Antiwar.com Blog

Along the lines of Justin Raimondo’s article about Jonah Goldberg and the Ledeen Doctrine, one of the most sickening yet, as far as I can tell, unremarked upon bits of hearsay in Bob Woodward’s new book, State of Denial, is about the bloodlust of Henry Kissinger, apparently as relayed to Woodward by former Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson. From page 408:

“Why did you support the Iraq war?” Gerson asked him.

“Because Afghanistan wasn’t enough,” Kissinger answered. In the conflict with radical Islam, he said, they want to humiliate us. “And we need to humiliate them.”

The lesson is fairly obvious, no?

The problem again is collectivism. “We,” “they.” It is irrelevant that the government and people of Iraq were innocent of the crimes of September 11th, and in fact had nothing to do with “radical Islam.” They are “they” to Henry Kissinger, and so now they’re dead – in order to “send a larger message.”

Too bad the Bush regime still hasn’t captured or killed Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri. Instead, last May, Emperor Bush apologized and explained how he wishes he’d never said he wanted bin Laden brought in “dead or alive” for his crimes, since we might have “misinterpreted” his words to mean he was going to hold the actual perpetrators of the attacks responsible, rather than untold numbers of innocent people.

There’s a strict taboo in the column-writing business against recycling ideas. So let me start with something fresh.

Jonah Goldberg is a lying sack of bad arguments.

I know, I know. I’ve said it before. And I enjoy saying it now.

So, what’s fresh about my proclamation? Well, before, I said it regarding Jonah’s advocacy of the war in Iraq. Now, I’m saying it in response to his claim that the war was a mistake. Why? Because he’s still lying:

In the dumbed-down debate we’re having, there are only two sides: Pro-war and antiwar. This is silly. First, very few folks who favored the Iraq invasion are abstractly pro-war. Second, the antiwar types aren’t really pacifists. They favor military intervention when it comes to stopping genocide in Darfur or starvation in Somalia or doing whatever that was President Clinton did in Haiti. In other words, their objection isn’t to war per se. It’s to wars that advance U.S. interests (or, allegedly, President Bush’s or Israel’s or ExxonMobil’s interests). I must confess that one of the things that made me reluctant to conclude that the Iraq war was a mistake was my general distaste for the shabbiness of the arguments on the antiwar side.

First, very many of the people who supported the invasion of Iraq are abstractly pro-war. Ever read Max Boot or Victor Davis Hanson? Second, damn right most antiwar people aren’t pacifists, if by “pacifist” Goldberg means “one who rejects all use of violence.” Antiwar libertarians and conservatives most certainly believe in the right to armed self-defense. And they, along with a number of leftists, most certainly did oppose all of the wars he mentions. If Goldberg needs to refresh his memory, he can scoot on over to a little site called, ahem, Antiwar.com, and use its handy search feature to look for the words “Kosovo,” “Somalia,” “Haiti,” “Darfur,” and so on. We have been against intervention in each case. Finally, yes, it is difficult to see how war with Iraq advanced any American interests, unless the interests – the short-term interests, at that – of the GOP, Israel, and ExxonMobil are the interests of all 300 million of us.

The rest of Goldberg’s column is pretty predictable, worth reading only for the odd man-stabbed-in-the-chest metaphor. How long until we get the follow-up, “Staying the Course Was a Worthy Mistake”?

Via.

Most commentary on North Korea, by hawks and doves alike, posits a false dilemma: either “get tough” with Kim Jong-Il (thus far, this has meant talk tough, because there’s no military solution that doesn’t end with Seoul in ashes), or send him money. This naturally plays into the hawks’ hands, as no one wants to coddle an elfin Jerry Bruckheimer wannabe. Sheldon Richman gets it right:

Some want to see the Bush administration engage Kim in one-on-one negotiations. But negotiations mean that each side offers something. What would the United States offer? In the past it has provided aid, but this is objectionable on two counts. First, previous aid didn’t keep Kim from pursuing his nuclear program. More important, American taxpayers should not be forced to assist Kim’s evil, decrepit regime. For one thing, while assistance would help him, it would do little for the long-suffering North Korean people. Moreover, the North Korean government is almost universally condemned because it flouts the rights of “its” people. Where is the logic in the Bush administration’s flouting the rights of Americans in dealing with Kim’s government?

There is something the administration could offer, but it’s not likely to want to do so. It could agree to remove the 37,500 American troops from South Korea, to end the alliance with Seoul, and to pledge never to start a war, including an economic war, with North Korea. That’s something an American president should have done a long time ago. The North Korean government has had grounds for distrusting the United States since the war in the early 1950s, which began when North Korea invaded South Korea. U.S. participation in that war — President Harry Truman’s undeclared “police action” — was unjustified from the standpoint of limited government and the safety of the American people. But it told the world that the United States was assuming the role of world policeman. That couldn’t help but create fear of — and enemies for — America. It also gave North Korea’s communist dictator a powerful propaganda tool with which to keep the North Koreans scared and loyal.

It should come as no surprise that successive American administrations have taken the least sensible approach (short of war), alternating bribery with bullying. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in Iraq, the Bushies won’t let mere failure stand in the way of total ruin, so expect U.S. Korean policy to get much worse.

Last week, a mortar attack on a U.S. ammo-storage site in Baghdad “set off a series of explosions … that shook buildings miles away.” If you’re wondering what such a thing looks like, watch the video below. Note in particular the explosion at 3:57.

[youtube]LlM3BDojdLo[/youtube]

(If you’ve forgotten the title reference, click.)

From The History of Torture by George Riley Scott (London, 1940), we read:

Often in combination with the rack was applied the “torture of water.” This was generally adopted when racking, in itself, proved ineffectual. The victim, while pinioned on the rack, was compelled to swallow water, which was dropped slowly on a piece of silk or fine linen placed in his mouth. This material, under pressure of the water, gradually glided down the throat, producing the sensation experienced by a person who is drowning. A variation of the water torture was to cover the face with a piece of thin linen, upon which the water was poured slowly, running into the mouth and nostrils and hindering or preventing breathing almost to the point of suffocation. In another variation, the nose was stopped up, either by means of plugs placed in the nostrils, or by pressure of the fingers, and water was dropped slowly and continuously into the open mouth. The victim, in his desperate efforts to breathe, often burst a blood-vessel. Generally speaking, the larger the quantity of water forced into the victim the more severe was the torture.

Will the next edition of The History of Torture contain additional water tortures used by the American military and CIA? Impossible you say? Nothing is impossible with this administration. Is there any doubt that the full story of U.S. “interrogation” techniques is yet to be revealed?

In Japan, that is – one of our closest allies, whose discussion of developing nukes was only a response to Kim Jong-Il’s growing arsenal – but, hey, let’s go ahead and chalk this up to Dubya’s refusal to tolerate Saddam’s WMD.