Antiwar.com Blog

The White House calls for democracy in Lebanon have not produced the results they were hoping for. In yesterday’s third round of voting, neocon poster boy Walid Jumblatt was trounced by a Syrian-alligned coaltion led by former general Michel Aoun.

Even more of a surprise was the sweep by Hezbollah in the eastern Bekaa Valley where the group labeled by Bush as “terrorists” won all 10 seats. Hezbollah has so far won 33 seats out of the 128-seat parliament, the largest of any single group.

Hezbollah was not expected to win anywhere near this many seats, but was helped by recent pronouncements of the White House. Knight Ridder reports:

Samia Hajj, a 43-year-old Shiite Muslim housewife, said she isn’t traditionally a supporter of either Hezbollah or its recent ally, the more secular Amal party. However, recent U.S. admonitions for Hezbollah to lay down its arms infuriated her, she said, and drove her to vote for the Hezbollah-Amal list as a means of resisting outside influence.

“We are not against America, but we aren’t terrorists and we don’t like being called terrorists,” Hajj said. “When the United States talks like that, it makes us think they are going to interfere here like they did in Iraq. We’re not going to let that happen.”

Billmon, writing in his brilliant weblong, Whiskey Bar:

“If the symbol of the Roman state was a statue of a she wolf suckling the city’s founders, Romulus and Remus, then I think America should have one of a sow, suckling every defense contractor, hack politician and PR operative in Washington.”

It’s a hair-raising and perceptively-written story about the Pentagon’s growing budget for strategic information — or “psywar” operations. It is a scary, trenchant look into the bowels of George W. Bush’s America, and well worth a read.

That’s right: conservatives are now apologizing for espionage. The arrest of Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin is just the beginning of the dramatic court case that will expose Israel’s amen corner in the U.S. as a fifth column in the service of a foreign power — with the neoconservatives leading the chorus that this is a case of “persecution.”

Bollocks.

Read all about how leading American “conservatives” have positioned themselves as apologists for espionage in my latest post on the Huff-blog.

The War Street Journal recently published an op ed piece by one Debra Burlingame, in which the author claims that the Freedom Center planned for the re-built WTC — re-dubbed the “Freedom Tower” — has been “hijacked” by those gosh-darned America-hating left-wingers, who will fill the heads of schoolchildren and other visitors with their anti-American “propaganda.” A small taste is quite enough:

“The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. is handing over millions of federal dollars and the keys to that building to some of the very same people who consider the post-9/11 provisions of the Patriot Act more dangerous than the terrorists that they were enacted to apprehend — people whose inflammatory claims of a deliberate torture policy at Guantanamo Bay are undermining this country’s efforts to foster freedom elsewhere in the world.”

As a libertarian, I don’t think anyone should be handing over millions of federal dollars for anything. Private citizens could buy the site, finance a memorial with voluntary contributions, and design it to their own specifications: otherwise, we are to be perpetually subjected to inquisitors of Ms. Burlingame’s ilk, such as the rightwing radio screamer Michael Smerconish who utilizes his posting privileges on the Huffington Post blog to support her attempt to “take back” the memorial.

If we must have a state-subsidized memorial — which seems pretty close to inevitable — then the War Party’s efforts to control what it looks like and what ideas it projects must be resisted — and that’s just what I do in my answering post on the Huff-blog, here.

Check out my latest post on the Huffington Post blog: it’s about “fragging,” a practice much in evidence during the Vietnam era when hundreds of American military officers were killed by their own soldiers — and, no, we aren’t talking about “friendly fire” here. Hand-grenades were the favored mode of execution, a most unfriendly way to die.

I have to say that I’ll be absolutely shocked and, yes, surprised if this does indeed turn out to be a case of fragging. After all, these soldiers are volunteer, unlike the conscripts forced to fight the Vietnam war. Could it be that they’re discovering that, as in Vietnam, we have no business being over there — and are now beginning to take out their anger at being bamboozled into volunteering on their officers?

Wow! I’ve made the big-time! The Huffington Post has asked me to blog for them — and here’s my first contribution. There I am, right alongside Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Catharine Crier, Gary Hart, Jann Wenner, Karen Finley (!), Erica Jong, Paul Krassner, my old adversary Bill Maher (what war in the Balkans?!), and of course Arianna Herself.

Gee, am I famous yet ….?

UPDATE: And I see that my friend Scott McConnell has joined the ranks of the Huff-bloggers, with a great post on the state of the antiwar movement.

UPDATE II: I just posted another one.

UPDATE III: Hey, lookee here — Lew Rockwell’s joined in the fun! Oh boy, is this really going to piss off the War Party, or what?!