Antiwar.com Blog

The New York Post, in a Saturday editorial, called for punishing Doubleday, the book publisher, for putting out The Al Qaeda Reader, a compendium of writings by Osama bin Laden & his gang:

“Americans are right to wonder if Bertelsmann is on their side in the War on Terror — or on al Qaeda’s.

“After all, the Islamists’ methods aren’t limited to terrorism; they’re also battling for people’s hearts and minds. In al Qaeda’s twisted logic, getting out its “message” will fuel support for the movement.

“Bertelsmann is serving al Qaeda’s ends by publishing and promoting its rantings.”

They want NY’s attorney general Eliot Spitzer to prosecute under the “Son of Sam” law that prevents criminals from profiting from their crimes. But of course this applies only if Doubleday is seen as an arm of Al Qaeda, which would be news to Bertlesmann, the German conglomerate that owns Doubleday. S.M. Oliva, writing on the Mises.org blog, notes:

“The Post is really referring to any speech that doesn’t conform to whatever the White House decides is the party line. Publishing casualty figures, for example, can be labeled as aiding the enemy because it demoralizes our population and encourages further enemy attacks. If you take the Post‘s reasoning to its logical conclusion, all war reporting would have to cease immediately.”

Well, uh, yeah. Except for this junk ….

Inquiring minds want to know: “Why are we flying Allawi around on military aircraft?“, asks Steve Clemons.

Moqtada Al-Sadr, no slouch at political maneuvering, appears to have preserved several options for his response to the looming elections. Anthony Shadid, in the Washington Post, on the Sadrists’ stance toward the Ayatollah Sistani:

Sadr’s men have stopped short of calling for a boycott but insist they are not supporting the election. In coded language, they have ridiculed Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country’s most influential religious leader, whose perceived backing of the top Shiite coalition has made it the favorite in the vote. Loath to provoke the U.S. military, which killed hundreds of its followers in last year’s fighting, the Sadr movement has relegated its militia to a lower profile while keeping up its strident rhetoric.

According to Shadid, Sadr’s opposition to the occupation has not lessened. Often, al-Sadr is portrayed as a rival to Al Sistani for leadership of the Iraqi Shi`a, which is true, but is it possible that Moqtada al-Sadr is angling for the leadership of a coalition? Shadid quotes a statement by Sadr this month:

“I personally will stay away [from the elections] until the occupiers stay away from them, and until our beloved Sunnis participate in them,” the statement read. “Otherwise they will lack legitimacy and democracy.”

Hmmm. Lately, al-Hakim has been firming up his US-out-of-Iraq rhetoric, but it is widely understood that the United Iraqi Alliance (the party list al-Hakim heads) is less enthusiastic about the immediate departure of US troops than most Iraqis, correctly seeing the US as a necessary barrier to their immediate assassinations.

At this point, I think the pertinent question may be to ask what is the US response to be to an alliance of the Sadrists with the Sunni resistance when they respond to the newly elected regime’s failure to demand an immediate and complete withdrawal of US troops by overthrowing them?

In Jerry Z. Muller’s The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought, one finds a detailed description of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in the context of the anti-commerce/anti-market era in which it was written. Hobbes questioned his era’s Christian virtues of faith, honor and glory coupled with the vices of Industry, material well-being and individualism. Muller writes of Leviathan

Instead of religious other-worldliness, its vision is resolutely this-worldly; and the secular world it seeks to forge is not one of warriors and rulers, but of individuals living in peace, prosperity and intellectual development.

Muller describes just how different these ideas were

Hobbes knew that he was undertaking a transvaluation of values, some of which took the form of the redefinition of character traits. Those which had been regarded as virtues in the Christian tradition such as piety and faith, were redescribed as superstition and credulity. The passion for honor, glory and command so valued in the civic republican tradition were treated primarily as causes of contention and war. […] Parts of Leviathan, therefore, take the form of what the rhetoricians of [Hobbes’] day . . . called “paradiastole,” the method of rhetorical redescription by which what had been defined as vices could be redescribed as virtues, and vice versa.

This sounded eerily familiar in wake of Bush’s inaugural speech: did he know that its rhetoric was a “transvaluation of values,” particularly conservative ones? As one writer put it

The speech was in almost no way that of a conservative. To the contrary. It amounted to a thoroughgoing exaltation of the state.

