Antiwar.com Blog

I’ll be appearing on the “Liberated Space” radio program out of Austin, TX, with Angela Keaton from 6:30-7:00 Central this evening. You can listen online here.

If you’re not watching C-Span2 right now, please start. It’s the International ANSWER counter-inaugural demonstration, and it’s a laff riot. Karl Rove paid these imbeciles to show up, right? And what is it with leftists and chants?

“No blood for oil/US off Iraqi soil!”

“No justice, no peace/US out of Middle East!”

“Stop the war, recall the troops/To liberate the chicken coops!”

OK, I made up the last one, but why do lefties believe in the self-evident consanguinity of the antiwar, gay and lesbian, and animal rights movements? Michael Berg, God bless him, just blamed K-Mart for the war on Iraq. Sheesh.

Bush couldn’t ask for better enemies.

Matt Drudge has this excerpt from the Inaugural speech:

“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. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

“America has need of idealism and courage, because we have essential work at home — the unfinished work of American freedom. In a world moving toward liberty, we are determined to show the meaning and promise of liberty.”

If it is “common sense” to launch a worldwide crusade to create by force what took centuries of cultural and political evolution to produce in the West, then the commonsensical has become the nonsensical and we are truly living in Bizarro World.

You bet we have “essential work at home” — and each day we stay in Iraq this vital work is delayed. Each billion we lavish on reconstructing what we so wantonly destroyed is diverted away from productive investment. As for the “unfinished work of American freedom” — does George W. Bush, the single greatest threat to that freedom, really have no shame? Are words that meaningless to his speechwriters?

The President speaks of “a world moving toward liberty” as if it were as natural as the earth’s turning. But if the appeal of liberty is universal, as the President has contended, then why does it have to be imposed at gunpoint in Iraq? By intervening we only distort and perhaps even defeat what would happen naturally, albeit not immediately.

It doesn’t take “idealism and courage” to declare war against an already-devastated and militarily insignificant Third World country, where the average income is less than a shoeshine boy makes in the U.S. It does take a certain brazenness, however, to proclaim that you’re only doing it because you’re so courageous.

If the President is right and “the survival of liberty in America” depends on freedom’s fate in Zimbabwe and Belarus, then all is lost. If we cannot think of returning to the work of rolling back government power on the home front, or even returning to normalcy, without first liberating Borneo from its oppressors and delivering Ukraine from the grip of odious oligarchs, then we are doomed.

This hectoring ideologue, more dogmatic than any Trotskyite, would have us suffer the fate of Sisyphus — who was cursed by the gods and condemned for eternity to roll a rock up a hill, only to see it fall back down as soon as he reached the top. Under such a regime as this, the “unfinished work of American freedom” is certain to stay unfinished.

Falah Hassan al-Naqib, Iraq’s Interior Minister, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that anyone who fails to vote in the upcoming elections is guilty of a criminal act:

“‘If any group does not participate in the elections, it will constitute treason,’ al-Naqib said, adding that ‘boycotting the elections will not produce a National Assembly that represents the Iraqi people’ but instead will bring on ‘a civil war that will divide the country.'”

And just to make sure everyone participates in this mandatory exercise of “freedom,” on election day the entire country is going on lockdown: closed borders, a lengthened curfew, and “about 300,000 Iraqi and multinational troops” on the streets “providing security” — and also no doubt checking to see who votes and who doesn’t. Making abstention just as risky as voting is bound to increase turnout.

As George W. Bush has repeatedly stated:

“You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.”

Or, as Henry Ford once said:

“People can have the Model T in any color — so long as it’s black.”

The Senate Democrats are holding up the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice: no, nix that — Senator Robert Byrd is holding up the confirmation vote until Thursday on the magnificently combative grounds, as explained by the Senator’s spokesman, that

“Senator Byrd and others believe that the Senate’s advice-and-consent Constitutional responsibilities are not a rubber stamp.”

This is a slap in the face to one of the core principles of red-state fascism: unanimity. The lies that sustain this regime — the lies that led us into war, and are leading us into another — are so fragile that a loud defiant voice could shatter them. That’s why the neocons defame all dissenters as “anti-American.”

