Antiwar.com Blog

Aw shucks, turns out we at Antiwar.com haven’t been conjuring visions of a dark neocon conspiracy, after all. Jim Henley goes super-sleuth on something called Google:

I read a lot of criticisms of neoconservative foreign policy. Been reading them for years, actually, long before the Bush Administration existed. Hey, I’ve written them! While I occasionally see people who use the word “conspiracy” with regard to the neocon influence on Bush Administration policy, I don’t recall actual critics referring to said conspiracy, or Tendency or what-have-you as “shadowy.” There is clearly nothing shadowy about prominent national security intellectuals, prominently published in many cases, holding down high-level government jobs and not infrequently making statements to the media. “Shadowy” itself is a word generally inserted into the discussion by those who smear neocon critics, the better to stigmatize them. I googled “neocon shadoy conspiracy” this evening, and a scan of relevant hits on the first two pages shows that the word “shadowy” is almost always used by smearer of neocon critics rather than a neocon critic. Then I googled Antiwar.com specifically. Of the four hits, not one used the word “shadowy” in relation to “neocon conspiracy.” Then it was off to The American Conservative. No hits at all.

Googling the same site for simply “neocon conspiracy”, the only hit is actually a quote by neoconservative columnist Robert Kagan. Searching the same parameters on Antiwar.com produces 10 pages of hits (imagine!), but none of the ones on the first two pages turn out to be about, well, neocon conspiracies. The word conspiracy is never used to characterize the actions of the neoconservatives in or out of government.

This makes sense. Conspiracies are secret things, and if there’s one thing the PNAC, the Weekly Standard and AEI are not, it’s secret. Even Richard Perle can’t shut his mouth for more than five minutes.

I can still wear a tinfoil hat, right?

Every time I question either the policies or character of the “reformers” in the former Yugoslavia, there’s guaranteed to be at least one letter accusing me of sympathies for the nationalists, nationalist-socialists, etc.
My disdain for democracy really gets people’s goat. It doesn’t seem to matter if I link to my arguments against it (rather than interrupt my current text for a lengthy explanation). Since I don’t intend to explain the issue over and over again, here it is, in a nutshell:
The argument I’ve adopted is very simple. Democracy is a tyranny in which individual and property rights are subject to decisions of the majority. It cannot be restrained by laws, as laws themselves are subject to revision by vote. Even a virtuous society that respects life, liberty and property rights is not guarantor enough, as it can be subjugated by the force of government (which itself is subject to democratic procedure). Therefore, it is impossible by definition to have both democracy and liberty.
Democracy and peace are also mutually exclusive. There are constant internal conflicts between political groupings in any given democratic country. Democracies can and do start external wars (think of what happened in Kosovo, or Iraq), and once begun, these wars are extremely hard to terminate, because of popular support (“patriotism”) they draw on (think Vietnam). Continue reading “Democracy vs. Freedom”

Anyone catch this report of a U.S. atrocity in Iraq? I’m not sure I buy it, but it’s not from an antiwar/anti-occupation source– it’s from Zeyad. Yes, that Zeyad, he of “kill and rape all the Sunnis” fame. Glenn Reynolds and co. had no problem with that little outburst, but they’re mighty miffed about this one. Atrocities? Us?

From Atrios, courtesy of David Sneek, David Brooks’s response to critics of his most recent garbage:

For what its worth, that neo being short for Jewish was meant as a joke. Nothing more. Most of the people who get labeled as Neocons are Jewish, so I was just sort of playing off that.
As for me accusing anybody who accuses neocons of being anti-Semitic, there are a few issues here. First, I wasn’t saying anything about people who criticize neocons’ ideas. The column wasn’t about that at all. It was about people who imagine there is a shadowy conspiracy behind Bush policy. Second, I explicitly say that only a subset of the people who talk about the shadow conspiracy find Jewishness a handy explanation for everything. I have no idea how large a subset that is, but judging from my e-mail it is out there.
So I was careful not to say that Bush or neocon critics are anti-Semitic. I was careful not to say that all conspiracy theorists are anti-Semitic.
I am still on the learning curve here, and I do realize that mixture of a crack with a serious accusation was incredibly stupid on my part. Please do pass along to readers that I’m aware of how foolish I was to write the column in the way I did. –David Brooks

Yeah, he nailed it, Tim Blair, right between your eyes.

R.J. Stove nominates Tim Blair for most obnoxious. Despite the general irrelevance of his posts, he seems mildly witty. I was actually chuckling a bit as I scrolled down the page–until I hit this post on David Brooks’ latest ruminations:

Brooks has nailed it…

David Brooks may have nailed something in his life, but never with his pen.

The fascinating economist Joseph Schumpeter, whose concept of “creative destruction” has been so abused by Michael Ledeen and various liberventionists, opposed the Second World War. Found this nugget from a Schumpeter biography via LRC blog:

Before the war’s outbreak on 1 September 1939, [Schumpeter] made clear to his friends and colleagues his belief that war should be avoided at all costs. Even if concessions to Hitler were necessary, they would be preferable to an all-out war that could destroy the European economy and, even more important, its culture. Not only did Schumpeter fear the physical destruction of cities and the loss of many lives, he also dreaded the idea that European civilization itself might receive a blow from which it could not recover. Imagining yet another threat, he felt that capitalism could not survive a war. His alarm was not based on a fear of socialism, because he believed it would result from the natural evolution of capitalist society anyway, but he did fear fascism, state-controlled capitalism, and circumscribed personal liberties. He reasoned that a war would so change Europe that fettered and state-dominated capitalism in the hands of totalitarian regimes would become permanent features of European states. And, as he would say later, even the United States might share the same fate.

Cue David Frum and Conrad Black worshipping FDR; the ever-plumping military-industrial mafia; and the spend spend spend/restrict restrict restrict GOP.