid past, and is also entitled to kill thousands or millions of Iranians because of that country’s figurehead’s denials of past atrocities.

I have consistently criticized Americans Against Escalation in Iraq — an antiwar group that has been running antiwar ads and doing grassroots political work – for what I viewed as their partisan strategy in pursuing an end to our involvement in Iraq, particularly their tactic of going after pro-war (or fence-sitting) Republicans in Congress and leaving pro-war Democrats alone. However, the following more than makes up for their past transgressions:

At last, the antiwar movement is waking up. Only a coalition of antiwar Democrats, Republicans, and independents can beat the War Party.

Wow! If even half of what Richard Poe claims in his “Hitchens Unhinged” piece over at Taki’s Top Drawer is true, what remains of the drink-soaked Trotskyist poppinjay’s reputation is shot. Here’s a hot excerpt:

“At the end of the event as he staggered, sweating and red faced, out of the room, he [Hitchens] advanced on Father Rutler in a threatening and physical manner, screaming that this beloved pastor and brilliant scholar whom he had never met was ‘a child molester and a lazy layabout who never did a day’s work in his life’. His behavior was so frightening that a bodyguard put himself between Hitchens and Father Rutler to protect him. Several of the event organizers then escorted Hitchens to the men’s room and when he emerged he continued his psychotic rant.”

Yikes.

Drunk on his own self-importance (and other things), reckless, violent, convinced he can get away with anything, Hitchens the personality seems to be the perfect reflection of the foreign policy he advocates.

Even Hitchens’ allies know what a dingbat he has become. The event, entitled “An Evening With Christopher Hitchens,” was sponsored by the “David Horowitz Freedom Center,” and took place at New York’s sedate Union League club, where Senor Horowitz no doubt had some inkling of what the out-of-control Hitchens was about to do when he opened the meeting with: “Welcome to what’s bound to be a stimulating and unpredictable events.”

I guess Hitchens was pretty well out of it by that time.

In the Michigan debate, economic imbecile John McCain just recommended that Ron Paul read The Wealth of Nations. Oh Jesus. Paul had just commented on how America’s fiscal insolvency is a result of maintaining a welfare-warfare – especially warfare – state. The military-industrial complex rakes in the dough, the politicians profit politically by distracting the yahoos from the nation’s real problems, and the national debt grows and grows – to be paid eventually in taxes, inflation, or both.

By the way, here’s Adam Smith on imperial warmongering:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war.

That’s from The Wealth of Nations, Johnny. Here’s some more.

Today at TomDispatch, Robert Lipsyte looks at recent media sideshows involving Michael Vick, Marion Jones, Barry Bonds, Bill Belichick, et al., and wonders if there’s trickeration afoot:

After all, the powers-that-be love to promote sports scandals which encourage a hopelessness about the world as well as our ability to change or control it. Sports scandals liberate us from having to stand up, vote, demonstrate, move on. What’s the use when everything – including our games and pastimes – is so obviously fixed, or at least a little bit crooked?

But as Lipsyte notes, there’s one story at the intersection of sports and war “that refuses to die … one that, it seems, could yet give us hope.” Check it out.

A few blocks from me, on the side of a bodega, a small wall-side billboard always has a poster for the armed forces that is quickly defaced. The latest one I noticed just the other day: a local armed with permanent marker spelled out exactly what he feels about the United States military. Bushwick is a relatively poor, black and Puerto Rican community in Brooklyn, New York, and so is disproportionately beset by recruiters and military propaganda.

Cross-posted from BushwickBK.com