Antiwar.com Blog

Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-Md.) is no stranger to war. He signed up with the Marines in 1964 and went to Vietnam in the grimmest, bloodiest days of the war. He survived a shot to the chest, and spent the decades afterward studying foreign policy, history, and why nations go to war.

Gilchrest supported the 2002 authorization for war against Iraq: “Blessed are the peacemakers who freed Europe from the yoke of Nazism,” he said in a floor speech. “Blessed are the peacemakers whose save people of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. It is not a matter for us as peacemakers of if we go into Iraq. It is a matter of when we do it, how we do it, and who we do it with.”

Within two years of that vote, after taking multiple trips to Iraq, Gilchrest repudiated that decision. He has become a member of the small but vocal antiwar Republican caucus in Congress.

Reason Magazine’s David Weigel has a revealing in-depth interview with Gilchrest today.

Remember how I dreamt of more national dialogue on the war from a sane perspective? It seems the Washington Post has the precise opposite hope: They want the antiwar candidates, Ron Paul and Mike Gravel, out of the debates. These debates are “cluttered,” apparently, by too much focus on the evil of US imperialism, which is bankrupting Americans, corrupting our culture, and recruiting more fanatics in anti-American terror groups.

After all, why confuse the American public with off-topic, taboo talk of how the maniacs of the War Party still want to nuke Iran, or talk about how the US shouldn’t be policing the world in the first place? Shouldn’t we instead hear the six or seven respectable candidates from each party, discussing the ins and outs of health care and trade policy that none of them understand, or waxing passionate and empty on who is the real champion of God, country, equality, family, the middle class, safe schools, safe neighborhoods, a clean environment and a strong economy?

Paul and Gravel actually say something important, and thus they are just too fringe. There you have it: The supposedly liberal Washington Post is as much a shill for the establishment, including the warfare state, as any other paper or network. Don’t rock the boat.

Those who know that there’s an alternative to this establishment press, a news source that understands that war should be a mainstream issue, discussed in every debate with more substance than “we should support the troops and win this thing by stopping it from being mismanaged,” can help keep the flame of truth alive by going here.

Thanks to Lew Rockwell for the Wash Post link.

Over the last few years, I’ve come to understand that the only meaningful difference between the New York Times and the New York Post is that the latter is occasionally good for a chuckle. The two rags take equally insouciant approaches to reality. Witness Patricia Cohen parroting what her Sociology 101 instructor told her about Herbert Spencer:

It is true that political interpretations of Darwinism have turned out to be quite pliable. Victorian-era social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer adopted evolutionary theory to justify colonialism and imperialism, opposition to labor unions and the withdrawal of aid to the sick and needy.

While the last two items are beyond the scope of this site (but read this and this if you’re interested in, say, facts), the bit about colonialism and imperialism is rich. Herbert Spencer was the premier anti-colonial, anti-imperial thinker of his age – perhaps of any age. If the great British classical liberal were around today, he’d make most lefties look like Bill Kristol on matters of foreign policy. Good grief, check out these lines from Spencer’s essay “Patriotism” (1902):

To me the cry – “Our country, right or wrong!” seems detestable. By association with love of country the sentiment it expresses gains a certain justification. Do but pull off the cloak, however, and the contained sentiment is seen to be of the lowest. …

Some years ago I gave my expression to my own feeling – anti-patriotic feeling, it will doubtless be called – in a somewhat startling way. It was at the time of the second Afghan war, when, in pursuance of what were thought to be “our interests,” we were invading Afghanistan. News had come that some of our troops were in danger. At the Athenæum Club a well-known military man – then a captain but now a general – drew my attention to a telegram containing this news, and read it to me in a manner implying the belief that I should share his anxiety. I astounded him by replying – “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.”

I foresee the exclamation which will be called forth. Such a principle, it will be said, would make an army impossible and a government powerless. It would never do to have each soldier use his judgment about the purpose for which a battle is waged. Military organization would be paralyzed and our country would be a prey to the first invader.

Not so fast, is the reply. For one war an army would remain just as available as now – a war of national defence. In such a war every soldier would be conscious of the justice of his cause. He would not be engaged in dealing death among men about whose doings, good or ill, he knew nothing, but among men who were manifest transgressors against himself and his compatriots. Only aggressive war would be negatived, not defensive war.

Of course it may be said, and said truly, that if there is no aggressive war there can be no defensive war. It is clear, however, that one nation may limit itself to defensive war when other nations do not. So that the principle remains operative.

But those whose cry is – “Our country, right or wrong!” and who would add to our eighty-odd possessions others to be similarly obtained, will contemplate with disgust such a restriction upon military action. To them no folly seems greater than that of practising on Monday the principles they profess on Sunday.

Ponder that awhile, ye wimpy progressives and bloodthirsty wingnuts. For more of Herbert Spencer’s actual views on imperialism, militarism, authoritarianism, and corporate-statism, click here. For more ignorance and mendacity on every topic, keep reading the New York Times.

Paul Wolfowitz is now almost certain to get booted from the World Bank.  Unfortunately, the World Bank itself will probably survive.  (The Washington Post frets today that the Wolfowitz scandal could “jeopardize” efforts to squeeze more bucks out of foreign governments to bankroll more World Bank boondoggles).

So what will Wolfowitz do with himself now that he is again disgraced?

Obviously, this is why God made think tanks.

There is no better place for someone driven out of office under a cloud of infamy to park his butt and restore his credibility.

Will it be the Hudson Institute, the deep-thinking-abode that is providing a desk for Scooter Libby before Libby is sentenced to prison?

Will it be the American Enterprise Institute, which has a natural affinity to Wolfowitz’s chickenhawk warmongering?

Will it be the Heritage Foundation, which has never permitted itself to be prejudiced by a former high-ranking government official’s scandals?

Stay tuned.   Add your comments or your prediction on which think tank will take Wolfowitz at my blog here.

I can’t even think of any modern antiwar pop music, actually, I just know of a few songs that have lamely hurled juvenile denunciations at Bush like little wet boogers. Pink has continued the tradition of crappy lyrics that try to hit home and fail. It’s not all bad — at this point I’m smiling at anything that picks on Bush for any reason — but some of the lyrics are just so much tired liberal candy. She mentions the homeless twice in the song. We get it, homeless bad. Abortion, gay daughters, it goes on. She does allude to war a couple times, but not with nearly as much punch as is packed when she says Bush has “come a long way from whiskey and cocaine” and “you don’t no nothin’ ’bout hard work” — not that that last one isn’t true.

Anyway, at least she has a good voice. Makes dumb lyrics sound better than they should. But something tells me the president isn’t crying in the Oval Office when this comes on the radio.

As Antiwar.com holds our quarterly fundraising drive, the US military announces its plans for the upcoming quarter as well.

Major General Rick Lynch promises us an increase in US soldiers being killed in Iraq, primarily a result of the latest troop surge. Major General William Caldwell reminds us that things will also likely get even worse for the Iraqi people.

Is this the same surge that was supposedly going to be a major turning point in the American occupation of Iraq? Because it seems to me that a rising body count and an ever worsening situation for the Iraqi populace is essentially the same thing they’ve been giving us for the last four years.