Antiwar.com Blog

Al Lorentz, a Texas reservist serving with the U.S. Army in Iraq, has gotten into hot water for writing this courageous appraisal of the Iraq disaster. Specifically, the military may charge him with “willfully causing or attempting to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty.” Lt. Col. (ret.) Karen Kwiatkowski suggests that another Texan might be a tad uncomfortable with Lorentz for entirely different reasons. Check out this piece Lorentz wrote for Antiwar.com back in June to see why.

Alot of bloggers are decrying this Rumsfeldian comment:

“Let’s say you tried to have an election and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country in some places you couldn’t because the violence was too great,” Rumsfeld said. “So be it. Nothing’s perfect in life. You have an election that’s not quite perfect. Is it better than not having an election? You bet.”

Asked later by reporters to elaborate, Rumsfeld said: “Is it dangerous? You bet. Will there be elections? I think so. Might there be some portion of the country where the terrorists decide they’re going to mess things up? Possibly. Does that mean that there won’t be elections? No.“

How does that statement stack up against this?

US officials are looking at ways to postpone the 2 November presidential poll should “terrorists” attack the United States near election time, a US magazine is reporting.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge on Friday said: “Al-Qaida is moving forward with its plans to carry out a large-scale attack in the United States in an effort to disrupt our democratic process.” However, he admitted US intelligence had no information about any specific plot.

But unnamed counterterrorism officials told Newsweek on Sunday they were considering a proposal to delay balloting in the event of an attack.

So, it’s OK to have elections in Iraq despite the violence and attacks which would leave out large swaths of the country including the capital(!), but in the US…well, that’s a different story.

I wish I could say that I find it hard to believe that opposition parties in the US aren’t pointing this out, but considering the TweedleDee and TweedleDumb-ness of this election, it isn’t at all surprising. I do think many Iraqis noticed the hypocritical double standard.

An excerpt from Riverbend’s latest:

After Bush finished his piece about the glamorous changes in Iraq, Allawi got his turn. I can’t seem to decide what is worse- when Bush speaks in the name of Iraqi people, or when Allawi does. Yesterday’s speech was particularly embarrassing. He stood there groveling in front of the congress- thanking them for the war, the occupation and the thousands of Iraqi lives lost… and he did it all on behalf of the Iraqi people. It was infuriating and for maybe the hundredth time this year, I felt rage. Yet another exile thanking the Bush administration for the catastrophe we’re trying to cope with. Our politicians are outside of the country 90% of the time (by the way, if anyone has any news of our president Ghazi Ajeel Al Yawir, do let us know- where was he last seen or heard?), the security situation is a joke, the press are shutting down and pulling out and our beloved exiles are painting rosey pictures for the American public- you know- so everyone who voted for Bush can sleep at night.

Allawi actually said “thank you” nine times. Nine times. It really should have been more- at least double that number of Iraqis died yesterday… and about five times that number the day before. Looking back on the last month alone, over 350 Iraqis have been killed either by American air strikes, fighting, or bombs… only 9 thank yous?

The elections are already a standard joke. There’s talk of holding elections only in certain places where it will be ‘safe’ to hold them. One wonders what exactly comprises ‘safe’ in Iraq today. Does ‘safe’ mean the provinces that are seeing fewer attacks on American troops? Or does ‘safe’ mean the areas where the abduction of foreigners isn’t occurring? Or could ‘safe’ mean the areas that *won’t* vote for an Islamic republic and *will* vote for Allawi? Who will be allowed to choose these places? Right now, Baghdad is quite unsafe. We see daily abductions, killings, bombings and Al-Sadr City, slums of Baghdad, see air strikes… will they hold elections in Baghdad? Imagine, Bush being allowed to hold elections in ‘safe’ areas- like Texas and Florida.

Kevin Hayden on this bill: “The monster they created was so bad even some Republicans are saying they can’t support it. I wish they’d just declare martial law, lock up everyone with an IQ above 86 and get it over with. I hate the waiting while they pretend they’re not tyrants.”

Raed Jarrar and Rahul Mahajan both highlight this video purportedly of an American attack on civilians in Fallujah.

Rahul: “Listen for the pilot’s “Aw, dude!” at the end. I read it as some combination of “Oh, the humanity!” and “Yee-hah!” Not sure about the relative ratios.”
Raed: “And, for sure I wasn’t amused by the comedian that seemed to be enjoying his time killing people, ‘Ohhh, Dude’ after the big explosion.
Isn’t this one of the most irresponsible things that you can hear?
Doesn’t such incidents increase and rationalize brutal reactions to the U.S.?
And, can’t the sick dudes in the pentagon remove “ohhh, dude” if they didn’t want us to hear it?”

