Matt Barganier - Antiwar.com Blog

Norwegian Wood

Before Norwegian authorities arrested a sole, Norwegian suspect in today’s murders, America’s professional bullshitters stroked themselves into quite the, er, terrection, if you will. A sampling:

Jennifer Rubin:

This is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists. …

Some irresponsible lawmakers on both sides of the aisle — I will point the finger at Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee and yet backed the Gang of Six scheme to cut $800 billion from defense — would have us believe that enormous defense cuts would not affect our national security.

Will Saletan:

Oslo Peace Process. Nobel Peace Prize. Today’s attacks show how little terrorists respect countries that pursue peace.

This was, of course, seconded by Saletan’s colleague Dave Weigel.

The Atlantic ~~ran with the unsubstantiated Muslim-terrorist angle and~~ [edit: this article was from July 13, 2010; see Update 2 below] scoffed at any suggestion that the Norwegian government’s ongoing involvement in two wars in Muslim countries might have anything to do with an attack by Muslims:

It may be pointless to search for a single grievance to explain the recent plot. Most likely, a combination of factors placed Norway on the jihadists’ radar. In al-Qaeda’s binary worldview, Norway is part of the “Jewish-Crusader alliance.” Not a platinum member, perhaps, but a member nonetheless. If you’re not with al-Qaeda, you’re with the United States.

(Perplexed hat tip to Jesse Walker, whose reading recommendations will be taken less seriously in the future.)

There are plenty of other examples of this war-on-terror-justifying gun-jumping; feel free to post the most egregious in comments. And who knows? Maybe blondie really will turn out to be a Muslim, as The Daily Mail hopefully suggested*. But even if that’s so, as Glenn Greenwald put it:

[T]hese kinds of civilian-targeting attacks are, as I said, inherently unjustifiable (though if NATO declares the leader of Libya a “legitimate military target” and air bombs his residence, what’s the argument as to why the office of the Prime Minister whose country is at war with Libya is not a legitimate target?). The point is that it’s completely unsurprising that a nation at war — whether Norway or the U.S. — is going to be targeted with violent attacks. That’s what “being at war” means, and it’s usually what it provokes. And the way this fact is suppressed (“a coordinated assault on the ordinarily peaceful Scandinavian nation” = the post-9/11 why do they hate us?) highlights how we view violence as something only those Others commit, but not we.

*UPDATE: The Daily Mail, with characteristic integrity, has revised the linked story without notice to remove the original suggestion that the suspect might be — cross your fingers! — Muslim.

UPDATE 2: In haste, I jumped the gun on dissing The Atlantic. I missed the date and read it as background on today’s attacks.

Cold War Americans Not as Fainthearted as You Might Think

At Reason, Greg Beato sketches the history of the fallout
shelter in Cold War America. Apparently, most people didn’t get too carried away
with doomsday preparations:

“Despite what a 1961 issue of Good Housekeeping derided as ‘massive propaganda to induce Americans to burrow underground like worms,’ officials were never able to secure the level of funding a widespread shelter-building program would require. The government’s more general efforts to persuade citizens to build shelters on their own dime were only slightly more successful. After a decade of federal proselytizing, Newsweek noted in July 1961, American families had built around 2,000 shelters. In contrast, they’d built around 300,000 swimming pools during that time. (A New York Times article, also from July 1961, put the estimated total of family bomb shelters in the U.S. at 60,000.)”

Of course, all they had to worry about was the Soviet Union, not guys who put bombs in their underwear. Shelter chic is making a bit of a comeback today, so if you think a pool is a waste of a hole in the ground, then I have an investment opportunity for you:

You Won’t Have Ahmed Wali Karzai to Kick Around Anymore

Ahmed Wali Karzai was assassinated this morning. Two weeks ago, Matthieu Aikins reported on the push to make Hamid Karzai’s half-brother a provincial governor:

Last Wednesday, nearly 200 tribal elders and other notables from Kandahar Province convened in the Roshan Plaza in downtown Kabul. The group was a who’s who of pro-government figures, among them Agha Lalai Dastegiri, Fazluddin Agha, and Bacha Sherzai, brother of former governor Gul Agha. They had gathered to petition President Hamid Karzai to appoint his brother Ahmed Wali Karzai as the next governor of the province. (The current leader, Afghan-Canadian Tooryalai Wesa, is widely reputed to be looking for a way out of his job.) The meeting was part of a week-long junket, and according to several people who attended, the cost, which would have been as high as several hundred thousand dollars, was paid by Ahmed Wali Karzai himself. …

