Antiwar.com Blog

How absurd is it for a foreign country to send troops to another foreign country and then import other foreign troops in to guard them? And when one foreign country decides to pull its troops out of the invaded country the remaining foreign country’s troops have to get some other foreign country to come and guard their troops that nobody wants there in the first place?

Aussies to guard SDF troops in Iraq

Juan Cole has a long post up in which he analyzes the somewhat sketchy information available about the process of choosing a candidate for PM of the Iraqi Assembly. Rather surprisingly, Ahmed Chalabi is still announcing to anyone who will listen that he has the votes to become PM. Cole explains how this might actually be true and also lays out a scenario which could result in Allawi retaining power.

Interestingly, Cole thinks that the women (33% of the seats by UN rule) might be the wild card that allow Chalabi to cobble together enough votes to be a contender, but Abu Aardvark reminds us of the truckloads of blackmail files Chalabi still has.

As I was writing this post, the wires began announcing that Chalabi has withdrawn from the PM contest, so now we can take all this reasoning about PM and apply it to whatever position Chalabi announces that he will win next since he never goes away.

Chalabi photo via billmon

According to a report from the Pentagon’s testing and evaluation office, the Defense Department wants to “target an adversary’s space capability by using a variety of permanent and/or reversible means to achieve five possible effects: deception, disruption, denial, degradation and destruction…”

Pentagon Exercises Focus on Space Control

Space control is military jargon for the ability to ensure one’s own access to satellite capabilities while denying space-based services to adversaries. It encompasses both defensive measures designed to protect satellites as well as what the Pentagon refers to as negation — measures to counter or destroy enemy satellite capabilities.

I know Reason magazine gets its fair share of abuse around here, but this gem from Tim Cavanaugh is my early frontrunner for comment of the year:

I think it says more about how contemporary liberals view themselves than about our “debased political terminology” that anybody at The New York Times believes a neocon “revision” of American history would even be possible, or that it would differ in any substantive way from the way that history would be written by The New York Times itself.

The genius of neoconservatism is that it’s exactly in step with the progressivist, middle-of-the-road, big state view of American history they teach in school: The Articles of Confederation resulted in a disaster that taught the founders the value of a strong central state; the Whiskey rebels were dangerous kooks, not unlike the Branch Davidians of our own time; “States’ Rights” has always been a code word for slavery; President Woodrow Wilson was a man of vision but sadly was unable to achieve his goals for an international order; the America Firsters were even kookier and more marginal than the Whiskey rebels, and the best way to deal with one is to sock him in the jaw like in The Best Years of Our Lives; many well intentioned folks on the left underestimated the danger of the Soviet Union, but the anti-communist witch hunts of the fifties were a regrettable overreaction (the Left didn’t become dangerous until the late sixties and early seventies, when it embraced separatist and militant views that undermined the politics of consensus that made this country great); real civil rights progress only came when the federal government asserted its power over the refractory states; September 11 shocked America out of its isolationism and freed President George W. Bush (an excellent man, but distressingly shortsighted in some matters) from his naive opposition to nation-building. And so on.

Leave aside how much of it you agree or disagree with. What would the neocons add to the official version of American history? That Winston Churchill should have been made King of the United States as well as Prime Minister of Great Britain? That we missed a great opportunity by not jumping into the Franco-Prussian War? That we should have intervened on Sylvania’s side against Freedonia? The folks at The Times may have a narcissistic interest in highlighting small differences, but you can’t misuse language forever. When liberals look at the neocons, they see themselves.

Absolutely perfect.

After this spittle-flecked screed (and it keeps going) from a commenter at Liberty & Power, resident AWC-basher Steven Horwitz adds the following Deep Thought:

As someone who thinks ALL foreign aid should disappear, including, of course, aid to Israel, I still believe there are criticisms of Israel that cross the line into anti-Semitism. Dershowitz’s definition of anti-Semitism with respect to Israel works for me: being opposed, even strongly opposed, to Israeli policy is not anti-Semitism. Holding Israel to standards that no other country is held to, or continually singling out Israel for problems [th]at are as bad or worse elsewhere, is.

First off, Dershowitz? Sure you want his representation, professor?

