Bushian Thinking Infects the Drug War

Nearly every day there’s a story about Bush or some other official (not to mention the embarrassingly ridiculous John McCain) claiming sectarian violence is dropping, Baghdad is safer, Iraq is “making progress.” But periodically throughout the war, usually when there is a spike in violence, we hear that such spikes are a good thing, because it signals that all is not well with the insurgency, and that they are “desperate” and “worried.” Well such omelette-making (and anti-logical) thinking has bled into the office of the drug czar.

This morning over my waffles and café con leche, I read in Men’s Vogue a piece titled “A Budding Invasion.” I was instantly annoyed by the embedded reporter, official line-toeing tone of the article (“cartel henchmen,” “growers leave an eco-disaster,” “Can anyone halt the harvest?”), but what really caught my eye was this bit:

“Gruesome violence afflicts Michoacán—stomping grounds of some of the cartels that dominate the American marijuana market—where cartel henchmen have lately developed a partiality for leaving human heads, with written warnings attached, outside government offices. Last year they rolled five of them onto a discotheque dance floor….The bloodshed is dismaying, but [Deputy Drug Czar Scott] Burns sees it as a potentially promising sign. ‘The violence can be an indication of many things, such as disrupting the cartels,’ he says. ‘If everything is running smoothly, there’s no reason to shoot somebody. It can be an indication of good work by the Mexican and U.S. governments.’

Got that? The more heads roll onto Uruapan’s dance floors, the better Burnsie sleeps at night because he takes it as a sign that he is doing his job better. That job? To tell adult Americans what kind of plants they can ingest. A true hero.

Congress Rubberstamps Martial Law

Congress amended the Insurrection Act last September to make it far easier for the president to declare martial law. I go into the cheery details in a piece in the April 23 issue of the American Conservative:

How many pipe bombs might it take to end American democracy? Far fewer than it would have taken a year ago.

The Defense Authorization Act of 2006, passed on Sept. 30, empowers President George W. Bush to impose martial law in the event of a terrorist “incident,” if he or other federal officials perceive a shortfall of “public order,” or even in response to antiwar protests that get unruly as a result of government provocations.

The full text of the piece is posted at my blog here, where comments & caterwaulings are welcome.

Justin Raimondo

Iraq’s Catastrophic Success: And who’s next on the hit list

Justin Raimondo discusses Iraq, Left, Right and prospects for an anti-imperialist realignment, the neocons, China, Africa, Russia and the AIPAC trial.

MP3 here.

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000). He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).

He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The President of Iran Is Not Hitler

He is worse than Hitler, at least according to Victor Davis Hanson and the Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry.

We already knew that Hanson was a crazed warmonger, but in a speech earlier this year at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar (as reported in Hillsdale’s April 2007 Imprimis), he stated (after he said that Ahmadinejad wants to destroy Israel):

Let no one doubt that a nuclear Iran would end the entire notion of peaceful global adjudication of nuclear proliferation and pose an unending threat to civilization itself.

And from the March/April 2007 issue of Israel My Glory, published by the Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry, we read in an article by Elwood McQuaid:

But annihilating the Jewish state is merely a warm-up. Although the lynchpin of Ahmadinejad’s crusade is a first-strike success against his near neighbor Israel, the next move is westward to Europe and then on to finish off the hated United States.

Another piece in Israel My Glory quotes Benjamin Netanyahu as saying that “unless the United States stops Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, America has only two to five years left.”

So basically, unless the United States attacks Iran now, Iran will destroy the entire world. Right.

 

Dilip Hiro

Actions Have Consequences: Iraqi Shia Out of Patience

Dilip Hiro, author of Secrets and Lies: Operation “Iraqi Freedom” and After: A Prelude to the Fall of U.S. Power in the Middle East? and 27 other books, discusses the end of the Iraqi Shia’s patience with the U.S. occupation and the relationships between the different Shia power blocks in Iraq’s south.

MP3 here. (44:12)

Born in the Indian sub-continent, Dilip Hiro was educated in India, Britain and America, where he received a master’s degree at Virginia Polytechnic & State University. He then settled in London in the mid-1960s, and became a full-time writer, journalist and commentator. He has published 28 books.