Antiwar.com Blog

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 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.

Jonathan Schwarz has been on a roll lately. Check him out.

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, 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.

It seems to me that John McCain’s “bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran” outburst is his very own “Dean Scream,” if you know what I mean:

Is someone who is this cavalier about going to war really fit to be President? After his musical interlude, McCain declared that, after all, Israel is being threatened, and we can’t allow that. Not very convincing — and really kinda weird.