Rodger Payne on Baghdad Bob Bush’s latest speech on the Republic of FUBAR(as Hesiod calls it).

Ken Layne on Afghaniraqistan, Land of Armies & Suiciders and don’t miss Meet Ayad Allawi.

James Landrith smites the liberventionists: Killing in the Name of Libertarianism. There are some great links at the end of that post as well, one of which sends you back to AntiWar.com blog to read a Matt Barganier post, which you may have missed. Also, here’s Landrith (who’s been blogging up a storm lately) on the demise of the American National Guard:

Hmm. I wonder if back to back deployments, piss poor planning with regard to an exit strategy in Iraq, being lied to about the reasons for the war, and plans to spread the conflict further into Iran and possibly Syria might have something to do with it.

Or perhaps those men and women choosing to allow their contracts to expire are just plain un-American traitors, unlike those brave souls who support interventionist wars through the use of the twin weapons of a fully loaded mouse and combat ready futon.

Yeah, thats probably it.

Libertarian Jackass on non-violence, here and here.

On the subject of liberventionism (did Stromberg invent that term?) David Beito found an interesting argument at Crooked Timber. The author of the post to which Beito points is Belle Waring, who starred in last week’s Blog Tour with this post: Why I Was So Totally Wrong About Iraq.

Terrorists from Fallujah targeted by an American precision strike:

In its daily battle against insurgents, the US military said its air force “conducted a strike inflicting a blow to the Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi terrorist network by conducting a precision strike on a known terrorist meeting site in central Fallujah.”

UPDATE: Hey, Wally Conger has a blog!

Sorry I haven’t blogged anything in awhile, but this is something most of you will probably get a kick out of.

How to Avoid Becoming an Anti-American

I normally try to excerpt the good stuff, but I’ll just reprint this in full and let all you anti-Semites chew on it (bolding mine):

Blame It on Neo
Don’t call me a “neocon” unless you are a friend.

BY JULIA GORIN

Last week Pat Buchanan appeared on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” and liberal host Jon Stewart bonded with his paleoconservative guest over their mutual opposition to the liberation of Iraq. Mr. Stewart smiled and nodded while Mr. Buchanan derided “neoconservatives” four times in the course of the six-minute interview. In his efforts to promote his and his guest’s common agenda, Mr. Stewart didn’t ask Mr. Buchanan what he meant by “neoconservatives.” It was clear that the Jewish Mr. Stewart didn’t realize that Mr. Buchanan was using what has become an epithet for “Jews”–an epithet employed most often by the left.

One big culprit has been Air America. Tune in to the proudly liberal radio network, and you’ll hear actress-turned-activist Janeane Garofalo and other hosts frequently blast the “influence” of the “neocons” on the Bush Administration, then go on to name names such as Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams and Libby. Not a single gentile name makes the list, so it’s the Jewish influence to which the network takes particular exception.

Others have gotten in trouble for pointing this out, but let’s give up the charade. When a member of the enlightened classes, or Pat Buchanan, makes reference to a “neocon,” what he’s saying is “yid.” That’s right, “neoconservative,” particularly in its shortened form, when employed by a nonconservative (or by Buchananites) and therefore meant derogatorily, is the modern, albeit more specific, word for “kike” that the left can say–and it has been doing so liberally (no pun intended) ever since American conservatism became yet something else that Jews have managed to benefit from–the conquered, final frontier of that famous Jewish manipulation.

By “neocons,” the left means the Jewish subset of neocons. [MB: Please read that again. What the?] Witness Maureen Dowd’s column last year, titled “Neocon Coup at the Department d’Etat”: “The neocons have moved on to a vigilante action to occupy diplomacy. The audacious ones have saddled up their pre-emptive steeds and headed off to force a regime change at Foggy Bottom. . . . The president is not always privy to the start of a grandiose neocon scheme. . . . When the neocons want something done, they’ll get it done, no matter what Mr. Bush thinks. And they think Mr. Powell has downgraded the top cabinet post into a human resources job, making nicey-nice with the U.N. and assorted bad guys instead of pursuing the neocon blueprint for world domination.”

