Antiwar.com Blog

The Opus cartoon in Sunday’s paper is one of the finest Memorial Day tributes I have seen anywhere. 

Cartoonist Berkeley Breathed ruled the 1980s with Bloom County, and today’s cartoon is one of his best since then.

(Comments et al. welcome at my blog entry on the cartoon here).

First, Ron Paul on Bill Maher’s show.

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

While Maher deserves props for giving Paul a chance to make his case, he doesn’t seem to get Paul’s fundamental point. Yes, Bush’s response to 9/11 has been horrible, but the policies that led to 9/11 didn’t begin when Bush took office. As Paul notes, American meddling in the Middle East goes back decades – and Bill Clinton’s eight years of bombing and sanctioning Iraq probably motivated more anti-Americanism than anything George W. Bush did in his first eight months of office.

Clip two, from Penn & Teller’s Bullsh*t, features Jacob Hornberger, whose commentaries frequently appear on this site.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDYTizsjbKw[/youtube]

(Both clips courtesy of LRC blog.)

Tucked away in an Associated Press story this morning:

Meanwhile, in Kut, 160 kilometers (100 miles) southeast of Baghdad, 70 police officers resigned Sunday morning and handed over their weapons. They cited their fears of being targeted by Mahdi Army militants, police said.

Scott Ritter, author of Target Iran and Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement, discusses the irrationality of Bush’s Iraq policy, the Democrats betrayal of the Antiwar Left, Mitt Romney’s fit over ABC News’ reporting Cheney’s leak of the finding authorizing CIA action against Iran, the pretext of Iran’s nuclear program as the excuse to bomb them, Pelosi and Reid’s complicity in that upcoming war and John Boehner’s blubbering crocodile tears.

MP3 here. (19:18)

As a chief weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq, Scott Ritter was labeled a hero by some, a maverick by others, and a spy by the Iraqi government. In charge of searching out weapons of mass destruction within Iraq, Ritter was on the front lines of the ongoing battle against arms proliferation. His experience in Iraq served as the basis for his book Endgame, which explored the shortcomings of American foreign policy in the Persian Gulf region and alternative approaches to handling the Iraqi crisis, and for Iraq Confidential, which detailed his seven year experience as a weapons inspector.

Scott Ritter has had an extensive and distinguished career in government service. He is an intelligence specialist with a 12-year career in the U.S. Marine Corps including assignments in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. Rising to the rank of Major, Ritter spent several months of the Gulf War serving under General Norman Schwarzkopf with US Central Command headquarters in Saudi Arabia, where he played an instrumental role in formulating and implementing combat operations targeting Iraqi mobile missile launchers which threatened Israel.

In 1991, Ritter joined the United Nations weapons inspections team, or UNSCOM. He participated in 34 inspection missions, 14 of them as chief inspector. Ritter resigned from UNSCOM in August 1998, citing US interference in the work of the inspections.

He is the author of many books, including “Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein” and most recently “Target Iran: The Truth About the White House’s Plans for Regime Change.” He lives in New York State. Ritter was born in Florida, and raised all over the world in a career military family. He is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, with a B.A. in Soviet History.

Former NSC staffer Roger Morris discusses the pathetic American media, U.S. covert action in Iran, the sad state of 9/10 of the Republican candidates, and 7/8 of the Democrats, the growth of terrorism, why the 9/11 hijackers did it, the ignorance of the U.S. population, and the overthrow of Mossedeq.

MP3 here. (15:07)

Roger Morris, who served in the State Department and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, resigned in protest at the invasion of Cambodia. He then worked as a legislative advisor in the U.S. Senate and a director of policy studies at the Carnegie Endowment, and writes this Rumsfeldian history from intimate firsthand knowledge as well as extensive research. A Visiting Honors professor at the University of Washington and Research Fellow of the Green Institute, where his work originally appears. He is an award-winning historian and investigative journalist, including a National Book Award Silver Medal winner, and the author of books on Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, and the Clintons. More recently, he co-authored with Sally Denton The Money and the Power, a history of Las Vegas as the paradigm of national corruption. His latest work, Shadows of the Eagle, a history of U.S. covert interventions and policy in the Middle East and South Asia over the past half-century, will be published in 2007 by Knopf.

Steve Clemons of The Washington Note blog and the New America Foundation discusses his contribution to the final destruction of the career of Paul Wolfowitz.

MP3 here. (9:38)

Steven Clemons directs the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, which aims to promote a new American internationalism that combines a tough-minded realism about America’s interests in the world with a pragmatic idealism about the kind of world order best suited to America’s democratic way of life. He is also a Senior Fellow at New America, and previously served as Executive Vice President.

Publisher of the popular political blog The Washington Note, Mr. Clemons is a long-term policy practitioner and entrepreneur in Washington, D.C. He has served as Executive Vice President of the Economic Strategy Institute, Senior Policy Advisor on Economic and International Affairs to Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and was the first Executive Director of the Nixon Center.

Prior to moving to Washington, Mr. Clemons served for seven years as Executive Director of the Japan America Society of Southern California, and co-founded with Chalmers Johnson the Japan Policy Research Institute, of which he is still Director. He is a Member of the Board of the Clarke Center at Dickinson College, a liberal arts college in Carlisle, Pa., as well as an Advisory Board Member of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College in Chestertown, Md. He is also a Board Member of the Global Policy Innovations Program at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs and a member of the board of the Citizens for Global Solutions Education Fund.

Mr. Clemons writes frequently on matters of foreign policy, defense, and international economic policy. His work has appeared in many of the major leading op-ed pages, journal, and magazines around the world.