The campaign to make Ahmed Wali governor of southern Afghanistan’s most important province has become a topic of earnest discussion in Kabul policy circles since that meeting. Yet from what I’ve heard, the reaction has been relatively muted among diplomats and senior military officers, aside from some apprehension over how such an appointment might play in the press. The sentiment seems to be that since Ahmed Wali is already the de facto governor, actually giving him the job might make him more accountable.

Such a development would bring to an inauspicious close the long-running debate about what to do with a problem like Ahmed Wali. In the past three years, the president’s brother has been accused (mostly by American sources cited in the New York Times) of being involved in the heroin trade and of being paid by the CIA to run illegal militias. He also has close ties to Akhtar Mohammad and Ruhollah, the muscle behind the notorious convoy operations of Watan Risk Management, a now-blacklisted entity whose problematic links with insurgents were detailed in the congressional Host Nations Trucking Report.

So what to do with Ahmed Wali? Pressure Hamid to move him out of Kandahar? Put him on the JPEL “kill/capture” list? Work with him, in the hope that he’ll mend his ways? Or marginalize him by building “capacity” around the office of the current governor, Tooryalai Wesa?

Read the rest.

Farewell, Alan Bock

Though my interaction with Alan Bock was fairly limited and strictly virtual—emailing occasional editorial queries or kudos after particularly strong pieces—I was a longtime admirer of his. I knew Mr. Bock’s work before I had ever heard of Antiwar.com, as I had a (Koch-subsidized!!!) subscription to Liberty back in the late ’90s. My views on foreign policy, drug laws, and other matters were undoubtedly shaped by his understated yet forceful commentaries for that magazine and, later, this Web site. And though it must be difficult for even optimists to keep their cool, much less their high spirits, while chronicling injustice and idiocy every day, he seemed to pull it off. Treat yourself to a stroll through his archives, then try finding another author who was so consistently and prolifically correct about the American empire.

One surprising thing I’ve learned from various tributes is that our late columnist wrote a book on Hank Williams, a fact that warms the heart of this Alabamian. Here’s to you, Mr. Bock:

Posthumous Moore Award Winner: Mark Twain

“He [Theodore Roosevelt] knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms—and would not have been a brilliant feat of arms even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets. He knew perfectly well that our uniformed assassins had not upheld the honor of the American flag, but had done as they have been doing continuously for eight years in the Philippines—that is to say, they had dishonored it.”
– Mark Twain, autobiographical dictation of March 12, 1906

This weekend’s Spotlight over on the home page has the disadvantage of being a little elderly—two months and 105 years old, give or take a day. But do read Mark Twain’s two–part commentary on a massacre of Moro men, women, and children by U.S. troops in the Philippines. If nothing else, it will give you a soothing sense of continuity. For instance, despite the diversity of America’s official enemies through the years, they’re all alike in certain ways. Thus, we read in Twain’s account how the general who oversaw a refugee camp’s annihilation assured a reporter that there was “no wanton destruction of women and children in the fight, though many of them were killed by force of necessity because the Moros used them as shields in the hand-to-hand fighting.” Those cowardly fill-in-the-blanks and their human shields never change, do they?

Nor do our Serious Journalists. Twain quotes a New York Tribune editorial on the killings: “It was not a question of submission to American rule but a question of regard for any rule at all and for the peace of the Moro people. [¶] The manner of doing the work was undoubtedly severe. There are cases in which severity is humanity.” Not to be outdone, The New York Times editorial page did its best impression of, well, The New York Times editorial page: “Lamentable as it is to hear of the enforced slaughter of 600 inhabitants of the islands where we established peace some five years ago, there is yet consolation in the knowledge that these last rebels against our undoubtedly beneficent rule are men who, if nothing except extermination can reduce them to order, can be exterminated with exceptional facility.” America was once again reminded that it could do whatever it set its mind to.