What conservatives once considered vices: faith in government, utopian vision of democracy and Wilsonian idealism have become — courtesy the Bush administration — virtues:

From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights and dignity and matchless value because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth. […] Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation’s security and the calling of our time. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

Bush continued

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.

This new “paradiastole” thoroughly confuses the ideology that demands limited goverment and a healthy skepticism of all things collective with a dangerous faith in the power of government and disregard for all the costs of its actions. Today, those who demand cost considerations find mainstream conservatives labelling them “anti-American,” while others who demonstrate the futility of such policies are ignored. To echo Muller, what had been defined as vices are now virtues, and vice versa. Virtues as these are all but lost

She [America] has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

Even Tony Blankley is heading for the exits on the President’s Trotskyite inaugural speech: “Utopian” and “unsustainable” are a few of the kindest characterizations he had to offer on “The McLaughlin Group.”

Pat had the best line:

“He’s Woodrow Wilson on amphetamines.”

But the Group was wrong in rating the speech: I give it a zero.

Eleanor Clift on Condi:

“She has a Stepford quality.”

Meeeow!

The warblog-O-sphere echo chamber is busy linking to itself in a self-referential circle-post over Jackie Spinner’s Washington Post account of a pro-American Iraqi, humiliated by American troops in a home raid:

  On the night of Jan. 5, Imaad and his mother, Um Imaad — both of whom declined to give their full names for fear of retribution — were watching a movie in the living room. As in most other parts of the capital for the past two months, their Adhimiya neighborhood has electricity about two hours a day. So the generators outside were humming at about 9 that night, and the television was turned up so they could hear.

Imaad said they were startled by a loud banging at the door. He went quickly to open it. When he did, Imaad said, there were about a dozen U.S. soldiers standing with their guns pointed at his head.

Imaad and his mother said the soldiers rushed in, ordering them to sit together while they searched the house. "You look poor," Imaad recalled one of the soldiers saying. "Why?"

Imaad answered in English: "I have not been able to find a job, although I’m a graduate of the College of Arts." His heart was pounding, Imaad said. His mother, a chatty widow who adores her son, sat next to him, shaking.

The soldiers went to search his bedroom. He heard laughing, and then they called for him, he said. Imaad went to his room and saw that the soldiers had found several magazines he kept hidden from his mother. They had pictures of girls in swimsuits and erotic poses. Imaad said the soldiers spread the magazines on his bed and put his Koran in the middle.

"This is a good match," Imaad said one of the soldiers told him.
"It was a nightmare," he said. "I will never forget those bad soldiers when they put the Koran among the magazines."

Warbloggers in ideological lockstep mock the Iraqi and the reporter.

 
• Powerline: "Unintentionally hilarious." Links to Tim Blair and Roger Simon.

 

• LGF: "Today’s most ridiculous report from Iraq…" Links to Tim Blair.

 

• Instapundit:  Links and quotes Blair.

 

• Tim Blair: " It’s another My Lai!" Links to LGF.

 

• Roger Simon: "…exercise in conscious/unconscious self-destruction by the mainstream media."  Links to Blair and Jarvis.

 

• Jarvis: "Blair shreds the assumption and attitude in her writing by using her own reporting to show just how absurd her view is."  Links to Blair and Instapundit.

Now, you probably felt a sense of dread and sorrow that yet another Iraqi is going to be gunning for Americans, but that’s why you really need to read the warbloggers because you, outsider that you are, didn’t get the important, hilarious part!  See, the reporter is stupid!  And biased! 

Still, I’m missing something.  The reporter is stupid for believing this story and even stupider for writing about it and foreign correspondents are a dying breed in a dying industry and the Iraqi is a hypocrite and violent and not "educated" like Spinner wrote, right?  But, didn’t we just see the resistance grow by at least one gun, for whatever reason?  That’s not the funny part, right?  That wasn’t supposed to happen, was it?  What is it the US is trying to accomplish in Iraq, again?

"I used to have a good opinion of the Americans," Imaad said. "But they are the enemy. They are bad."

[ed. – fix error, NYT for WashPost]