Antiwar.com Blog

Documented in a series of in-depth interviews by The Nation with 50 combat veterans of the Iraq war from across the US.

The Republican smear machine is revving up its motors, getting ready to launch a typically vicious campaign against Ron Paul, the only real threat to their death-grip on the GOP. Since the first assault, a piece by Ryan Sager in the New York Sun, failed — the charges of “racism” were based on tenuous documentation and fall apart when examined up close — the second wave has been launched: a piece in The Politico, headlined: “Ron Paul Warns of Staged Terror Attack.” It links to a clip of a radio interview with Ron, conducted by Alex Jones, and hosted on the Breitbart.com site — part of the neocon-Drudge propaganda network.

If you listen to the interview, one thing is clear: Paul said no such thing. Jones asked him a 5-minute-long question that melded together all sorts of disparate elements, including the possibility of a staged US government-sponsored terrorist attack and a US military attack on Iran. Ron focused exclusively on the latter, and said that the great danger comes from a “Gulf of Tonkin“-type incident involving Iran. No mention is made by Paul of a staged terrorist attack on US soil.

Ron spends the rest of the interview talking about what a disaster an attack on Iran would turn out to be, and then launches into his favorite subject: the economic consequences of our spendthrift ways, and the impossibility of maintaining our empire of debt.

The Politico is telling a lie: their headline is a lie. What’s amazing about this particular smear is that it is so transparently obvious: after all, in this day and age, we don’t need intermediaries and “gate-keepers” telling us what Paul said, we can refer directly to it by linking to it. And anyone who listens to what Ron says in this interview cannot come away thinking that he said the US government is going to stage a terrorist attack on its own people on American soil or anywhere else.

The smears are starting to come, just as some people feared: but there is no reason to quake and quail. The lies of the neocons are so brazen, so easily debunked, and so obviously motivated by people with an agenda, that they will boomerang on the smear artists — and wind up helping Ron rather than hurting him. The voters will begin to ask: who is taking out all the stops in an effort to destroy the candidacy of a good and honest man? Who is trying to frame him up on phony charges — and why?

Ask those bozos over at The Politico: (202) 289-1155.

UPDATE: Here the “Prison Planet” web site run by Jones complains that readers are writing in saying that Paul never said the words Jones tries to put in his mouth. Jones then — again — conflates Paul’s contention that a “Gulf of Tonkin” incident on the Iran-Iraq border is a danger with the wacked-out idea that the US government is going to stage a real terrorist attack against its own citizens. Apparently they believe their own readers are sooooooo stupid that they won’t notice they’re being lied to. Ditto, The Politico ….

It’s been a busy week, and it’s going to be an even busier weekend: I’ll be speaking in Mountain View, California, this Saturday. Go here for information. I’ve also been blogging up a storm at Taki‘s Top Drawer — go here, here, and here, for starters. Oh, and here‘s my piece on “Ron Paul: The Conscience of Conservatism.”

Andrew Sullivan comes down off his high horse long enough to answer my recent blog on Christopher Hitchens’ 1976 article, recently unearthed and posted by the New Statesman, valorizing Saddam Hussein as “perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser.” Sullivan quotes only that snippet from the entire article, which goes on to present the Butcher of Baghdad as a model of socialist idealism and ideological “fervor.” Says Sullivan of his warmongering and perpetually tipsy friend:

“Look, we all have a right to change our minds. I see no reason to believe that Christopher’s evolution has not been completely genuine. And he noted the torture and barbarism at the time.”

Yes, change is possible: witness Sullivan’s own transformation from the Savonarola of the War Party to the avowed enemy of the neoconservative project (although when it comes to Iran, he seems quite prepared to go along with the neocons just as he did in the case of Iraq). Yet no one is saying that the evolution of Hitchens, from “third camp” Trotskyist to left-neocon-with-a-flaming-sword, isn’t “genuine,” whatever that may mean. This history is pretty common in neocon circles. What Sullivan doesn’t address is the real point I was trying to make: that intellectuals of Hitchens’ sort — ideologues — tend to be seduced by power, and are quite willing to overlook all those pesky little atrocities that “leaders” make when they think they’re making History with a capital “H”.

I even cited Sullivan’s favorite writer, George Orwell, whose essay on James Burnham (actually, two essays) is the definitive take-down of this type. So, yes, Hitchens did note the torture and repression carried out by the Ba’athists, but this didn’t deter him from painting Saddam as a towering, heroic figure: it just added to Saddam’s mystique as a powerful leader, at least in Hitchens’ eyes.

In 1976, when Hitchens’ piece was published, Saddam had yet to formally assume the office of Iraqi president, although he had already acquired a fearsome reputation. The future Iraqi dictator had spearheaded Iraq’s literacy campaign, promoted modernization, and done all the things a militantly secular socialist like Hitchens would (and did) admire, including playing a key role in the nationalization of major industries and handing out land to peasants during the Ba’athist “land reform” program. Hitchens saw a man on the move, a man of power who was leading the charge against Muslim religious obscurantism and holding high the banner of socialism. That he was also setting up a police state didn’t concern Hitchens in the least.

I expect Sullivan refuses to confront these issues — the tendency of intellectuals to excuse the worst abuses in order to score ideological points — because they bring into focus his own motivations for helping to lead the charge for a war he now abhors.

David Beito calls him prophetic.

[audio:http://dissentradio.com/radio/07_07_13_silverstein.mp3]

Ken Silverstein, Washington Editor of Harper’s magazine, and author of the Washington Babylon blog discusses the heroic character of “the other” Scott Horton and Silverstein’s undercover investigative work in reporting the role of powerful DC lobbying firms in propagandizing the American people and determining American foreign policies.

MP3 here. (39:39)

Ken Silverstein is the Washington Editor for Harper’s Magazine and writes Washington Babylon for Harper’s online.