Antiwar.com Blog

The Wartime Economist David R. Henderson explains the capitalist peace theory, Iran and opportunity cost, America’s relationship with China and the rising left-right-libertarian alliance against empire.

MP3 here.

David R. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and an associate professor of economics in the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School. He is author of The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey and editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, available online. His latest book, co-authored with Charles L. Hooper, is Making Great Decisions in Business and Life.

He has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor, the Jim Lehrer Newshour, CNN, and C-SPAN. He has had over 100 articles published in Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Red Herring, Barron’s, National Review, Reason, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Christian Science Monitor. He has also testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources. Visit his website.

Well, we’re four days into our quarterly fund drive – and it’s going lousy. I was planning to remind you how time is money… and how much time Antiwar.com saves you each day, collecting, reviewing, organizing, and updating hundreds of news items and opinion pieces … and how I bet you checked the site on Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s – and found new content, just like every other day… and how we bring you exclusive commentary from the likes of Justin Raimondo, Alan Bock, Doug Bandow, David R. Henderson, Charles Peña, Philip Giraldi, Nebojsa Malic, Ran HaCohen, and many more… and how there’s simply no other venue, online or in print or on-air, that even comes close to our level of focused coverage… and how I haven’t noticed any global outbreaks of lamb-lion love that might justify letting this site wither away – how, in fact, each day’s stories portend fresh horrors…

But that would be one bummer of a sermon, and anyway, I found this upbeat testimonial from Vanity Fair‘s James Wolcott to share instead:

Upon rising from my bed of nails (keeps me sharp–on the edge–where I gotta be) each morning, I begin my blog day with a high-impact megadose of Antiwar, the premiere site for tracking the dogs of war and their latest foamings and the softer mewings of the compliant press. Its prescience in identifying the neocon arguments for war against Iraq as specious, fearmongering, and a betrayal of this country’s ideals is there in the archives, and each day it refuses to flinch from the butcherhouse debauchery the Bush administration and the neocon architects have unleashed. The best thing about Antiwar is that it’s ecumenical in its anti-empire coverage, giving voice and space to opponents of the war whether they be libertarian, conservative, traditionally liberal, or far lefty. …

Antiwar is holding a fundraiser this week and I entreat you to cough up a little for the causes of peace, justice, truth, liberty, and good old American cussedness.

Listen to the man.

Gen. William Odom discusses the “worst strategic disaster in American history,” the war in Iraq: the view of most generals that the war is wrong, the failure of the politicians to see the consequences of their actions, the centrality of the neoconservatives and the Israel lobby in pushing for the Iraq invasion, the “surge,” Bush’s siding with the Iran factions even though the Iraqi Shia don’t want them, the crisis of Iraq’s four million refugees and it’s possible consequences, the tenuous alliance between Iraq’s Sunnis and al Qaeda, the fact that a September 11th worth of Iraqis die every month in that country, his view of George Tenet and Colin Powell’s failure to resign before the war and the possibility of war with Iran.

MP3 here. (18:47)

Lieutenant General William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.), is a Senior Fellow with Hudson Institute and a professor at Yale University. As Director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988, he was responsible for the nation’s signals intelligence and communications security. From 1981 to 1985, he served as Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Army’s senior intelligence officer.

From 1977 to 1981, General Odom was Military Assistant to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski. As a member of the National Security Council staff, he worked upon strategic planning, Soviet affairs, nuclear weapons policy, telecommunications policy, and Persian Gulf security issues. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1954, and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1970.

General Odom’s latest book, America’s Inadvertent Empire, co-authored with Robert Dujarric, was published in early 2004 by Yale University Press. His previous book, Fixing Intelligence For a More Secure America, was published in January 2003 (Yale University Press). His book, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (Yale University Press, 1998), won the Marshall Shulman Prize. General Odom has also written (American University Press, 1993); America’s Military Revolution: Strategy and Structure After the Cold WarTrial After Triumph: East Asia After the Cold War (Hudson Institute, 1992); On Internal War: American and Soviet Approaches to Third World Clients and Insurgents (Duke University Press, 1992); and The Soviet Volunteers (Princeton University Press, 1973). He coauthored Commonwealth or Empire? Russia, Central Asia, and the Transcaucasus with Robert Dujarric (Hudson Institute, 1995).

