Iraqi Victims of American Delusions

Since a murderous, violent resistance movement (which antiwar people predicted) rules much of Iraq rather than the liberation cakewalk and democratic utopia (that prowar people predicted), an inevitable class of victims of the American invasion of Iraq has emerged (just as it always does, after an invasion.)

To the resistance, they’re collaborators and to the occupiers they’re living proof of failure. They want to get out of Iraq before the resistance kills them and their families for aiding the US occupation. The Americans in Iraq want them to shut up and go hide somewhere, so they won’t be embarrassed back home by the spectacle of Iraqis fleeing the US-recreation of the Garden of Eden in Mesopotamia. This woman sums up their predicament poignantly,

Alyaa hoped to find a haven in the United States but discovered the State Department isn’t resettling refugees from Iraq. She’s lost her faith in the country she once loved.

“We gave them our friendship,” Alyaa said during a recent interview at an Amman restaurant, wearing jeans and smoking cigarettes. “We gave them our hard work. And they don’t even help us to have a new life.” Is it so hard, she asked, “for America to give a visa to Iraqis to have a new life that they took from them?”

Iraqi refugees in mortal fear at home can’t get entry into United States

Recommended reading

Jonathan Schwarz has a great interview with Chris Floyd posted. Just so you know what you’re missing if you don’t go over there and read this interview, here’s Chris Floyd on Matt Taibbi (who I vote for as the subject for Jonathan’s next interview, if he can’t get JD Guckert.)

There were lots of people from the paper [The Moscow Times]during that period who you see now all over the place. Carlotta Gall, who’s in Afghanistan now for the New York Times. I used to take her dictation when she’d call on her satellite phone from Chechnya. Anne Barnard, who’s in Baghdad for the Boston Globe. Frank Brown, my roommate in Moscow, who writes for Newsweek now. Matt Taibbi was there.

Taibbi was a great reporter, a big, honking goon of a guy who’d ride with the police and get down in the real Moscow dirt. He used to make fun of me because I wore this black shirt with a pink tie—I had about four changes of clothes altogether while I was there, living out of a couple of suitcases—so he started calling me “Cheap Trick,” because he thought I looked like one of the singers from that old band. Which I suppose tells you something about his musical tastes.

Oil and Instinct

I’ve received some replies to my blog entry of April 3. Unfortunately, most of them rehash issues I’ve already addressed. I did provide a link to the pre-April 3 debate but I don’t blame people for not going back and reading all that before e-mailing in their criticism, questions, and mockery; it’s quick and easy to send an e-mail, while reading is time-consuming and brain-tiring. In this same spirit I’m going to refrain from replying to the rehashing e-mailers. I find myself unable, however, to refrain from replying briefly to an essay titled “Is Peak Oil a myth? Just so long as we can catch the goddamn monkey,” posted on the (apparently popular) Daily Kos blog by a self-described “Mom of 2, Ex-Yuppie, 3rd Generation Democrat, Engineer, MBA, Silly Goose” calling herself Lawnorder. Her first sentence introduces one of her (long) essay’s main themes:

“AntiWar.com editor Sam Koritz thinks Big Oil and imperialist neocons are fooling us all into believing the world’s supply of oil is ending and that the end of Oil would amount to such a big crisis.”

Nope. I never wrote that anyone was fooling anyone else into believing in peak oil theory (POT). Erroneous economic beliefs — from the lump of labor fallacy to the potty “lump of fuel” fallacy of our current debate — are the norm; no conspiracy required. (My guess is that much of this economic ignorance can be explained by natural selection: we intuit our ancestors’ world of warring tribes and privation.)

The strange thing is that, before writing her piece, Lawnorder actually did bother to go back into the archives and read my “Economics of Oil, Part 2” posting in which I answer a similar mistaken criticism from a reader named Joseph O’Ruandaidh, and in which I explicitly deny having claimed that any oil conspiracy exists. Lawnorder, in her Kos essay, prominently quotes O’Ruandaidh’s criticism but not my reply.

