Antiwar.com Blog

A large explosion has been heard in the center of Baghdad…

This looks interesting. Pricey, but worth it.

The career of John T. Flynn, an old-style liberal who was one of the leaders of the America First Committee, exemplifies the course followed by many other liberals and progressives of the 1930s: his opposition to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s warlike foreign policy — and super-centralism on the home front — exiled him from the precincts of the Left and drove him into the ranks of the “isolationist” (i.e. pro-peace) Right. After reading Lew Rockwell’s recent piece on “red-state fascism,” I thought of Flynn, who foresaw our present predicament in 1943, the year his book As We Go Marching (now sadly out of print) was published:

“When you can put your finger on the men or the groups that urge for America the debt-supported state, the autarchial corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes to alter the forms of our government to approach as closely as possible the unrestrained, absolute government – then you will know you have located the authentic fascist.

“But let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that we are dealing by this means with the problem of fascism. Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans, as violently against Hitler and Mussolini as the next one, but who are convinced that the present economic system is washed up and that the present political system in America has outlived its usefulness and who wish to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing millions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society. There is your fascist. And the sooner America realizes this dreadful fact the sooner it will arm itself to make an end of American fascism masquerading under the guise of the champion of democracy.”

See no evil.

Hear no evil.

Speak no evil.

Evil.

Over at The Guardian, Sidney Blumenthal considers the president’s second inaugural address, recalling a line from the first:

As Bush draws the sword of righteousness against the forces of darkness, the enemy being evil itself ("evildoers … axis of evil"), he ascends on messianic imagery. "Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?" he said in his first inaugural, quoting a letter written by a Virginian friend to Thomas Jefferson during the American revolution. "This story goes on," said Bush. "And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm."

As Blumenthal notes, "That particular verse originates in the book of the prophet Nahum. It contains no ‘angel,’ but the Lord, ‘a jealous and avenging God … full of wrath….’" He goes on to provide some context for that Biblical extract, but alas, not enough. The president could use the tutorial; as a practitioner of refrigerator-magnet Christianity, he probably lacks the vaguest idea what the passage refers to. Refrigerator-magnet Christians (RMCs) – America’s largest denomination – approach the Bible as a compendium of ye olde inspirational nuggets for posting about the home and office. To be sure, fundamentalist RMCs like the prez believe the Bible to be much more than a sacred Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, but they leave all that big-picture philosophical and historical stuff for accredited theologians and bestselling novelists to process and distribute in bite-sized (and highly politicized) portions. And by "big-picture philosophical and historical stuff," I of course mean Armageddon.

But what of actual Biblical history – y’know, things that have already happened, real historical events alluded to in the Bible? As a Christian Web site summarizes the book of Nahum:

The subject of this prophecy is the approaching complete and final destruction of Nineveh, the capital of the great and at that time flourishing Assyrian empire. Assur-bani-pal was at the height of his glory. Nineveh was a city of vast extent, and was then the center of the civilization and commerce of the world, a "bloody city all full of lies and robbery" (Nah. 3:1), for it had robbed and plundered all the neighboring nations. It was strongly fortified on every side, bidding defiance to every enemy; yet it was to be utterly destroyed as a punishment for the great wickedness of its inhabitants.

Hmmm. Now where is Nineveh? Why, it’s just outside present-day Mosul. I’m sure many Bush-supporting RMCs would read Nahum (if they read Nahum) as a prophecy re-fulfilled by the fall of Saddam Hussein, but there are a few problems with that. For one, who would say that Hussein’s Iraq at even its peak was a "great and flourishing empire"? "The center of the civilization and commerce of the world"? I think not. Second, Assyrian Nineveh was destroyed by the Babylonians. Hussein fancied himself heir to the Babylonian kings, particularly
Nebuchadnezzar. Finally, Nineveh is no longer Saddam’s and hasn’t been since it was made part of the northern no-fly zone after the first Gulf War. Thus, even before the "Pottery Barn rule" went into effect, Nineveh was quite literally us.

And I imagine quite a few Iraqis now sympathize with Nahum’s vision for Nineveh:

Nahum 3
1 Woe to the bloody city! it is all full of lies and rapine; the prey departeth
not.
2 The noise of the whip, and the noise of the rattling of wheels, and prancing
horses, and bounding chariots,
3 the horseman mounting, and the flashing sword, and the glittering spear,
and a multitude of slain, and a great heap of corpses, and there is no end of
the bodies; they stumble upon their bodies. …
17 Thy princes are as the locusts, and thy marshals as the swarms of grasshoppers,
which encamp in the hedges in the cold day, but when the sun ariseth they flee
away, and their place is not known where they are….
19 There is no assuaging of thy hurt: thy wound is grievous: all that hear
the report of thee clap their hands over thee; for upon whom hath not thy wickedness
passed continually?

That’s one Bible passage I guarantee you won’t hear on Thursday.

Daniel Pipes is quietly dropped from the U.S. Institute for Peace. I wonder if this had something to do with it.

Michael Scheuer, lately of the CIA, now a bestselling author, on the tail wagging the dog:

“Pro-Israel lobbyists have run an enviable ‘covert action’ in the United States, a former top CIA analyst said. Michael Scheuer, who wrote a best-selling book criticizing the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies last summer, while he still worked for the CIA, said the U.S.-Israel relationship was a case of the tail wagging the dog. ‘I just think it does America tremendous harm in the Islamic world for us to be so obviously the dog that’s led around by the tail,’ Scheuer said Thursday at a Middle East Policy Council briefing in Washington. He suggested that the United States should reconsider its aid to Israel, but that such a debate was impossible. ‘I think the Israelis have done a marvelous job in terms of being able to control the nature of debate in this country over our policies toward Israel,’ he said. ‘Whether it’s people sending out from AIPAC a list of rules on how to review my books or, you know, the fact that if you criticize Israel you’re an anti-Semite, it’s a tremendous covert action. I wish our intelligence community could have done the same over the course of the past 30 years anywhere.'”

The pro-Israel lobby and “covert action” — do you think he means this, or this — or maybe even this?