Antiwar.com Blog

Boy, the liberventionists sure picked a great time to become conservatives. Howard Fineman at MSNBC says the “conservative coalition” has had it. Wouldn’t that be great? The oddball grouping of fundamentalist crazies, the warfare mercantilists, fiscal conservatives and libertarians was in jeopardy after the fall of Communism when quite a few on the right who had believed William F. Buckley, when he said that the “totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores” was strictly a temporary measure found themselves disappointed.

The imperial rule of Bill “burn and machine gun and call it suicide” Clinton helped keep the structure of the right intact temporarily, but the damage had already been done. George W. Bush and his neoconservative cronies’ “strategic disaster” of a war in Iraq, as former Reagan-era NSA director William Odom has called it, has finished the job.

The neocons, having created the war in Iraq, have now turned on Bush for having it waged, and officially abandoned him:

“Their neo-Wilsonian theory is correct, they insist, but the execution was botched by a Bush team that has turned out to be incompetent, crony-filled, corrupt, unimaginative and weak over a wide range of issues.

The flight of the neocons – just read a recent Weekly Standard to see what I am talking about – is one of only many indications that the long-predicted “conservative crackup” is at hand.”

Fineman is adding the neocons to the religious crazies who are mad about Harriet Myers’ nomination to the Supreme Court, businessmen (presumably from companies other than Halliburton) who are embarrassed by the disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina, fiscal conservatives worried about funny money, and those he calls “isolationists” (the old smear term against those who advocate political “independence“).

Traditional establishment chessboard types like Zbigniew Brzezinski haven’t liked him since he went to Iraq instead of taking over all of Central Asia.

So who are the 40% of people left supporting George W. Bush and the stupidest foreign policy since McKinley waged aggressive war in the Philippines to Christianize the Catholics?

This seems like a pretty good sample: American government school graduates who think Iran is a continent in the South Pacific.

Hey, Everybody! Check out Antiwar.com’s new regular writer Charles Pena. He is just the kind of heavy hitter we like to have around here: a senior fellow with the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, an adviser to the Straus Military Reform Project and an analyst for MSNBC television. Pena is the co-author of Exiting Iraq: Why the U.S. Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War Against al-Qaeda, and author of the upcoming Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism.

His new column is called Dispatches from the Un-War, and today’s, A New York State of Mind, deals with the hoax terror threat in New York last week.

Score one for Anti-interventionism!

You’re going to indict Michael Ledeen and his CIA buddies for forging those Niger uranium documents, right?

As quoted in the Wikipedia entry for Yellowcake forgery:

In an interview on July 26, 2005, Cannistraro’s business partner and columnist for the “American Conservative” magazine, former CIA counter terrorism officer Philip Giraldi, confirmed to Scott Horton that the forgeries were produced by “a couple of former CIA officers who are familiar with that part of the world who are associated with a certain well-known neoconservative who has close connections with Italy.” When Horton said that must be Ledeen, he confirmed it, and added that the ex-CIA officers, “also had some equity interests, shall we say, with the operation. A lot of these people are in consulting positions, and they get various, shall we say, emoluments in overseas accounts, and that kind of thing.” [9]

In a second interview with Horton, Giraldi elaborated to say that Ledeen and his former CIA friends worked with Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. “These people did it probably for a couple of reasons, but one of the reasons was that these people were involved, through the neoconservatives, with the Iraqi National Congress and Chalabi and had a financial interest in cranking up the pressure against Saddam Hussein and potentially going to war with him.” [10]

Or is it a crime to lie a country into war?

Short mp3 of the relevant Giraldi quotes here.

Your one stop shop for analysis of the denouement of Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury investigation is Jane Hamsher’s blog firedoglake. ReddHedd has been a posting machine the last few days.

The news is flying fast and furious this evening: Raw Story has an excerpt from tomorrow’s WSJ saying that the investigation may have broadened to include the whole of the White House Iraq Group.

Is Fitzgerald moving ever closer to the Niger uranium scammers? We can hope. As Josh Marshall says:

But this WHIG thing is a whole ‘nother level of hurt.

This group was the organizational team, the core group behind all the shameless crap that went down in the lead up to the Iraq war — the lies about the cooked up Niger story, everything. If Fitzgerald has lassoed this operation into a criminal conspiracy, the veil of protective secrecy in which the whole operation is still shrouded will be pulled back. Depositions and sworn statements in on-going investigations have a way of doing that. Ask Bill Clinton. Every key person in the White House will be touched by it. And all sorts of ugly tales could spill out.

Digby connects the dots. Pass the popcorn!

Here’s an extra helping of schadenfreude, as Jonathan Schwarz oh-so-cruelly interrupts Colin Powell’s attempted image rehabilitation:

Yesterday I quietly and calmly explained that COLIN POWELL IS A GIGANTIC ERUPTING GEYSER OF LIES. Today I thought it might be fun to soberly and carefully describe why POWELL’S REAL NAME IS MR. BULLSHIT GOT-LIES PINOCCHIO.

Go, Jonathan! Kick ’em while they’re down! Don’t let ’em get up!

Publius is making sense, here:

For now, the question across the political spectrum is why Miers? Or more precisely, why not someone from the farm team? I think the answer is simple: torture.

Of all the scandals and junkets and leaks and what have you, the one that history will consider the most serious is the authorization of torture and the flagrant violations of the Geneva Convention. As Marty Lederman and Andrew Sullivan (to his credit) have made clear again and again, this administration is guilty of war crimes. And they know it. That’s why they won’t release the Yoo memo of March 2003 (and I think a good case can be made for charging Yoo with war crimes). That’s why Cheney lobbied to defeat McCain’s torture bill and why Bush (the alleged Christian) is threatening to veto it. Of all the scandals, this is the one that probably keeps them up at night – and it is the one that will dog them through the centuries. In the spring of 2003 (and before), this administration gave the CIA and the DOD authorization to torture prisoners and relied on specious legal arguments to justify it.

And one day, when all the facts are finally known (as they inevitably will), the legal reckoning will come. And I suspect that the Supreme Court will ultimately have the final say on a lot of these issues (though if I were Donald Rumsfeld, I wouldn’t go on any educational tours of the Hague anytime soon, or for the rest of his life). Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld know how guilty they are. That’s why (I would argue) that Bush’s top priority in picking Justices has been the nominee’s deference to the executive branch in its wartime activities. I have no idea how Justices Roberts and Miers will rule, but I strongly suspect they will not hold the administration’s feet to the fire for its detention policies. Hell, Miers even participated in this stuff. [On an aside, I suspect that’s why Bush so desperately wanted Gonzales on the Court – and we may yet see him nominated for precisely the same reason.]

Yeah, it’s depressing, but read the rest.

After almost five years of Thursdays, Balkan Express (est. October 19, 2000) is moving – by a day. From this week onward, it will appear on Wednesdays. It may be five years since the ‘revolution’ in Serbia, and ten since the Bosnian War ended, but the Empire is still knee-deep in the Balkans mud, and getting deeper.

Will the illegal occupation of Kosovo end in an ethnically-cleansed Albanian statelet? Will the efforts to create a centralized Bosnia-Herzegovina lead to peace and harmony, or another war? Will the EU devour the region, and either solve its problems or create new ones? That, and a lot more, as Balkan Express enters its sixth year – now on Wednesdays.