Anyway, who’s picking on Israel? I have never heard a single American of any stature – not even the shrillest critic of Zionism – ever suggest that the U.S. should aggress in any way against Israel. All my life (and especially the last four years), I have heard “respectable” folks call for the U.S. to bomb and/or invade practically every country on the planet – certainly every Arab country – yet I have never come across even a joking suggestion that Israel should be targeted. I’m sure Professor Horwitz can pull such a suggestion from his grievance clip file, but it certainly won’t bear the mark of Antiwar.com or the other libertarian organizations he and his pal smear as anti-Semitic.

So he can stop his whining about “singling out Israel” – if Israel’s singled out for anything, it’s American goodwill.

What libertarian critics of Israel have called for at most is an end to the subsidies, and there’s no crypto-Nazi logic behind such demands. If Israel comes up more often than other countries in critiques of foreign aid, it’s first and foremost because Israel gets more foreign aid than anybody else (see Figures 3 & 4). (Excluding the recent spike in “aid” to Iraq, which only cost the Iraqis tens of thousands of dead. As for longtime #2 recipient Egypt, you can go ahead and count them at least partly as an extension of the Israel budget. As the ultra-anti-Semitic Cato Institute put it in a 1986 report: “As part of the Camp David peace accords of 1978, the United States promised to give Egypt and Israel billions of dollars of aid to compensate them for forgoing the privilege of fighting each other.”)

Yes, I’m for abolishing foreign aid, period, as are all of the libertarians Horwitz hates. As I advised the Bush administration almost a year ago,

Kick Israel off of the dole.

There’s no reason to be nasty about it. You don’t have to single out Israel, nor should you. Simply announce an end to all foreign aid (as I recall, that used to be a major goal for conservatives). See ya, Egypt. So long, Uzbekistan. Later, Haiti. The handouts benefit neither them nor us.

And yes, I would applaud any reduction in foreign aid, including whatever pittance we give to Moldova or Fiji. But I’m not going to pretend that all foreign aid packages are equally inimical to my interests as an American citizen and taxpayer. For a domestic policy parallel, defunding the National Endowment for the Arts would be a step in the right direction, but defunding the Drug Enforcement Agency would be a giant leap. Obviously, the NEA bleeds taxpayers far less than the DEA. But much more important than immediate costs is blowback. The NEA litters the country with a few lousy sculptures, some boring shock photography, and a bunch of performance artists bathing in Hershey’s syrup. The DEA fuels drug-related violence, incarcerates thousands for victimless crimes, erodes the privacy of all, destroys the lives and livelihoods of people guilty only of being born in the wrong place, etc. If Congress abolishes the NEA, I’ll clap. If it abolishes the DEA, I’ll rejoice. Both are wasteful, stupid government programs, but they are not equivalent.

To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever claimed to attack the U.S. because of its support for Moldova or Fiji. President Bush has not assured the world that he will back a Moldovan preemptive strike against Russia, thereby putting U.S. foreign policy in foreign hands, as he has done with Israel. And while I’m sure there’s some pro-Fiji Laurent Murawiec out there agitating for the U.S. to annihilate Fiji’s enemies, he’s had no success thus far.

As for “holding Israel to standards that no other country is held to,” I haven’t even touched on Israel’s internal affairs – though I don’t dig how any self-professed libertarian can champion a hypersocialist theocracy – because it’s not necessary. Even if Ariel Sharon and all the settlers waiting to Yitzhak Rabin him have gilded wings and halos, and the Palestinians really are just a bunch of horned devils who arose ex nihilo in 1948, it’s not my country. Neither is France, despite my surname. I am under no moral obligation to subsidize (or suffer the consequences of subsidizing) either. Anyone who wants to contribute to the Israeli military is free to do so – hell, it’s tax-deductible! Just don’t force me to, don’t tell me it’s the same as subsidizing Fiji, and don’t call me an anti-Semite for noticing the difference.

And if Professor Horwitz truly thinks “ALL foreign aid should disappear, including, of course, aid to Israel,” I’d be pleased to update this post with any links in which he has advocated any such thing. My preliminary Google search turned up nothing. Surely that’s not just a stock caveat he tosses off before libeling others, is it?

I think Jonathan Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution has figured out the answer to The Great Perfume Atomizer Mystery.