At first, Ms. Dowd’s neocon list of last names included only Wolfowitz, Perle, Kristol, Libby and their “Likudnik friends,” but later, as blogger “Silver Surfer” writes on IsraPundit.com, she amended the list to include Cheney, Woolsey and Gingrich. “In Ms. Dowd’s view,” he writes, “adding a few non-Jewish names to her ‘neo-cons’ list makes her conspiratorial story-line kosher. But it doesn’t. The result is a classical portrait of ‘neo-con’ (read: Jewish) advisors, who drip poison in the ears of their hapless gentile bosses, while they advance their global plot to subvert true American interests and take over the world–and, as Ms. Dowd is always quick to point out . . . thereby ‘advance the strategic goals of Israel.’ ”

For a while, I couldn’t tell whether the word was a euphemism or a slur, but from the resentful tone with which it was being employed by certain contingents (“pushy neocons” is another popular one), I could discern that the term’s usage was undergoing a transition. After all, ethnic slurs can start out as euphemisms (meant to avoid identifying anyone blatantly by nationality) before evolving into derogations. “Colored” was a way to avoid the N-word, but today it doesn’t go over very well itself. And a century ago Jews jokingly called one another by their Ellis Island designation “keikle” (Yiddish for “circle”)–until the joke was co-opted by those hostile to Jews.

As a new staple of mainstream American vocabulary, “neoconservative” warrants a reminder of the term’s beginnings, before it became chic newspeak. It originally referred to a movement of largely Jewish liberals who gave leftism an honest and protracted effort, who dutifully reviled every Republican president through Eisenhower, who did their time in inner cities, and who gave peace and social engineering a chance, until the real-world consequences of their good will forced them to acknowledge that what they were doing wasn’t working but in fact backfiring. At which point, these men (e.g., Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol) underwent a midlife epiphany and became conservative after the 1960s.

Today the word applies to anyone who undergoes such a transformation, Jewish or not. True, neoconservatives are not the same breed of conservative that made up the Republican Party of Barry Goldwater. The difference is the neoconservatives’ more interventionist foreign policy as opposed to vintage conservatism’s isolationism.

With today’s “post-9/11 omigod I think I may be Republican” Democrats, what we have in effect are neo-neoconservatives. Many of the Jews in this group might be more accurately described as Bush Democrats, but they’ve opted for the cachet of the label and call themselves neocons. But when Al Franken and other determinedly left-wing Jews use the term, they don’t mean it nicely, embarrassed as they are by their politically wayward fellow tribesmen.
So let’s go over the rules: Just because we call ourselves “neocons,” it doesn’t mean you can. Of course, if you’re right-leaning and don’t intend the word disparagingly, you get a pass. Just know that unless you’re aware that “neoconservative” also includes last names like Bennett, Kirkpatrick, Sowell, Kemp and Ashcroft, when you refer to someone as a neocon, you’re saying “Jew.” We might suggest reverting to previous, less codey expressions such as “Jewish conservative” or “Republican Jew”–especially since not every right-leaning Jew is neo. But not to worry: We neocons, Republican Jews, Jewish conservatives and Jews for Bush won’t take offense, since we don’t want American Christians to feel even more paranoid than they already do (particularly during “holiday” season).

As for our imperviously left-leaning fellow tribesmen, let them figure out for themselves how to handle their non-Jewish co-ideologists who say “neocon” angrily and freely in mixed company.

Yes, poor Richard Perle and Dick Cheney (oops, Douglas Feith) drinking at their segregated water fountains, “doing their time in inner cities” – why, my tears run down like waters, and my self-righteousness like a mighty stream.

A stinking tub of sh*t, that, and anyone who has ever abetted such foolishness should be embarrassed. At least Ms. Gorin calls herself a comedian, though she’s no Lenny Bruce.

Given the Bush administration’s fondness for failed Soviet initiatives, they may want to consider another one that has just come to light: putting a military base on the moon. From The Moscow News:

In the days of the Cold War Soviet commanders and their best scientists were working on a project to build military headquarters on the Moon, the Novaya Gazeta weekly reports. The paper writes that the lunar base project was developed thirty years ago and was only abolished because of its enormous cost.

The newspaper cited Aleksandr Yegorov, deputy general designer of the General Machine Building Design Bureau (the name of the bureau suggests that it deals with top secret military projects — MosNews) as saying that he personally took part in the development of the lunar base project.

Soviet scientists considered the Moon to be a very good place for a strategic headquarters as nuclear strikes on its surface would lose most of their destructive force. As the moon has no atmosphere, no shockwave could spread there and the radioactive dust would immediately fall out back on the surface without an atmosphere to carry it. …

The project was abolished only due to its enormous cost, Yegorov said. According to him, the Soviet project was “tens of times” more expensive than the Apollo project of the United States which cost $34 billion.

Well, cost has yet to prevent Bush from doing anything else, and occupying the moon would probably be a damn sight cheaper than occupying Iraq for the rest of eternity.