Antiwar.com Blog

Some of the nation’s best antiwar cartoonists will be appearing this weekend at the Small Press Expo – America’s premier cartooning and comic arts festival -  in Bethesda, Maryland this Friday and Saturday.  

Many of the cartoonists appeared at a book event last night for  Attitude 3 – a collection of the work of “the New Subversive Online Cartoonists.”  The book was edited and features questions and commentary throughout by Ted Rall. Torture is a frequent target of their pens. This is refreshing, considering how much of the mainstream media have thumbtwisted themselves away from the subject.

August Pollack showed a great cartoon he penned with a country singer talking about his new song denouncing those “Saddam-fellating liberals.”

One of the cartoonists on the panel, Stephanie McMillan, has a new book – Minimum Security -  with her own columns.  She has the greatest author photo ever – showing her bent over a police car surrounded by cops with her hands handcuffed behind her back.

In the Q&A, I chucked in a question about the cartoonists’ perception of whether editors had been more cowardly or fearful of controversy since 9/11.

Rall replied, “Editors have become incredible cowards – and they never had a lot of balls to begin with.”  Rall was one of the cartoonists most often reprinted in the New York Times in 1997 and 1999.  But they have ceased using his work.

Rall related how he was almost hired in the 1990s as a cartoonist for a newspaper in Asbury, New Jersey.  He sensed the interview had gone very well – and then came one last question.  The editor pointed out the window to the large parking lot and asked: “Am I ever going to look at that window and see someone protesting some cartoon that you drew?”
 So much for that job.

Mikhaela Reid, a red-haired former Teamster/Harvard grad, commented,”The cartoons that stay in the newspapers are those that generate the least angry mail… Editors respond to a few cranky letters as if the business is going under.”

Cartoonists are doing some of the finest political commentary in the nation these days.  It is unfortunate that so few respectable columnists have as much gumption.

Other details on the cartoonists’ presentation last night are on my blog – where comments/ condemnations are welcome.

What exactly is going on in Iraq, and what are its long-term implications? What will it take for Iraq to become a stable nation? How much does this depend on U.S. policies? How will the outcome in Iraq affect oil prices and the U.S. economy? How will it affect relations between the United States and its allies and rivals? What affect is the Iraq war having on domestic politics throughout the Muslim world? Is Iran next?

To address these and related questions, the Independent Institute is hosting the forthcoming forum, “The Reality and Legacy of the Iraq War,” featuring noted journalist and author Mark Danner and national security expert Ivan Eland.

The forum will be held on Tuesday, October 17, 2006, at the Independent Institute Conference Center in Oakland, California. A reception begins at 6:30 p.m., and the program will start at 7:00 p.m. and conclude at approximately 8:30 p.m. Given the tremendous significance of this topic, we expect this event to attract a large audience. Make your reservations as soon as possible by contacting the Institute’s Events Coordinator, Ms. Nichelle Beardsley, at 510-632-1366 x118 or NBeardsley@independent.org.

Reception and book signing: 6:30 p.m. Program: 7:00 p.m. at The Independent Institute Conference Center 100 Swan Way Oakland, CA 94621-1428 For a map and directions, see this link.

Tickets are $15 per person or $10 for Independent Institute Members.

They also have a special offer: Admission and a copy of The Empire Has No Clothes: $35 or $30 for members.

Reserve tickets by calling (510) 632-1366 or ordering online at here.

A new poll is out:

“According to a poll by Princeton Survey Research Associates released by Newsweek. 61 per cent of respondents believe the Bush administration misinterpreted or misanalyzed the intelligence reports they said indicated Iraq had banned weapons. In addition, 58 per cent of respondents think the federal government purposely misled the public about evidence that Iraq had banned weapons in order to build support for war.”

Imagine that — they lied us into war! Who knew?

Is this a trend, or what? First, the Polish embassy in New York cancels a scheduled talk by Tony Judt in response to pressure from Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Judt’s sin? He defended scholars John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, whose thesis that the Israel Lobby has a virtual lock on U.S. foreign policy has the Amen Corner up in arms.

Now we learn that author Carmen Callil has suffered the same fate — this time at the hands of the French.

Callil’s new book, Bad Faith, is about the career of an official of Vichy France who masterminded the deportation of Jews: the book has received rave reviews. However, the Amen Corner is peeved at the author’s postscript, which refers to the oppression of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli state. The French embassy in New York scheduled a reception to honor Ms. Callil’s arrival in the U.S., and celebrate her book — but an email campaign underscoring the offending passage and indulging in the usual smears put the kibosh on the party. Why am I not surprised that, according to Media Bistro, the French surrendered after only a few emails?

Israel Lobby? What “Israel Lobby“?

This one:

“The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.”

Having made a clean sweep of Embassy Row, the intellectual shock troops of the IDF (American branch) are now no doubt preparing an assault on Publishers’ Row: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux is reportedly bringing out a book-length work by Mearsheimer and Walt, elaborating on their thesis. You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see, with a fair degree of certainty, an organized effort to spike their book.

If FS&G, the Mercedes Benz of the publishing world — which has brought out works by T.S. Eliot, William Golding, Hermann Hesse, Czeslaw Milosz, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, and Tom Wolfe — can be intimidated into silencing the Lobby’s critics, then what institution in American society is immune?

The War Party did more to enlist journalists in the cause of invading Iraq than deploying Judith Miller. Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, reveals a top secret meeting chaired by Paul Wolfowitz, on November 29, 2001, attended by thinktank wonks, government officials, and two “journalists”: Fareed Zakaria, editor of the international edition of Newsweek and columnist for that magazine, and Robert D. Kaplan, currently on the staff of The Atlantic Monthly. The purpose of the group was to produce a paper dealing with the aftermath of the invasion of Afghanistan and which countries to invade in the Middle East. President Bush reportedly found the paper illuminated the “malignancy” of all those damn Ay-rabs in the Middle East, especially Iraq, who had yet to be “liberated.”

Both Zakaria and Kaplan signed confidentiality agreements, and the former, at least, appears to be living up to his as best he can: Zakaria denies that he knew a document would come out of the meeting, although Kaplan says most of the meeting was spent drafting the document. The New York Times asked Senor Kaplan: “Could any of the participants have been unaware there was a document in the making?” “No,” averred Kaplan, “that’s not possible.” Who’s lying, here?

These guys are “journalists” in the same sense that the old staff of Pravda, the mouthpiece of the Soviet Kremlin, are “journalists” — that is, they aren’t real journalists in any meaningful sense of the term. They are propagandists, pure and simple: shills for the government. When the State is pushing a course of action — an invasion, either of a foreign country or the rights of its own citizens — these people respond like Pavlovian parrots, rationalizing and “explaining” from their perches in the “mainstream” media, outdoing one another in their obeisance to Power, in the hope that they’ll be invited to the next secret meeting of shills and ass-kissers.

 

Get ready for a furor:

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq’s government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country. …

The study was conducted under the supervision of Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and will be published in the British medical journal the Lancet.