Antiwar.com Blog

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).

Bill Minutaglio, author of First Son: George W. Bush & The Bush Family Dynasty and The President’s Counselor: The Rise to Power of Alberto Gonzales, discusses the story of attorney general and his relationship with the President and his likely future.

MP3 here. (15:45)

Bill Minutaglio has distinguished himself as an award-winning Texas journalist with the Abilene Reporter-News, San Antonio Express-News, Houston Chronicle, and Dallas Morning News, where he has worked since 1983 as a special writer. His work has appeared in many national publications including Talk, where he is a contributing writer, and the New York Times. He has coauthored two books and served as a contributing author to three others. He lives in Austin with his two children and his wife, Holly.

Today’s spotlight viewpoint is by George Soros, and I think it’s very good, for the most part. But it inspires Jonathan Schwarz to fact-check Slick Willie.

In my review of Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism I mentioned the Cato Institute’s online symposium, which utilizes the book as a take-off point for a discussion about the libertarian movement in general, and I note here the posting of Virginia Postrel’s contribution, which takes the “pragmatist” line: Rand and Rothbard are “dogmatists,” and really, in Postrel’s view, religious rather than political activists. This is nonsense, of course, and the whole thing is really a set-up for La Postrel to wonder why most libertarians aren’t “freethinkers,” i.e. more like herself:

“There’s no libertarian hierarchy to excommunicate heretics, but within libertarian organizations free thinkers do feel informal pressures to conform. It’s safest and most rewarding to stick to a straightforward anti-government script.”

Too bad for those who, like Postrel, yearn for another, more pro-government script. This may be a bit odd coming from a former editor of Reason, supposedly the premier libertarian magazine, and yet when you think about the one big issue on which many alleged “libertarians” have allied with the State — the Iraq war, and the larger “war on terrorism” — this longing for “complexities” and “trade-offs,” as Postrel puts it, isn’t all that hard to explain. If you’re trying to make it in the world of journalism, and selling yourself as a quasi-libertarian pundit, then you don’t want to offend the delicate sensibilities of newspaper publishers and other potential markets by all that “deductive” “dogmatism,” but you still want to somehow preserve your “libertarian” bona fides. What to do? Why, sell out on the war, which Postrel — in the hallowed tradition of Reason magazine — has done with alacrity.

After all, what are you, one of those hated “deductive” “dogmatists”? Why not be a “freethinker” and contemplate the aesthetic glories of state-sponsored mass murder?

Come to think of it, none of the commenters on Doherty’s book so much as mention the Iraq war — and Brink Lindsey was openly supportive of it, as Tom Palmer, another self-styled “moderate,” was supportive of the U.S.-installed “democratic” government, going so far as to travel to Iraq to “advise” the Iraqi parliament. Postrel cites this as an example of how “libertarians” doing meaningful political work may sometimes find themselves in the business of “state-building” — although she doesn’t mention if these “libertarians” will be working under a government contract.

What seems truly odd, however, is that these people are discussing the past, present, and future of a movement — libertarianism — that came to prominence in the modern era largely in opposition to the Vietnam war (along with Nixon’s wage and price controls). Yet one searches, in vain, for so much as a mention of the current war in their commentaries.