Antiwar.com Blog

J. Daryl Byler, a Mennonite minister and attorney in Iran talks about his delegation of different American religious leaders’ trip to Iran in an attempt to stave off war, their meetings with various ayatollahs, the Iranian people’s love for Americans, whether or not he’s on a Potemkin tour, and his upcoming meeting with Ahmadinejad.

MP3 here.

His open letter to George W. Bush.

J. Daryl Byler is director of the Mennonite Central Committee’s Washington Office. He is an ordained Mennonite minister and an attorney. Before taking his current position, he served for six years as pastor of Jubilee Mennonite Church and as a staff attorney with East Mississippi Legal Services, both in Meridian, Miss. Daryl is married to Cynthia Lehman Byler, an elementary school teacher, and they have three children, Jessica and Holden (Eastern Mennonite University students), and Jeremy (a high-school freshman in D.C.). In connection with his current work, Daryl follows and writes about U.S. policy affecting the Middle East, and he has traveled frequently to the region, including visits to Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, retreats and running.

The news that The New Republic is going bi-weekly has got to be good news all ’round. To begin with, the magazine has always been in the vanguard of the War Party: it heralded the onset of World War I, agitated for U.S. intervention in the world’s second great calamity, supported the Vietnam war, emerging as the “liberal” wing of the cold war crusaders, and — true to form — was in the forefront of the pro-Iraq war forces. Although the editors have since seen fit to apologize for their zeal to invade Iraq, the decidedly antiwar tilt of public opinion has exacted a high price in the marketplace.

While political magazines are not exactly moneymakers, and have traditionally been subsidized by rich ideologues with an axe to grind, the decline of TNR’s circulation has been precipitous: from 110,000 down to 50,000 and dropping. Sold to CanWest Communications, a Canadian conglomerate, and shorn of editor Peter Beinart, TNR is positioning itself as the left-wing of the possible. In 2004, when the editor of the magazine published a mea culpa, of sorts, on their support for the war, they entitled it “Were We Wrong?” Back then, they weren’t so sure, but today Foer insists: “The question mark is gone.”

The war wasn’t the only thing Foer & Co. were wrong about, however: Foer wrote a piece for TNR gleefully predicting the swift demise of The American Conservative — a magazine which took the opposite stance from TNR’s on the war — which he referred to as “Buchanan’s surefire flop.” Yet the really big flop is TNR and its Scoop Jackson-Harry Trumanesque brand of “muscular” liberal interventionism, which is today indistinguishable from neoconservatism. Back in ’02, Foer exulted:

Over time it has become clear that on this side of the Atlantic, 9/11 hasn’t boosted the isolationist right; it has extinguished it. Instead of America Firstism, September 11 has produced a war on terrorism that has virtually ended conservative qualms about expending blood and treasure abroad. And as a corollary, it has produced an unprecedented eruption of conservative and evangelical support for Israel. … In short, Buchanan and his rich friends couldn’t have chosen a worse time to start a journal of the isolationist right. … no one on the right is listening anymore. A CBS News” poll from last month shows that 94 percent of Republicans approve of the president’s handling of the war.

Those poll numbers have turned around — with a vengeance. TAC editor Scott McConnell was convinced, as Foer noted at the time, that public opinion, including conservative opinion, would do a turnaround on the war — and he was right. Foer, who opined that, “over time,” the TAC-Buchanan analysis would prove irrelevant, has been proved spectacularly wrong. TAC is on the way up, and not just in terms of circulation: TNR, on the other hand, is on the way down. The magazine’s efforts to re-position itself to blend in to the generally anti-interventionist consensus on the left, is a “surefire flop.” In order to pull it off, they’d, for one, have to get rid of Marty Peretz and his embarrassingly racist screeds, which describe Arabs (and all Muslims) as little more than savages, and they’ll have to do a lot more than re-design their website to make their tired politics palatable.

TNR — wrong about the war, wrong about TAC, and wrong about nearly everything.

Will Grigg has an excellent new E-Zine, Pro Libertate, here.  Will posted a piece of mine in his first issue on the collateral benefits of liberating Iran.  Here’s the lead – full text at his e-zine and at my blog, where comments & carping are always welcome.