But Mark Twain, bad sport that he was, just had to get all shrill: “The enemy numbered six hundred—including women and children—and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.”

Bark that last sentence with conviction, and you just might get your mug on Mt. Rushmore.

For more on the massacre of the Moros, read “What Happened at Bud Dajo” by Andrew Bacevich. If you don’t understand the title of this post, give Andrew Sullivan some much-needed traffic. For more divisive, bitter, and intemperate rhetoric from Mark Twain, read “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” [.pdf].

Why Are People Grudgeful?

Timothy P. Carney weighs in on the “Cato purge”:

[Brink] Lindsey will be portrayed as a martyr, excommunicated for his heresies from the Right’s dogma. In this role, he joins neoconservative writer David Frum, who was driven from the American Enterprise Institute after praising Obamacare.

Lindsey and Frum followed parallel paths. In 2002 and 2003, Lindsey – contra most libertarians – prominently beat the drums for invading Iraq. Meanwhile, Frum played the conservatives’ Robespierre, trying to purge from the Right those who opposed the invasion, whom he slurred as “unpatriotic conservatives.”

Lindsey, when he admitted in 2006 that invading Iraq was a mistake, still billed himself as “extremely controversial” and open-minded in the face of dogma. Frum, today, basks in the Left’s praise as an independent thinker. But Lindsey and Frum, in backing Bush’s invasion then and supporting Obama now, were the opposite of dissidents: They consistently supported those in power who were fighting for more power.

This pattern doesn’t make Lindsey or Frum sycophants, but it undermines their claim to be dissidents.

Amen.

The reason I keep banging on about Iraq War supporters â€“ including the “born-again doves” â€“ is simple: The road out of militarism and empire runs through the ruins of the Washington establishment that got us here.

First, there must be some penalty for supporting wars of aggression, even in a non-governmental role. I don’t mean a legal penalty, obviously, but shaming, shunning, boycotting, and the like. But everywhere you look, the very people who sold the Iraq War have not only not paid for their bloodthirsty idiocy, they’ve often been promoted. Second, as long as even “reformed” warmongers hold positions of influence, there’s always the danger of relapse. Clearly, the personality defects that contribute to the endorsement of monstrosities don’t go away quickly, if ever. For example, here’s one ex-Bushbot-turned-Obamaton sticking it to the White House’s critics:

Personally, Iâ€™m not satisfied with the job they [Obama & co.] are doing (unemployment is horrible, theyâ€™ve spent too much time negotiating with Republicans, the drone wars, the civil liberties issues, Lloyd Blankfein is still a free man, etc.), and think there have been some real failings and some real let-downs. But I will belly crawl over broken glass while someone pours lemon juice and rubbing alcohol on me to vote for the Democrats in November.

Note how drone wars and civil liberties fall behind “negotiating with Republicans” on this list of sins. To paraphrase Mick Jagger, could you use a lemon-squeezer, dude? I volunteer.

I could go on â€“ there are so many targets â€“ but instead, I’ll leave you with a thought experiment. Imagine that the invasion of Iraq had succeeded on the war supporters’ own terms, and the U.S. had crushed all armed resistance within a few months and set up some plausibly “pro-American” Potemkin democracy that didn’t need a foreign army to defend it from the citizenry (this requires a lot of imagination, I know). Let’s assume that the U.S. military had accomplished this by really taking the gloves off, as many war supporters urged in the days when the occupation began to implode. Thus, in our counterfactual, the Iraqi civilian casualty count is roughly the same as the actual count today, anti-American sentiment is inflamed throughout the Muslim world, and Iran is the unquestioned dominant regional power, all for a preventive war against a fabricated threat. Do you think that our born-again doves â€“ much less the dead-enders who still think the war was a good idea â€“ would have had any moral or even practical second thoughts? Or do you think they’d be doing a sack dance in the peaceniks’ faces and demanding the destruction of the next country on their list?

UPDATE: I think this sort of amends-making is a wonderful idea, but I suggest it for people who have abetted acts of mass destruction. How many prosthetic limbs could the Brinkster buy with his disposable income? Shoot, Andrew Sullivan could probably fund half a dozen orphanages across Iraq if he cut his personal expenditures back to bare subsistence levels. Let’s make this happen!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpCghKWnzC0[/youtube]