Saturday on the Weekend Interview Show I’ll be talking with Christopher Deliso of Balkanalysis.com about events in the Balkans and the neocon crime ring. In the second hour, I’ll be talking with Congressman Ron Paul about empire and gold money.
Update: Show’s over, archives here.
Michael Young on the assassination of Lebanese MP Gebran Tueni in today’s Reason online:
Never any doubt? Really? I could have sworn that just yesterday, Reason‘s Tim Cavanaugh injected quite a lot of doubt into the discussion when he described Tueni’s position on Lebanon’s Shi’ites:
“Let’s say you and I start a business,” he said, “and we split the shares 50-50. If I have four children and you have one, that doesn’t mean my children should get 80 percent of the shares.”
I’m sure the pacifists in Hezbollah were thrilled by that statement.
Young, who argues for the US to step even deeper into the Lebanon/Syria quicksand, tells us that only “sheer malice” could explain the demand for conclusive evidence of Syria’s (and more specifically, Assad’s) involvement. That’s about as reasonable as saying that only militant atheism could account for skepticism about Intelligent Design. But honestly, I’m relieved he said it. Now we know — was there ever any doubt? — that Young’s call for an expanded investigation into the matter is pure baloney. Why investigate what cannot be questioned? Let’s get the Marines into Damascus ASAP.
Helena Cobban offers and invites suggestions for the antiwar movement.
On Wednesday, the 8th-grader-in-chief again pitched the most far-fetched of lies during his speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. They loved it, of course.
In the speech, Bush tried to paint a picture of a dark and terrible future if the US does not keep our soldiers killing and dying in Iraq: that if American military forces were to leave, Osama bin Laden and his Islamo-fascists would become the dictators of all the land from Spain to Indonesia.
Bush has pushed this fearmongering garbage over and over. In this speech he claimed “They have aims,”
These acts are part of a grand strategy by the terrorists. Their stated objective is to drive the United States and coalition forces out of the Middle East so they can gain control of Iraq and use that country as a base from which to launch attacks against America, overthrow moderate governments in the Middle East, and establish a totalitarian Islamic empire that stretches from Spain to Indonesia. Hear the words of the terrorists. In a letter to the terrorist leader Zarqawi, the al-Qaeda leader Zawahiri has outlined plans that will unfold in several stages. These are his words: Expel the Americans from Iraq. … Establish an Islamic authority over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq. … Extend the jihad wave to secular countries neighboring Iraq. End quote.
…There’s only one way the terrorists can prevail: if we lose our nerve and leave before the job is done. And that is not going to happen on my watch.
The problem with this argument is that the possibility of the new Eurasia-wide Caliphate he conjures – under the dictatorship of Osama bin Laden, no less – is too remote to even be considered fantasy. Zarqawi is a two-bit rapist who only has status due to the propaganda of the US government, and Zawahiri was, at last count, hiding in exile off in the mountains of Pakistan, where the Bush government let him escape.
As reformed War Party stalwart Jack Murtha has pointed out, and as Bush even conceded in this speech and his last at the Council on Foreign Relations, the foreign jihadist types make up less than seven pecent of the resistance, which is primarily run by ex-Ba’athists and blessed by local Sunni Imams. The Imams may not mind the mujahedeen helping out in the short term, but the likelihood that they could ever take over the Sunni triangle, much less all of Iraq, is incredibly low. Even if they did, the Badr and Wolf Brigade monsters, along with the Kurdish peshmergas that the US has nurtured, can surely take ’em. They’re ruthless enough. Hell, the generals had to turn down their offer to help outright, and just let them into the new Iraqi army instead. The US is now protecting the “Terrorists” from the majority we’ve empowered.
The only reason Iraq is the “central front in the war on terror” is because of our invasion and occupation. As Dr. Robert Pape, author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism explained to me back in July, suicide terrorism is simply a reaction to foreign occupation, and historically, when the occupation ends, the radical groups’ recruitment dries up as people go back to their lives. The longer US forces stay, the worse off we all are, as new jihadist recruitment increases and more American tax dollars go down the drain.
In other words, Bush is completely full of it.
As Robert Higgs explains in his article for the current issue of the Independent Review [.pdf], “Fear: The Foundation of Every Government’s Power,” in which he argues that fear is not simply a useful tool of state power, but the very basis of it,
“Over the ages, governments refined their appeals to popular fears, fostering an ideology that emphasizes the people’s vulnerability to a variety of internal and external dangers from which the governors—of all people!—are represented to be their protectors. Government, it is claimed, protects the populace from external attackers and from internal disorder, both of which are portrayed as ever-present threats. Sometimes the government, as if seeking to nourish the mythology with grains of truth, does protect people in this fashion—even the shepherd protects his sheep, but he does so to serve his own interest, not theirs, and when the time comes, he will shear or slaughter them as his interest dictates.”
On another occasion, though he quickly contradicted himself, the president actually told the truth about the enemy. Al Qaeda, he said, is “more like a loose network with many branches than an army.”
As long as we keep letting the politicians frame the debate around such far-fetched fears as a multicontinental Islamo-Fascist Caliphate, the argument will never, finally, get to the point: In order to win the fight against anti-American terrorism, our foreign interventionism must end.
and he is the president of Iran, according to conservative radio talk show host Michael Savage. Just a few years ago it was Saddam Hussein who was Hitler. Will Republicans, conservatives, the Religious Right, and hawkish Democrats be fooled into war again? You can bet money on it.
Tim Cavanaugh splashes some context on the “it had to be Syria” narrative of the recent murder of Lebanese MP Gebran Tueni:
Let’s see: a Christian politician wanted to partially disenfranchise the largest single religious group in Lebanon, a group whose leading subsidiary is Hezbollah. Yes, he was obviously assassinated by foreigners.
