Antiwar.com Blog

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/07_08_15_weinstein.mp3]

Mikey Weinstein, former Reagan White House counsel, president and founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and author of the book, With God On Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military discusses the American Taliban takeover the Armed Services and the I.G.’s newest whitewash.

MP3 here. (15:37)

Mikey Weinstein is an attorney and businessman who served 10 years’ active duty as an Air Force Judge Advocate (JAG) at military installations from California to Washington, D.C. The former federal prosecutor spent three years in the Reagan White House and served as the Air Force’s first Chief of Telecommunications and Information Systems Procurement Law.

Mikey’s family has deep and distinguished military-academy roots spanning nearly 60 years: His father is a Naval Academy graduate; and Mikey, his brother-in-law, eldest son and daughter-in-law are all graduates of the Air Force Academy (from where his youngest son is scheduled to graduate in 2007). Mikey and his wife of almost three decades, Bonnie, reside in Albuquerque, N.M.

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/07_08_15_bykofsky.mp3]

Stu Bykofsky, a writer for the Philadelphia Daily News discusses the ideas in his article “To save America, we need another 9/11” (which he has clarified).

My apologies to Stu for Hannitizing him after promising not to.

MP3 here. (18:08)

Transcript here.

Stu Bykofsky has been a columnist with the Philadelphia Daily News since 1987. Prior to the column, his assignments included theater critic, TV critic, copy editor, general assignment features reporter. A native of New York City, Stu has won numerous public service and journalism awards. His professional affiliations include the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and Philadelphia’s Pen and Pencil Club. He supports civil-rights, human-rights and animal causes. He is married.

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/07_08_14_kohlhaas.mp3]

Scott Kohlhass, former chair of the Libertarian Party of Alaska and founder of DraftResistance.org, discusses War Czar Lute’s trial balloon about reviving conscription and explains how Selective “Service” is unknowingly enlisting individuals in over half of the American States.

MP3 here. (28:28)

Scott Kohlhaas is former Chairman of the Libertarian Party of Alaska, and founder of DraftResistance.org.

On Sunday, Glenn Greenwald demolished the pro-surge scam that Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack have been trying to pull for the last couple of weeks. After Greenwald’s evisceration of these con men, one would think that the matter was settled, that anyone with a reputation to maintain would sooner peddle Nigerian investment opportunities on national television than so much as whisper the names O’Hanlon and Pollack in public.

Ah, but one would misjudge the shameless, pathetic little worm that is Bill Kristol. Granted, Kristol doesn’t have much of a reputation to maintain: his claim to “public intellectual” status is based solely on his frequent Fox News appearances and his editing of such heavyweights as Stephen Hayes and Stephen Comrade Sandalio Suleyman Ahmad al-Kosovi Shaka Zulu Schwartz. Still, even Kristol must have been slightly embarrassed when Jon Stewart instantly shot down his invocation of the Look! Even war critics say the surge is working! talking point on last night’s Daily Show. (It’s about 2:30 into this clip.)

Last week Hitwise, a leading Internet traffic-rating service, announced their new rankings for political sites. Under the overall category of political websites, Antiwar.com was ranked #10 for the week ending August 4.

This morning, Hitwise announced their rankings for the week ending August 11, and Antiwar.com has moved up to #7!

Please help keep us going for the next quarter.

A video has surfaced of Dick Cheney predicting an invasion of Iraq would lead to a “quagmire.”

In 1994, Cheney explained his reasons for not advocating an invasion of Iraq following the first gulf war:

Q: Do you think the U.S., or U.N. forces, should have moved into Baghdad?

A: No.

Q: Why not?

A: Because if we’d gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn’t have been anybody else with us. There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.

Once you got to Iraq and took it over, took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq, you could very easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off: part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of it — eastern Iraq — the Iranians would like to claim, they fought over it for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.

It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.

The other thing was casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action, and for their families — it wasn’t a cheap war. And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad, took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was, not very many, and I think we got it right.

Thanks to Grand Theft Country.