LIBERATING IRAN, ENSLAVING AMERICA

by James Bovard

The Bush administration is reportedly considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities. Many people have commented on how the U.S. military is already overstretched and cannot afford another major war. But little attention has been focused on how the American political system is also at the breaking point….

…. If Bush does bomb Iran, the chain reaction could wreck American democracy. The Bush administration shows no signs of developing either an allergy to power or an addiction to truth. The American republic cannot afford to permit a president to remain above the law and the Constitution indefinitely. Anything that raises the odds of a terror attack reduces the odds of reining in the government.

With this night/morning’s headline story about the US warning Israel not to enter into talks with Syria generating a lot of discussion, I thought it might be a good time to remind everyone of a headline from a couple of months ago.

Neocons: We expected Israel to attack Syria.

And as usual, this isn’t really just about Syria, it’s also about Iran. Here’s a choice quote from the prior story:

If Israel had hit Syria, it would have been such a harsh blow for Iran, that it would have weakened it and changes the strategic map in the Middle East.

But he’s considering bombing them anyway.

From his interview with the Australian.

‘You get various estimates of where the point of no return is,’ Mr Cheney said, identifying nuclear terrorism as the greatest threat to the world.

‘Is it when they possess weapons or does it come sooner, when they have mastered the technology but perhaps not yet produced fissile material for weapons?’

Goodness! Does this mean that Dick Cheney admits that the nuclear technology Iran is developing is only what we all know about since there are international inspectors everywhere?

That they are just beginning, after many failures, to be able to enrich uranium to 3.6% U-235, which cannot be used to make bombs anyway?

That’s all you got, Dick?

You’re not even going to bother making assertions about a secret program that cannot be proven to not exist? (Or can it?)

Debate over the “point of no return,” huh?

There you have it folks, Dick Cheney’s case for “regime change” in Iran:

Nothing.

(Comments welcome at Stress.)

Here‘s Andy Sullivan, the man who once denounced opponents of Bush’s War as a “fifth column,” continuing his strange metamorphosis:

Here’s a challenging essay by Michael Vlahos in the American Conservative, a magazine that for all its troubling underbelly, is taking intellectual risks not seen in more established venues like the Weekly Standard or National Review.

Ah yes, that “troubling underbelly” — he means this, and, of course, this. Oh, go f*ck yourself, Andy — that is, if you can find anyone to do that dirty job. And please spare us the condescending “praise” — your brand of “skeptical” conservatism is a euphemism for opportunism of the rankest sort. Speaking of underbellies, take a gander at Sully’s more than ample example:

The sophisticated form of anthrax delivered to Tom Daschle’s office forces us to ask a simple question. What are these people trying to do? I think they’re testing the waters. They want to know how we will respond to what is still a minor biological threat, as a softener to a major biological threat in the coming weeks. They must be encouraged by the panic-mongering of the tabloids, Hollywood and hoaxsters. They must also be encouraged by the fact that some elements in the administration already seem to be saying we need to keep our coalition together rather than destroy the many-headed enemy. So the terrorists are pondering their next move. The chilling aspect of the news in the New York Times today is that the terrorists clearly have access to the kind of anthrax that could be used against large numbers of civilians. My hopes yesterday that this was a minor attack seem absurdly naïve in retrospect. So they are warning us and testing us. At this point, it seems to me that a refusal to extend the war to Iraq is not even an option. We have to extend it to Iraq. It is by far the most likely source of this weapon; it is clearly willing to use such weapons in the future; and no war against terrorism of this kind can be won without dealing decisively with the Iraqi threat. We no longer have any choice in the matter. Slowly, incrementally, a Rubicon has been crossed. The terrorists have launched a biological weapon against the United States. They have therefore made biological warfare thinkable and thus repeatable. We once had a doctrine that such a Rubicon would be answered with a nuclear response. We backed down on that threat in the Gulf War but Saddam didn’t dare use biological weapons then. Someone has dared to use them now. Our response must be as grave as this new threat.

Any truly skeptical person, conservative, liberal, or whatever, would have to first be skeptical of Andy himself, whose positions change with the public mood and who still hasn’t disavowed the above-cited grotesque call to use nuclear weapons against Iraq.

Andy needs to be reminded of what a fool he is: go and remind him of his bloodthirsty cry of “nuke Iraq!”, and tell him Antiwar.com sent you: andrew@theatlantic.com