Speaking of loud dissent, Senator Barbara Boxer made me proud to be a Californian when she pretty much called Condi a liar at the Senate hearing:

“And I personally believe — this is my personal view — that your loyalty to the mission you were given, to sell this war, overwhelmed your respect for the truth. And I don’t say it lightly, and I’m going to go into the documents that show your statements and the facts at the time.”

The pinched scowl on Condi’s face was priceless: we got a good look at the inside of her nostrils. (I could’ve sworn I saw daylight at end of that tunnel). As Boxer went through the long litany of untruths uttered by Ms. Rice in the run-up to war — those sinister aluminum tubes, the imminent danger from nonexistent Iraqi WMD and Saddam’s equally illusory links to Al Qaeda — Condi sat there twitching. Now maybe some people in the Bush administration will come around to the right view of torture.

The Peter Bergen quote was a master stroke. As a policy analyst whose specialty was East European and Soviet affairs, and who never made any great waves in that now moribund area of study, Rice had to sit there and listen to the clear cold voice of a real expert succinctly summing up the truly extraordinary failure of this administration:

“What we have done in Iraq is what bin Laden could not have hoped for in his wildest dreams: We invaded an oil-rich Muslim nation in the heart of the Middle East, the very type of imperial adventure bin Laden has long predicted was the U.S.’s long-term goal in the region. We deposed the secular socialist Saddam, whom bin Laden has long despised, ignited Sunni and Shi’a fundamentalist fervor in Iraq, and have now provoked a defensive jihad that has galvanized jihad- minded Muslims around the world. It’s hard to imagine a set of policies better designed to sabotage the war on terror.”

When Rice spluttered her petulant denial, for the first time a note of whininess crept into her voice:

“Senator, I have to say that I have never,ever lost respect for the truth in the service of anything. It is not my nature. It is not my character. And I would hope that we can have this conversation and discuss what happened before and what went on before and what I said without impugning my credibility or my integrity.”

As with any skilled liar, it is necessary to look at Rice’s exact wording to get the gist of what she’s really saying. Given that, one notices at once the odd formulation: after all, isn’t it possible to respect the truth without necessarily telling the truth? It is like having great respect for, say, the Roman Catholic Church, without actually becoming a priest, or even a practicing Catholic. Every liar respects the truth in the sense that he or she fears it greatly. One can also have great respect for one’s enemies, without going over to their side.

As for Dr. Rice’s credibility, she impugned it herself — as Boxer showed to devastating effect in simply quoting her own contradictory statements back to her.

The undoubtedly partisan cast of these hearings is beside the point: I would only note that not one Republican came to Condi’s rescue. What’s important is that somebody is finally speaking up. That it happens to be Barbara Boxer, a politician with whom I agree on little else, is also beside the point.

The point being this horrific, futile, and increasingly costly war — and I mean costly in terms of far more than money. Better that Condi’s integrity and credibility should be challenged than to cede America’s moral integrity and international credibility to a clique of scheming warmongers.

The news that the FBI has initiated “a massive manhunt” for six suspected terrorists, four of whom are reportedly Chinese, is bad news for the racial profilers. It should also raise more than a few questions about the President’s proposed immigration “reform“, which would essentially legalize millions of illegal immigrants: the six came to the U.S. from Mexico. From there they supposedly headed for New York, and then Boston.

What are National Guard units doing on the banks of the Tigris, when they should be standing guard at the Rio Grande? To heck with sealing Iraq’s borders: let’s start with our own.

UPDATE: Uh oh, those “Chinese terrorists” may have slipped into the U.S. illegally, but it looks like the “tip” received by the FBI was a joke:

“One of 14 people, mainly Chinese nationals, sought over an alleged terror plot in Boston has been in US custody for two months, the FBI says. Mei Xia Dong, a Chinese woman, was initially identified as a man wanted in connection with an unspecified threat.

“But the FBI said she had been traced to a border detention centre in the San Diego area and appeared to have entered the US for economic reasons.”

This news isn’t stopping our Keystone Kops from diverting yet more resources to this wild goose chase:

“The FBI said it was still interested in details on the other 13 on its list.”

Here’s another tip they might want to follow up, as long as they’re determined to waste time and the taxpayers’ money….