Month: May 2007

An astonishing piece by Andrew Sullivan in the Times of London on antiwar Republicans, featuring Ron Paul. Aside from the condescending airs and insulting description of Ron as a “crank” — “even cranks have a point sometimes” — Sullivan gives an enthusiastic account of the rise of the antiwar right, and clearly recognizes that what’s happening in the Paul campaign, and in a wider section of the conservative movement, is the revival of the Old Right, or, as Sullivan puts it, “the fiscally prudent, freedom-loving isolationists of the United States.”

I say this is an astonishing piece because its author has come so far since 9/11 as to make a complete reversal: it’s as if Wendell Wilkie had suddenly morphed into Robert W. McCormick. Here’s Sullivan a few days after 9/11, in the same newspaper:

“This was the myth of the place apart, the city on the hill, the eternal elsewhere. And when you saw the squeamishness of Americans to intervene abroad, their often dangerous reluctance to embroil themselves in foreign entanglements, it was at some level this myth that prompted them. Isolationism, for all its faults, was always the flip-side of American exceptionalism. It was a naivete that was nevertheless founded on a dream that refused to die.

“But in one morning, this dream ended as America was wakened from its long sleep. The elsewhere is now somewhere. The refuge is now insecure. The threat from without is now also within. The new world is now just the world. Isolationism is no longer even a choice. It is lying in the rubble in downtown Manhattan.”

“Isolationism,” averred Sullivan in his previous incarnation as the Avenging Angel of 9/11, “is dead.” What one has to wonder is how, or why, it was suddenly revived in Sullivan’s mind. While I am always glad to see new converts, surely such a complete turnaround requires a bit of an explanation, or, at least, more of an explantion than Sullivan is giving.

Sullivan’s hostility to Pat Buchanan has been pretty consistent over the years, and yet Paul’s differences with Buchanan are pretty much confined to the trade issue: Ron’s a free-trader (not the Bushian fake variety, but the real thing), while Pat is a protectionist. On foreign policy, however, their views are so similar as to be virtually indistinguishable. So why the double-standard — why is Sullivan gushing over Paul, and yet is presumably set in stone in his contempt for Buchanan?

Let’s just hope no one tells Sullivan about Ron Paul’s position on gay marriage.

Ouch!

I’m glad to see what’s-his-name Matthew Yglesias is back in form after the transition to his new home on The Atlantic‘s blog — and remind me never to get on his bad side.

Clearly, there are too many candidates to give all of the different points of view a fair hearing. What to do? I suggest two podiums. Behind podium one, Ron Paul; behind podium two, the other nine, in an orderly, grade-school water-fountain line. After each question from the moderator, Ron Paul answers. In rebuttal, the other nine take turns howling “America, F*ck Yeah!“

From the latest issue of The American Conservative, a review by Peter Hitchens (the Good Hitchens) of John O’Sullivan’s The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World:

“I might add that Poland, though freed from the iron manacles of Moscow, is now instead wrapped up in the sticky marshmallow bonds of the European Union, a despotic, secretive, and lawless empire with the strong potential to get much worse than it already is.”

The death of communism was brought about by what seems to O’Sullivan to have been the very hand of Providence, a benevolent God who deemed that Reagan, Thatcher, and Wojtyla should all have attained their offices simultaneously. O’Sullivan’s thesis is that these three coalesced in a divine concatenation of forces, as it were, that brought down the godless Soviets. As “one of the last Protestants still standing in Britain,” Hitchens is inclined to believe in this miraculous manifestation of divine will, and yet:

“I cannot quite share John O’Sullivan’s awe at these things, even though I once did, and even though I should like to. As I read, and enjoyed, his fond recollections of Margaret Thatcher’s resolve and Ronald Reagan’s humorous squashing of liberal idiocy, I kept thinking, ‘Yes, so it was, but why in that case have we ended up as we are?'”

As more conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic begin to ask that question, the base of the War Party will start to crack.

I see this isn’t online, which is often the case with TAC‘s best stuff: which means that you’ve really got to subscribe to what is, to my mind, the most interesting magazine of political opinion in America.

Michael Scheuer, the former head analyst at the CIA’s bin Laden unit, has weighed in on the controversy surrounding the Republican Presidential debate held Tuesday May 15, when Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) stated that American foreign policy was a “contributing factor” in the 9/11 attacks.

“They attack us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years.” Paul said. He was then denounced by former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani who said it was “absurd” and that he’d “never” heard such a thing before demanding a retraction.

In an interview with Antiwar.com’s Antiwar Radio on May 18, Scheuer, who was the head analyst at the CIA’s bin Laden unit, Alec Station, and authored the books Through Our Enemies Eyes and Imperial Hubris, said “I thought Mr. Paul captured it the other night exactly correctly. This war is dangerous to America because it’s based, not on gender equality, as Mr. Giuliani suggested, or any other kind of freedom, but simply because of what we do in the Islamic World – because ‘we’re over there,’ basically, as Mr. Paul said in the debate.”

Scheuer also agreed with Dr. Paul’s statement in the debate that the war in Iraq was a diversion from capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and that bin Laden was “delighted” that the U.S. is occupying Iraq as it has become a training ground and recruiting tool for new jihadists joining the movement.

MP3 here.

Michael Scheuer is a 22-year veteran of the CIA and the author ofThrough Our Enemies Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America and Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror.

From the May 12-18 Economist:

“Soldiers in Iraq: Contaminated“:

Of the 1,767 troops questioned by the Pentagon’s mental-health advisory team last September… less than half (47% of soldiers and 38% of marines) felt that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect, as required by the Geneva Conventions. …

More worrying, only around half said they would be willing to report a member of their unit for killing or injuring an innocent non-combatant….

The more often and the longer that soldiers were deployed in Iraq, the more likely they were to suffer mental-health problems and to mistreat civilians.

—

“Afghanistan: Hearts, minds and death“:

THE American army this week delivered an apology, and blood money, too, to the families of 19 Afghan civilians killed and 50 wounded by a special forces unit of American marines near Jalalabad on March 4th. …

In the wake of the … shootings, Afghan journalists were quickly on the scene. Several were threatened or had their film erased by American soldiers. One reporter was told: “Delete the photos or I delete you.”

The Economist encouraged the invasion of Iraq.

I read the Economist so you don’t have to.