8 - 2005 - Antiwar.com Blog

Declare Victory and Bring Them Home

Politics1.com is a very useful site for political information. The politics1.com site includes pages for each state, with lists of announced and potential candidates, links to party websites and news websites for each state. Politics1.com also carries long, interesting profiles on the various political parties — not just the two major parties, but all the little parties on the right, on the left and on various tangents.

The editor of Politics1.com carries information on candidates and parties without bias , but occasionally lets his own views be known. He was enthusiastic for Howard Dean’s campaign last year, because of shared opposition to the Iraq War. Apparently he has taken a position that while the war was wrong, we are now responsible for Iraq and cannot pull out until it is safe and stable.

Today (August 5, 2005) he carried an editorial worth reading headlined:

SUPPORT OUR TROOPS … BY BRINGING THEM HOME
“Until this week, I was in the ‘You break it, you bought it’ camp…” (a position shared by Howard Dean and other mainstream “opponents” of the war.)

“We were misled into the war and never should have crossed the line that turned us into one of the bully nations that unilaterally starts so-called “pre-emptive” wars. “(This is a view that now more than half of Americans agree with, according to recent polls.)

“There is a very thin line between liberator and occupier — a line that usually gets get crossed very soon after the “victory” is declared…the distinction today between Iraqi insurgent and Iraqi citizen seems almost non-existent…”

“I fear that if we stay in Iraq another year (or another ten years), the internal situation in Iraq will remain largely unchanged — but the horrific body count will be so much higher. They obviously don’t want us there…”

His solution: “…let’s declare victory today (“The world is rid of Saddam Hussein…”), bring our soldiers home, and give them some great parades and our thanks for their sacrifice…No more American mothers should have to bury sons who died “defending” a foreign nation that doesn’t want us there. Bring ’em home. Every single American soldier. Starting today.

Read the whole thing here: (scroll down to the 7th post)

Gene Berkman

The Plame/AIPAC-gate Connection

Swopa cites Mark Kleimen on the AIPAC spy scandal — who points out that Larry Franklin and his cohorts are “simply charged with giving classified information to those without security clearances, in pursuit of a political agenda” — and makes the Plame-AIPAC-gate connection:

“Looking ahead to the future of Plamemania for a moment, let’s imagine the closest adviser to the President of the United States. And the chief of staff to the Vice President of the United States. Indicted for violations of the Espionage Act.

“I wonder how well they’ll be able to spin that.”

There’s another important factor that links the Plame-Rove-Libby imbroglion with the AIPAC spy scandal, underscored by the news that prosecutor Patrick J. “Bulldog” Fitzgerald is widening the investigation:

“Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has asked not only about how CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name was leaked but also how the administration went about shifting responsibility from the White House to the CIA for having included 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address about Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium from Africa, an assertion that was later disputed.”

Both Fitzgerald and Paul McNulty, the prosecutor in the AIPAC spy case, are targeting the same group of committed neoconservative ideologues. The neocons tried to discredit Ambassador Joe Wilson and “outed” CIA agent Valerie Plame because Wilson was an obstacle on the road to war with Iraq. And now they are trying replicate the same scenario in support a military strike at Iran — the issue at the root of the AIPAC spy scandal. In both instances, their ruthlessness and lawlessness was their ultimate undoing.

Plame-gate + AIPAC-gate = Neocon-gate.

Sit back, and enjoy …

Weekend Interviews

Saturday on the Weekend Interview Show, Jacob Hornberger from the Future of Freedom Foundation will explain the scandal surrounding the military tribunals, Greg Mitchell from Editor and Publisher will discuss the unnessessary nuking of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Japan 60 years ago and the supression of the reality of the effects, and I’ll try once more to speak with Mother Jones‘ David Enders from Iraq about the situation in Fallujah.

Update: Show’s over, archives here

Midnight Soccer

Put aside, for a moment, all the moral outrage and emotional rancor, and gaze upon the cold, dispassionate truth: whatever else interventionist war might be, there is no denying that it’s yet another gigantic government project, the kind libertarians and conservatives once instinctively ridiculed. Oh, how times change.

Jim Henley finds this passage in the CS Monitor:

Henley dispatches Vaught’s assumptions with a shot of Libertarianism 101 and a spoonful of the scorn that used to greet any mention of the phrase “midnight basketball.” I suggest that every time you hear about some civil-society miracle the U.S. government has authored in Iraq, whether a soccer field or a fresh coat of paint on a school, imagine that midnight basketball had been effected in this country at the cost of 25,000-100,000 dead and hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes and destroyed property.

Let’s Press the Press

Alright folks. Sibel Edmonds needs your help. She has filed an appeal to the Supreme Court on the heels of the explosive new Vanity Fair article which cites government investigators saying that the covering up of House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s (among others’) corruption is the reason for the Justice Department’s violation of her rights, gagging her with the state secrets privilege – a privilege that does not even exist in any American statute. Now it is certain: the only national security Sibel threatens with her story is the job security of corrupt politicians.

Don’t let this story die! Call, write, fax, email, cajole and complain until Edmonds gets some real coverage in the press.

Fox CNN ABC NBC CBS

The New York Times The Washington Post The Dallas Morning News The Chicago Tribune The Miami Herald

How shameful is it, that after all this time, it took a Brit to come to America, land of the first amendment, to write this story for a fashion magazine?

Very shameful.

Christopher Deliso’s interview of Edmonds here.

My interview of her here.

Edmonds’ homepage is here, her petition is here, and her Antiwar.com archives are here.

Is the United States a Terrorist State?

From The U.S. Government Guide to Surviving Terrorism, we read that the U.S. Department of Defense defines terrorism as “the calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.”

Obviously, yes, since the U.S. continues to use unlawful violence to forcibly impose the ideology of democracy on Iraq.