General Odom has published articles in Foreign Affairs, World Politics, Foreign Policy, Orbis, Problems of Communism, The National Interest, The Washington Quarterly, Military Review, and many other publications. A frequent radio and television commentator, he has appeared on programs such as “The PBS News Hour,” CNN, ABC’s “Nightline”, NBC News, C-Span, and BBC’s “The World Tonight.” He also is a periodic contributor to the op-ed pages of The NewYork Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and others.

Former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer discusses the open letter [.pdf] he and other former CIA officials wrote to George Tenet, the responsibility Tenet bears for the war and for failing to kill Osama bin Laden in the 1990’s, his excuse(?) that the “slam dunk” referred to lying us into war rather than the presence of WMD, Dick Durbin’s recent admission that he knew the war was based on lies and his responsibility for staying quiet, the Constitution’s requirement that Congress hold responsibility for declaring war, his belief that Osama is still alive, al Qaeda’s ability to quickly replace their leadership, Bush’s renewed invocation of Osama to justify the war in Iraq and threats against Iran and the fact that there was no pre-war link between Iraq and al Qaeda.

MP3 here. (17: 10)

Michael Scheuer is a 22-year veteran of the CIA and the author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror.

On Friday it was reported that Mohamed Dheere was appointed as the new mayor of Mogadishu by the US-backed Somali government. What’s interesting about this is that just last year, when the US decided to start funding warlords to pick fights with the Islamic Courts, Mr. Dheere was one of the warlords that was on the CIA’s payroll.

This is just the latest US link in a Somali government that is rapidly becoming an international embarrassment. I’m not going to rehash the backstory of the conflict: Scott’s recent Antiwar Radio interview with Chris Floyd does a far better job of that than I could in a single blog posting.

On the other hand, I was recently reading the transcript of the press conference in which Defense Department officials announced the creation of AFRICOM. The officials promise that America’s goals in Africa will be exclusively altruistic in nature, and I wonder if what’s occurred in Somalia, from American airstrikes on villages, to mass rendition of refugees to a nation with the dreadful human rights record of Ethiopia, and culminating with the installation of a CIA-funded warlord as the mayor of the capital city is an example of the sort of actions we can expect of AFRICOM in the coming years.

In 1983, the US founded CENTCOM to be the operational command for the Middle East and Central Asia. Since then, the US has fought three major wars and innumerable small skirmishes in that theater of operations. Can we expect more of the same from AFRICOM, and does its founding portend a massive increase in US military interventionism in Africa?

Only time will tell, but the Council on Foreign Relations recommended in a recent report that the US ramp up its involvement in Africa to secure its oil resources. Is it even possible that this agenda won’t lead to the same fiasco of a foreign policy that it has in the Middle East?

The “war on terrorism” as a project of the “visible yet sinister group” known as the neoconservatives — that’s the theme of this brilliant and beautiful video:

Andrew Sullivan, who supposedly has had a turnaround on the war, calls this “Nazi-like.” What’s so “Nazi-like” about it? Well, you see, the evidence is “in its concern with aesthetics.” So any “skillful” use of film in the service of making a political point is ”Nazi-like”? “Somehow,” Andy babbles on, ”I feel the irony was lost on it creators.” The irony here is that Sullivan’s use of the “Big Lie” technique is itself Nazi-like. As for the film, Sullivan clearly refuses to pay attention to its trenchant critique of managed “corporatist” economics and military expansionism, reducing it to epithets like “Chomsky-esque” when in fact it is much closer to what Old Right critics of militarism and big government, like John T. Flynn, were saying in the aftermath of World War II.