I just want to rebut again this misrepresentation of my argument: I have not claimed that there is a conspiracy of any sort involving oil. I’ll leave the rest of Lawnorder’s essay alone, except to point out that evidence for POT (the theory that oil production has peaked or is about to peak, and that this will cause a major world crisis) does not include ecological disaster on Easter Island, North Korean famine, global warming, or the fact that fuels are not free.

Continue reading “Oil and Instinct”

David Horowitz: All Wrong, All the Time

I hear that David Horowtiz spent half a million bucks on developing his conspiracy site, “Discover the network,” which purports to document the “subversive” activities of anyone he disagrees with. If so, his donors should ask for their money back, because if the entry on me is any indication, he manages to get everything — even the smallest easily-checkable details — flat-out wrong. Among my alleged sins:

“Administers the website Antiwar.com.”

Wrong. I’m not the webmaster of Antiwar.com, nor am I an administrator, alas, but only a mere writer. The real administrators keep me as far away from administrative affairs as possible — and that’s just the way I like it.

“Once sought notoriety as a leftist, but now poses as a rightist.”

This is puzzling. I was never a leftist, of any sort: National Review was my bible as a teenager, and I actively campaigned for Barry Goldwater for President in 1964. From there I joined Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), and then founded my own youth group, “Young Radicals for Capitalism.” We had a huge chapter at Wayne State University, and put out a single issue of a magazine, The New Radical, that was filled with denunciations of the New Left. From there I joined the Libertarian Party during the presidential campaign of Roger MacBride (1976) and subsequently ran for office (Congress, state legislature, etc.) several times in California under the LP banner. I left the LP in 1983.

Oddly, none of this is mentioned in Horowitz’s looney “profile” of me: according to his weird “alternate reality” version of my political history, my longtime (and continuing) association with the libertarian movement never happened.

In short, never have I “sought notoriety as a leftist.” I think Horowitz is projecting here, since the description fits him and not me.

“Posing as a war-hater, Raimondo defends murderous dictators like Slobodan Milosevic.”

Another lie, as anyone who reads my numerous attacks on Milosevic can see for themselves.

“Presents the Ba’athist party-states in Iraq and Syria as victims of the malicious West.”

As I have said repeatedly, the real victims of our intervention in the Middle East are the peoples of the countries that we target — and the American people, who have to die for and pay for the neocons’ endless wars.

“Openly wishes that Japan had won World War II.”

This laughable malarkey — after all, isn’t it a little late to be cheering for the Mikado? –comes from a comment I made about the calm beauty of the Japanese tea ceremony as opposed to Eminen’s noisy misogyny. Whatever they’re smoking over there in Horowitz-land, it must be some pretty powerful stuff.

“States that September 11 was ‘an enormous defeat for the U.S.'”

Is Horowitz is saying it was a great victory?

“Believes that the Great Satan is America, and the Little Satan is Israel.”

Horowitz doesn’t cite anything I have written or said to back this up. But, then again, what’s evidence for a proven liar and fraud, who knows the Leninist art of lying all too well?

“Author of The Terror Enigma, a pamphlet that insinuates, with no serious evidence, that the Israeli government had prior knowledge of 9/11 but failed to warn U.S. authorities.”

If Horowitz is saying that Fox News is not a source capable of providing “serious evidence,” then I believe there are many on the left who would agree with him. However, their four-part series on Israel’s “vast” (their word) spy network in the U.S. is just one of many sources that I rely on, including The Forward, Die Zeit, Insight magazine, Salon.com, and a host of others.

As if being wrong about everything wasn’t enough, however, the supposedly “interactive” feature of Horowitz’s “database” is broken. When I clicked on the button that is supposed to conjure up a “map” detailing all my alleged links to the “anti-American left,” what comes up on the screen is — absolutely nothing!

This cost half a million bucks? All I can say is that somebody got ripped off — bigtime.

Postscript: If you want to see what kind of dingbats are attracted to Horowitz and his nutty site, go here. Birds of a feather, and all … Continue reading “David Horowitz: All Wrong, All the Time”