Antiwar.com Blog

Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer discusses Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda, their true motives, how best to fight against them, torture, the escape at Tora Bora, the FBI and CIA in the months before September 11th, the 9/11 Commission sham, the Israeli art students, the Israel and Saudi lobbies, reports that a Pakistani general financed Mohammed Atta, Bojinka, Bill Clinton’s 10 blown chances to get bin Laden and the total lack of evidence of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection.

MP3 here. (41:40)

Michael Scheuer is a 22-year veteran of the CIA and the author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror.

Former US United Nations Ambassador John Bolton told the BBC today that he was “damned proud” of how the U.S. intentionally blocked efforts to achieve a ceasefire last summer when Israel was bombing Beirut and many other locales in Lebanon.

The BBC summarized Bolton’s comments: “A former top American diplomat says the US deliberately resisted calls for a immediate ceasefire during the conflict in Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Former ambassador to the UN John Bolton told the BBC that before any ceasefire Washington wanted Israel to eliminate Hezbollah’s military capability.”

Bolton said it was “perfectly legitimate and good politics” for Israel to seek to crush Hezbollah.   The fact that the Israelis used U.S. bombs to wreak death and destruction throughout Lebanon is apparently irrelevant.   More than a thousand Lebanese civilians were killed by the Israeli government, with the Bush team cheering on each detonation.

AIPAC, the most powerful lobby in DC, bragged of its role in blocking any ceasefire.  (A good critique of AIPAC’s role in the Lebanon carnage is here).  

Bolton captures the arrogance and total hypocrisy of the Bush war on terrorism.  In a meeting last August, Bolton  “implied that because Lebanon harbored Hezbollah, Lebanese lives were forfeit,” according to a UN official who heard Bolton commenting in meetings at the time.

Neither AIPAC nor the Bush team suffered any backlash from  Christian fundamentalists as a result of Israeli bombing of Christian villages.  Lebanese Christians despise and oppose Hezbollah – but they were Lebanese so they apparently deserved to die.

As I wrote in blogs last summer, both Hezbollah and the Israeli government were guilty of mass murder.  But the Bush administration’s absolute support (and re-arming) of a government that was intentionally slaughtering civilians is a crime that must not be forgot.  

Comments & contrary views welcome at my blog here.

From Think Progress, here is a brief, but very well done, examination of what the architects of the Iraq war are doing now. Covered are Wolfowitz, Feith, Hadley, Perle, Abrams, Wurmser, Natsios, Bartlett, Daniels, Tenet, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney, and Bush.

An ambassador – his name happens to be Timothy Carney – an Iraqi, and a penguin walk into a bar. The bartender asks how the Iraqi will ever possibly pay for his drink. The ambassador replies:

“The point to make there is that Iraq is basically a rich country; that in fact there’s been a successful effort to mightily reduce the debt that Iraq had incurred during the Saddam Hussein era. I would argue that as Iraq returns to its former levels of 3 million-plus barrels a day of oil exported, that you’re going to find as much money as the country needs for the major portion of this effort at maintenance and sustainment as you’ve defined it.”

Oh wait, I think I’ve already heard this joke before; but back in March 2003, it went like this:

A Deputy Secretary of Defense – his name was Paul Wolfowitz – an Iraqi exile, and a penguin walk into the House Committee on Appropriations. A Congressman asks how the invasion and occupation the Bush administration has just launched will be paid for. The Deputy Secretary of Defense replies that our “Second Iraq War” won’t be “overly expensive for American taxpayers”: “There’s a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people… and on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years… We’re dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.”

Oh, and ambassador Carney, who is officially in Baghdad as the “coordinator for Economic Transition in Iraq,” offered his gem on how the Iraqis could take over paying for the “reconstruction” of their country in a March 9th, 2007 Department of Defense briefing in the Iraqi capital.

When you hear jokes like this repeated almost four years later, head for the exits… fast.

Nazi propaganda poster, 1944. Hey, it’s no more ridiculous than the typical wingnut’s vision of a Sunni-Shia-Papist-Iran-Saddam-al Qaeda-Jacques Chirac-Michael Moore-Pat Buchanan-Dixie Chicks-Kim Jong Il-Antiwar.com axis of evil.

Via Jesse Walker.

Leon Hadar, foreign policy analyst and author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East, discusses the difference between what the neocons were trying to accomplish, the sad facts of what’s happened and the way things could have been instead.

MP3 here. (38:16)

Dr. Leon Hadar is a former United Nations bureau chief for the Jerusalem Post, he is the Washington correspondent for Singapore Business Times and a contributing editor for the American Conservative magazine. Hadar has written for numerous newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy and has been interviewed by broadcasting outlets like CNN, BBC and FOX News. He has taught at American University and Mount Vernon College and has been affiliated with think tanks such as the Institute on East-West Security Studies and the Center for International Development and Conflict Management. A graduate of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Hadar earned his MA degrees from the schools of journalism and international affairs and the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, and his Ph.D. in international relations from American University. He is the author of Quagmire: America in the Middle East (Cato Institute, 1992) and of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).