Antiwar.com Blog

Ezra Klein points to this bizarre grilling of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by CBS’ Scott Pelley:

PELLEY: What trait do you admire in President Bush?

AHMADINEJAD: Again, I have a very frank tone. I think that President Bush needs to correct his ways.

PELLEY: What do you admire about him?

AHMADINEJAD: He should respect the American people.

PELLEY: Is there anything? Any trait?

AHMADINEJAD: As an American citizen, tell me what trait do you admire?

PELLEY: Well, Mr. Bush is, without question, a very religious man, for example, as you are. I wonder if there’s anything that you’ve seen in President Bush that you admire.

AHMADINEJAD: Well, is Mr. Bush a religious man?

PELLEY: Very much so. As you are.

AHMADINEJAD: What religion, please tell me, tells you as a follower of that religion to occupy another country and kill its people? Please tell me. Does Christianity tell its followers to do that? Judaism, for that matter? Islam, for that matter? What prophet tells you to send 160,000 troops to another country, kill men, women, and children? You just can’t wear your religion on your sleeve or just go to church. You should be truthfully religious. Religion tells us all that you should respect the property, the life of different people. Respect human rights. Love your fellow man. And once you hear that a person has been killed, you should be saddened. You shouldn’t sit in a room, a dark room, and hatch plots. And because of your plots, many thousands of people are killed. Having said that, we respect the American people. And because of our respect for the American people, we respectfully talk with President Bush. We have a respectful tone. But having said that, I don’t think that that is a good definition of religion. Religion is love for your fellow man, brotherhood, telling the truth.

PELLEY: I take it you can’t think of anything you like about President Bush.

AHMADINEJAD: Well, I’m not familiar with the gentleman’s private life. Maybe in his private life he is very kind or a determined man. I’m not aware of that. I base my judgment on what I see in his public life. Having said that, I think that President Bush can behave much better. There were golden opportunities for President Bush. He should have used them better.

First, as Klein wonders, what most impresses Scott Pelley about Bush is that he’s “very religious”? Really? Is Pelley very religious himself, or did he not anticipate having his stupid query turned back on him, which forced him to spit out the first thing he could think of?

Second, say what you like about the messenger, but what in Ahmadinejad’s message is the least bit unreasonable? George W. Bush once told an interviewer that his favorite philosopher was Jesus Christ. (Hey, ask a stupid question…) Has Scott Pelley or any other American journalist demanded to know, in light of the events of the last five years, what exactly Bush admires about Jesus’ teachings? Because, as Ahmadinejad indicates, the answer is far from apparent.

And, just as an afterthought, please note that Ahmadinejad implies an ethical unity among Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Now perhaps he’s speaking with a forked tongue, but if he were really out to antagonize the West and score points among radical Muslims, what better time and place to rail against Jews and Crusaders? Hell, America’s faux-butch warbloggers lambasted Bush for calling Islam a “religion of peace” back in the day – imagine what the al-Qaeda types must be saying about Ahmadinejad now.

Our dingbat president blathered on painfully at the UN this morning about several things that have nothing to do with the United States. He wants to tighten Myanmar sanctions — because I guess in the Bizarro World he’s been sucked into, sanctions always work. He blathered on about “tyranny and violence,” “persecution,” “poverty,” — you know, all the things the government he runs has worked to promote the last six years and change. From a foreign policy point of view, it’s old news that we should just ignore anything he has to say unless it’s about the next country he plans to invade and destroy. But he’s always good for laughs on the economics front:

Bush also said he would propose a change in the way the United States offers food aid to Africa. Under Bush’s proposal. the U.S. would purchase crops directly from African farmers, rather than ship food directly from the U.S. That action would help African farmers become more self-sufficient, he said.

“I urge the United States Congress to support this initiative,” Bush said.

George, what happens when US food aid slows or shifts or ends after these farmers you claim to be making self-sufficient have become bloated agricultural enterprises built to sell to the big-spendingest corporation on the face of the earth? How will all their production capacity be used — will its “customers” suddenly have enough money to buy their own food, especially at the prices at which you will have been buying it?

Dumb. Chances are, unfortunately, that Congress is even dumber.

Picture this: you’re an Iraqi civilian, perhaps one of the ever growing number of internally displaced persons, roaming the streets of Baghdad. You come upon a piece of seemingly abandoned US military equipment. Desperate for money, you approach the item, intending to sell it to one of the many vendors dealing in lost, abandoned, and stolen military surplus.

Bang

You just fell victim to the newly uncovered US military practice of “baiting”, and are now officially part of the “insurgents killed” count that is being touted as proof of how swimmingly the surge is going.

This practice has apparently been going on for quite some time, and while we may never know for sure how many innocent lives were taken in the name of inflating the military’s kill count to sell the war to the American public, we do know that the practice was so widespread and acceptable that, according to court documents, soldiers were planting “baits” on the bodies of people they’d killed illegally and, like magic, the problem would just go away.

This gruesome new trend of padding body counts with actual bodies almost makes one long for the days when they were just flat out lying to us about their numbers.

Georgie Anne Geyer writes today about Jon Basil Utley‘s journey to find the fate of his father who disappeared into the Soviet gulag.

Jon’s mother, Freda Utley, was a prominent American Communist in the 1920s. She fell in love with a brilliant Russian Jewish economist, the handsome, dark-haired Arcadi Berdichevsky, and moved to Russia with him. In 1936, their lives together came to an end with the Soviets’ infamous “knock on the door” at 2 a.m.

Freda, unable to help him, soon used her and Jon’s British passports to return to England, where she mobilized important leftist friends, people like George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Harold Lasky, to try to find out where Arcadi was and even sent a letter directly to Stalin. What camp in the Gulag, that web of labor camps that eventually killed untold millions?

So Freda Utley stayed in the West, moving eventually to the United States, and turned totally against communism, becoming a prominent conservative writer, thinker and activist with her respected books The Dream We Lost in 1940 and Odyssey of a Liberal and many others. With Jon and his family, she settled in Washington, where she died at 80, having learned of her husband’s death, but never knowing the circumstances.

In 1991, Jon began contacting the Russians, and eventually made multiple trips to Russia where he eventually found the fate of his father. “Copies of files detailing his arrest, indictment and execution order were sent to me by the FSB, successor to Russia’s notorious KGB,” he told me. “Incredibly, it still has detailed records of political prisoners and willingly provides information and help to searchers like me. They also gave me three photos of my father from the file, taken at the time of his arrest in 1936. They are in better condition than any that my mother had preserved. In Moscow’s FSB library, I held the files of his interrogation in my hand.”

Read this great article.

I met Jon in the early days of Antiwar.com, and his commitment to the cause of peace and his assistance to this Website has been invaluable. Jon is still a welcome member of the conservative inner circles in Washington, DC, in spite of constantly handing out Antiwar.com’s latest articles to the often-uncomfortable insiders.

Check out Jon Basil Utley on the Web:
Antiwar.com archives
Americans Against Empire
Frida Utley’s Writings

Last week, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) announced an upcoming Q&A session with Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki.

IraqSlogger reports that today the CFR announced that, at Maliki’s request, his comments cannot be reported by any media or repeated by any participant in the meeting to anyone who might relay his comments to the media.

Maliki has asked to speak on this “not-for-attribution” basis, which is rare for a world leader speaking to an audience of hundreds of members of the CFR.

I have a question for Rudy Giuliani: Do you or do you not support your senior foreign policy advisor’s demand that we immediately bomb Iran?

Yes or no?