News and Views
Finally, the premier antiwar conservative magazine has a blog!
Among many others are posts by Philip Giraldi, Daniel McCarthy, James Antele, Leon Hadar, Scott McConnell, James Pinkerton, Tim Carney, Kelly Vlahos, Tom Woods, Steve Sailer, Kara Hopkins, and our own Justin Raimondo.
For months, now, Reason magazine has been conducting a smear campaign against Ron Paul, and his supporters, and editor Matt Welch — eager to lose yet more subscribers — has recently unleashed a broader attack, not only on Paul, but on the libertarian heritage upheld by we here at Antiwar.com: the legacy of Murray N. Rothbard, who the ignorant and decidedly un-libertarian Welch accuses of being part of a “racist” cabal. A more disgusting smear has never been penned. Go here and behold how I tear this loser to shreds ….
Thanks to a commenter over at Reason, here’s a vintage quote from Welch:
“Welcome to War. Sounds like a strange and unpleasant thing to say, but these are strange and unpleasant times, requiring unusual responses. Like many of you, I am reading and hearing and watching too much about the wicked horror of Sept. 11, and finding it a challenge to keep track of how it is already changing our lives. The biggest question facing Americans and other decent people is how the civilized world and its strongest country should respond to this mass murder. I, for one, advocate a Global War to abolish terrorism. ”
Â
This is Ron Paul’s statement before the US House of Representatives on House Resolution 997, “expressing the strong support of the House of Representatives for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to enter into a Membership Action Plan with Georgia and Ukraine.”
Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this resolution calling for the further expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia. NATO is an organization whose purpose ended with the end of its Warsaw Pact adversary. When NATO struggled to define its future after the Cold War, it settled on attacking a sovereign state, Yugoslavia, which had neither invaded nor threatened any NATO member state.
This current round of NATO expansion is a political reward to governments in Georgia and Ukraine that came to power as a result of US-supported revolutions, the so-called Orange Revolution and Rose Revolution. The governments that arose from these street protests were eager to please their US sponsor and the US, in turn, turned a blind eye to the numerous political and human rights abuses that took place under the new regimes. Thus the US policy of “exporting democracy†has only succeeding in exporting more misery to the countries it has targeted.
NATO expansion only benefits the US military industrial complex, which stands to profit from expanded arms sales to new NATO members. The “modernization†of former Soviet militaries in Ukraine and Georgia will mean tens of millions in sales to US and European military contractors. The US taxpayer will be left holding the bill, as the US government will subsidize most of the transactions. Providing US military guarantees to Ukraine and Georgia can only further strain our military. This NATO expansion may well involve the US military in conflicts as unrelated to our national interest as the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia. The idea that American troops might be forced to fight and die to prevent a small section of Georgia from seceding is absurd and disturbing.
Mr. Speaker, NATO should be disbanded, not expanded.
Ron Paul gave this speech before the US House of Representatives as they voted on House Con Res 154 “expressing concern” over Russian involvement in Alexander Litvinenko’s murder.
Mr. Speaker: I rise in strong opposition to this ill-conceived resolution. The US House of Representatives has no business speculating on guilt or innocence in a crime that may have been committed thousands of miles outside US territory. It is arrogant, to say the least, that we presume to pass judgment on crimes committed overseas about which we have seen no evidence.
The resolution purports to express concern over the apparent murder in London of a shadowy former Russian intelligence agent, Alexander Litvinenko, but let us not kid ourselves. The real purpose is to attack the Russian government by suggesting that Russia is involved in the murder. There is little evidence of this beyond the feverish accusations of interested parties. In fact, we may ultimately discover that Litvinenko’s death by radiation poisoning was the result of his involvement in an international nuclear smuggling operation, as some investigative reporters have claimed. The point is that we do not know. The House of Representatives has no business inserting itself in disputes about which we lack information and jurisdiction.
At a time when we should be seeking good relations and expanded trade with Russia, what is the benefit in passing such provocative resolutions? There is none.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to enter into the Congressional Record a very thought-provoking article by Edward Jay Epstein published recently in the New York Sun, which convincingly calls into question many of the assumptions and accusations made in this legislation. I would encourage my colleagues to read this article and carefully consider the wisdom of what we are doing.
Matt Yglesias captures the spirit of John McCain as the essence of militarism:
“For McCain, a certain culture of honor, militarism, and nationalism are their own reward. The military is to be celebrated and supported not for what it does but for what it is. Thus, a given military venture doesn’t need to have a real purpose or be ‘worth it’ in any particular sense. It is what it is, and what we need to do is keep on doing it for as long as ‘it’ takes and it doesn’t matter if ‘it’ is pointless or futile or even if ‘it’ isn’t anything in particular at all. The war is its own rationale.”
War is the religion of the post-Bush blood-and-soil GOP, and McCain is auditioning for the role of high priest.
He’s scarier even than Giuliani, whose vision of unremitting aggression seems pretty much limited to the Middle East, as per the Israeli-centric perspective of his foreign policy advisors. McCain’s belligerence is more all-inclusive: I remember he once went to Georgia, the former Soviet republic, and declared that South Ossetia — which has risen up in rebellion against the tyrannical Georgian regime — is “sovereign Georgian soil.” No part of the world is exempt from the McCaniac purview.
This country is truly blessed with brilliant law professors, and Glenn Reynolds may not even be the brightest. Here’s David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy:
Ron Paul is a tempting protest vote, and I did support him in 1988 when he ran as a Libertarian, but he strikes me as running less of a “libertarian” campaign than a pacifist, populist campaign that does have some appeal to young and idealistic libertarians, but has too much appeal to the old, paranoid, and racist pseudo-conservatives. There seems to be a right-wing version of the Popular Front mentality among many Paul supporters: just like it was okay for Social Democrats to ally with Stalinists for “Progressive” ends in the old days, it’s okay to ally with 9/11 and various other conspiracy theorists, southern secessionists, Nazis and fascists, anti-Semites and racists, against the common enemy of the modern “welfare-warfare” state. Count me out!
I know, right? I’ve always felt that the worst thing about Nazis was their opposition to war and statism.
UPDATE: Bernstein says that we’re not Nazis “whew, that’s a relief!“ but we’re “not going to be winning any awards from the ADL or NAACP any time soon, either.” I don’t get the NAACP reference – guess Bernstein was too embarrassed to just leave it at the ADL. By the way, how many ADL trophies has the Volokh Conspiracy received, since that’s apparently the measure of one’s non-anti-Semitism?
