Antiwar.com Blog

The Empire is in such dire need of new centurions that, as the Boston Globe reports, the Pentagon may go international in its recruiting methods [hat tip: Lew Rockwell]:

The armed forces, already struggling to meet recruiting goals, are considering expanding the number of noncitizens in the ranks — including disputed proposals to open recruiting stations overseas and putting more immigrants on a faster track to US citizenship if they volunteer — according to Pentagon officials.

Which brings to mind this passage from Gibbon‘s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

The warlike states of antiquity, Greece, Macedonia, and Rome, educated a race of soldiers; exercised their bodies, disciplined their courage, multiplied their forces by regular evolutions, and converted the iron which they possessed into strong and serviceable weapons. But this superiority insensibly declined with their laws and manners; and the feeble policy of Constantine and his successors armed and instructed, for the ruin of the empire, the rude valour of the Barbarian mercenaries.

History really is the endless repetition of the same mistakes. But then again, they probably don’t teach Gibbon in the schools anymore, do they? In any event, this latest development gives a whole new meaning to “multilateralism.”

Reading this little news item is the equivalent of getting a Christmas card from the War Party. Read it, and weep.:

A man who authorities believe was an Army Reservist just called up to serve in Iraq was fatally shot by police today after a standoff that began Christmas night…. Dean’s family contacted police Monday night, saying he was armed and threatening to kill himself, the sheriff said. Dean later told police he would shoot anyone who entered the house.

Dean was despondent about several things, including recent orders for him to go to Iraq, the family told authorities. Dean had returned in 2005 from a year-and-a-half tour in Afghanistan. Cameron did not know what reserve unit Dean served in…. About noon, while police were preparing to use gas, Dean came out the front door and pointed his weapon at police, Cameron said. At that point, a deputy shot Dean once, killing him.

Is this what they mean when they say our military iis “broken“? Well, then, so is this family, along with god knows how many others. 

A conservative blogger comments on my recent column on the Litvinenko affair:

It has become a very strange time indeed when I find myself in complete agreement with an anti-war liberal. In this case it is on the Litvinenko incident, and the argument laid out is an excellent synopsis of my posts on this matter. My impression of liberals has been inching upward recently, as I see clear examples of independent thinking and not accepting the PR that issues out of the mainstream media. This is a good sign to me that everyone is breaking their mental shackles that tie them to the error prone media giants.

Independent thinking isn’t the monopoly of any particular political persuasion — but, in any event, who is he calling a “liberal“?

Worth reading — Juan Cole on Gerald Ford’s foreign policy. An excerpt:

All presidents make errors, and some abuses occurred on Ford’s watch, though they often were initiated by Kissinger. But Ford faced with no illusions the challenges of his era, of detente with the Soviet Union, continued attempts to cultivate China, the collapse of Indochina, the fall-out of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and the beginnings of the Lebanese Civil War. Ford was right about detente, right about China, right about Arab-Israeli peace, right about avoiding a big entanglement in Angola, right to worry about nuclear proliferation (one of his worries was the increasing evidence that the Middle East had a nuclear power, Israel, and India was moving in that direction).

Clifford May, of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies — a neocon nest explored in an excellent 2003 piece by Dan McCarthy in The American Conservative — opines that the Ethiopians, currently fighting and supposedly beating “Islamist” militias in Somalia, could teach us a thing or two about how to defeat The Enemy:

More “boots on the ground” may be part of the explanation. The Ethiopians are not attempting to have a “light footprint.” They are not worried about whether they will be seen as “occupiers” or whether their “occupation” will be viewed as benevolent.Secondly, the Ethiopians are not overly concerned about whether their tactics will win approval from the proverbial Arab Street – or the European Street or Turtle Bay. They are fighting a war; their intention is to defeat their enemies; everything else is secondary or tertiary.Anyone have an alternative interpretation? 

Well, uh, yeah:

As Ethiopia and Somalia’s Islamic Courts movement inch closer to all-out conflict, a widespread view among people here in the capital is that Prime Minister Meles Zenawi is using the conflict to distract people from a vast array of internal problems and to justify further repression of opposition groups, including ethnic Somalis in Ethiopia.

In particular, opponents of war say he is playing up the claim that there are Al-Qaida operatives within the Islamic Courts in order to maintain the support of the U.S. government, which relies on a steady flow of Ethiopian intelligence that some regional analysts say is of dubious value.
 

Ethiopia is a dictatorship and U.S. ally that regularly jails political opponents and brutalizes its own people, as well as its neighbors. In the Bizarro “conservative” worldview of Senor May and the Foundation for the Defense of “Democracies,” this is a model to be emulated.

Dilbert today is worth triple its weight in Harvard political philosophers. Scott Adams is no boot-burnisher.

This cartoon cuts to the heart of the fraud of contemporary democracy.

I am amused to hear talk of politicians having mandates when voters had a choice of squirrel abusers or secretary stranglers. 

Amazing that there is far more truth on the comics page than on the editorial pages in this country. The cartoonists do not waste time genuflecting to the Official Lies, and they do not stay confined within the boundaries of respectable commentary.

Comments, caterwaulings & outbursts of idealism welcome at my blog here.