Antiwar.com Blog

For the latest on the smear campaign against Ron Paul, our Kurdish problem, and the evils of Kammunism, follow the links.

Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon, two top Democratic party foreign policy mavens, were instrumental in bringing around the Democrats in the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Now they’re back, with more advice: we’re winning and the “surge” needs to go on until at least 2008. And we should listen to them … exactly why? Their predictions weren’t all that great last time around. Here’s Pollack on the eve of the invasion:

“I believe that we are going to have to go war with Iraq sooner rather than later. The reason that it has to be sooner rather than later is because of Iraq’s development of nuclear weapons. …  the problem is that containment was a good policy when it was put in place, but by 1996, ’98, we realized that it really was failing. The inspectors weren’t finding anything. The Iraqis had gotten so good at hiding their weapons of mass destruction that the inspectors just couldn’t find anything.”

The reason they weren’t finding anything is because nothing was there. But that wasn’t an option for Senor Pollack. After all, he had an agenda …

O’Hanlon had — has? — an identical agenda, and was similarly completely, utterly, and totally wrong about Iraq’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction”:

“What we know for a fact from a number of defectors who’ve come out of Iraq over the years is that Saddam Hussein is absolutely determined to acquire nuclear weapons and is building them as fast as he can.”

And this nonsense, uttered in the winter of 2003: 

“Democrats implicitly assume that Iraq will still be as big a national problem come election time next fall. That assumption is probably wrong. For one thing, a number of trends in Iraq today—in the education and health sectors, in electricity levels, in availability of fuels for cooking and heating, and in market activity—are more positive than commonly appreciated.

“Perhaps most crucially, U.S. troops in Iraq will almost surely be fewer in number—and less exposed to attack—come next fall.” 

Tell me this: why in the name of all that’s holy should anybody listen to these guys — about anything? What this warmongering duo needs to do is take a vow of silence for the next decade or so.

Here’s why Giuliani and Romney can’t face YouTube questions:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEsdtg9ZZUM[/youtube]

Only Ron Paul could answer that one.

via 

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/07_07_30_blumenthal.mp3]

Max Blumenthal discusses the theology and politics of John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel as he documented for the Huffington Post.

MP3 here. (20:17)

Max Blumenthal is a Puffin Foundation writing fellow at the Nation Institute based in New York City. His work has appeared in The Nation, Salon, The American Prospect, The Huffington Post and the Washington Monthly. He is a research fellow for Media Matters for America. Click here to read his blog.

Related: Bill Barnwell from March 27th.

A 25% increase in aid to Israel — is anybody but Ron Paul and the pro-American government of Lebanon against it?

This originally ran on this blog right after Randy Barnett’s article in the WSJ came out. It was pulled to make sure the letter would be published in the paper. Now that a severely edited version has been, here is the original:

Randy Barnett argues (“Libertarians and the War,” July 17) that libertarianism does not imply any particular stance toward the Iraq War. He contends that as long as the U.S. government is delegated the task of protecting the American people from foreign aggression of one sort or another, there could be a reasonable libertarian argument in favor of the war – or, at least in favor of some proper management of the war.

As with most sophistic arguments there is a kernel of truth here. There is some configuration of facts that can, within libertarian principles, justify an attack on another country including Iraq. Nevertheless, Barnett does grave injury to the classical liberal and libertarian tradition by ignoring its strong Presumption of Peace.

In his trenchant analysis of America’s entry into the First World War, Randolph Bourne captured the essence of the classical liberal critique of war: “War is the health of the State….The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes…and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men.” This pervasive effect of war was stressed by the nineteenth century libertarian Herbert Spencer who saw the evolution of society as a conflict between the peaceful voluntary structures of industrial society and the regimentation and bias toward state action inherent in war and militarism. War is a both an activity and frame of mind that values conformity and the acceptance of orders over the primacy of the individual. This is the primary cost of war.

Of course, no classical liberal objects to self-defense. But where was the evidence of the threat from Iraq? We all now know that the “evidence” was unforgivably poor. The real motivation was regime change in the hope of making the Middle East more amenable to particular foreign policy goals. Furthermore, the U.S. government, as a signer of the U.N. Charter, had no authorization to invade, regardless of Saddam’s resistance to inspections. The immediate defense of the nation was not at stake so the “right” of every nation to self-defense cannot be honestly invoked. And to say, as some have, that the present disastrous consequences of the invasion were not reasonably foreseeable makes a mockery of foreign policy expertise.

Can libertarians of good will disagree with the above? Perhaps. But an adequate libertarian case for war in Iraq would have to overcome the heavy burden imposed by the Presumption of Peace. No libertarian I know or heard of has even begun this task.