Month: February 2008

Reuters reports:

“Pakistan rejected on Saturday a U.S. official’s assertion that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar are operating from Pakistani territory.“A senior U.S. administration official told reporters in Washington Bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri and others were operating out of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan.

“Mullah Omar and other Taliban leaders were directing insurgency operations in Afghanistan from the Pakistani city of Quetta, said the U.S. official who declined to be identified.”

If the US has information as to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, why are they going to the media with it — unless it’s to ready the American public for a strike at Pakistan?

Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Sadiqsaid had the only possible response:

“If there is any actionable intelligence it should be shared with the government of Pakistan so that they can be neutralized. You don’t talk to the media if you have information like this.”

No, you don’t. But if you don’t really have such information, and merely want to appear as if you do in order to pursue your own warmongering agenda –  well, then, you talk to the media anonymously ….

I’ve been busy over at Taki’s Top Drawer, blogging up a storm on libertarianism, orthodox and otherwise; the politics of promiscuity, or — who’s the Paris Hilton of the Beltway pundits?; why mockery is the best weapon against the McCainiac; and the economics of doom.

Oh, and don’t miss the first installment of a series on the Ron Paul Revolution: John Derbyshire’s “Only A Revolution Will Do.”

An important clarification of my piece on “The Imperial Class” posted this morning: the rank-and-file military are not automatically inducted into the ranks of the imperial class, and, indeed, their interests are diametrically opposed to the agenda of the War Party  and the military-industrial-congressional complex. That’s why we have seen some of the most persistent, and effective opposition to this administration’s Middle East project coming from the top ranks of the military, from generals who want to protect their soldiers — and the military machine they have built up into a peerless fighting force — from wanton destruction and useless sacrifice on the altar of the neocons’ vanity.

US soldiers are doing a job: protecting the country. The interventionists want to make their job 100 times harder — not only by invading every “enemy,” both real and imagined, in sight, but also by making the US itself more vulnerable by creating armies of anti-Americans eager to do us harm.

No wonder Ron Paul, the sole antiwar Republican presidential aspirant, received the largest amount of contributions from US military personnel, more than all the others combined.

As I noted in my last post, the withdrawal of both Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson would spur neo-conservatives and their closest aggressive nationalist friends, like John Bolton, to rally behind John McCain as their preferred candidate. Of course, now that Romney himself has withdrawn, there hasn’t really much of an alternative, notwithstanding Mike Huckabee’s ardent Christian Zionism. In any event, Jennifer Rubin, a political correspondent at Commentary’s Contentions blog (which has become much more active, if predictable, under John Podhoretz’s editorship), has a good rundown with useful links of the latest endorsements and commentary:

“On Friday at CPAC, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton sung McCain’s praises and then heartily endorsed him on Saturday. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Fred Thompson got on the McCain bandwagon too. The Wall Street Journal’s editors disparaged the notion that social conservatives should sit home or vote for Hillary Clinton ( “What they can’t do with any credibility is claim that helping to elect a liberal President will further the causes that these conservatives claim to believe most deeply in”) while President Reagan’s National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane doesn’t think much of the talk show critics’ suggestion that we hand management of the war over to one of the Democrats. Newt Gingrich recognizes the obvious ( “He’s had a lifetime voting record that’s dramatically more conservative than Clinton and Obama”) and Larry Kudlow voices support as well.

Bill Kristol thinks the anti-McCain sentiment among conservatives is exaggerated, and a simple account from the campaign trail reveals a obvious truth: lots of conservatives have supported McCain all along.”

Of course, McCain’s main foreign-policy spokesman (and NRA lobbyist who, I had a heard a few years ago, got in trouble with the Capitol Police for carrying some kind of firearm where he shouldn’t have), Randy Scheunemann, tends more to the Bolton camp. A former member of the board of directors of the Kristol’s Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and a main founder of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), Scheunemann worked for McCain in 2000. (When at one point just before the Iraq war, I clicked on the CLI website and got the website of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress [INC] instead, it was Scheunemann who told me that the two organizations used the same web server, thus tending to confirm the notion that the CLI — whose honorary co-chairs were John McCain and Joe Lieberman — was a Chalabi front organization.) And, as pointed out in a previous post and in a Friday article by McClatchy’s excellent Warren Strobel, former CIA director James Woolsey has signed on to the campaign as an adviser, too. Scheunemann set up the CLI with Bruce Jackson, a long-time friend and protege of Richard Perle’s.

Does this mean John McCain is a neo-con or would necessarily pursue neo-conservative/aggressive nationalist positions if he became president? No. Unlike Bush, he has his own strong views on U.S. foreign policy, not to mention far more foreign-policy experience — and hence confidence — in those views. He also has advisers who tend to the realist category. But it does mean that, like Bush, there would almost certainly be a major power struggle between the two tendencies if he got to the White House. The best relatively recent article on McCain’s foreign-policy evolution, however, suggests that the hawks would definitely enjoy the upper hand. Read John Judis’ October 2006 article in The New Republic entitled “Neo-McCain.”

Visit Lobelog.com for the latest news analysis and commentary from Inter Press News Service’s Washington bureau chief Jim Lobe.

Let’s see: Last night, I read this — an announcement that Ron Paul has, for all intents and purposes, dropped out of the GOP presidential race — and today, I read this — a report from Washington state that, with 78 percent of the vote in, Ron is polling 21 percent in the Republican state caucus.

At last, the Paul campaign has discovered the key to electoral success — play hard to get.

UPDATED: The KNDO report was for eastern Washington state only.