Antiwar.com Blog

Noam Chomsky has started a blog, called Turning the Tide. Here’s an excerpt from his latest entry concerning the murderous Iraqi sanctions:

There is reason to believe — as Halliday and von Sponeck had argued — that if the vicious sanctions regime had been ended the population of Iraq would have been able to send Saddam Hussein to the same fate as other murderous gangsters supported by the US and UK: Ceausescu, Suharto, Marcos, Duvalier, Chun, Mobutu…. — quite a rogue’s gallery, some of them easily comparable to Saddam, to which new names are being added daily by the same Western leaders, whose values are unchanged. If so, both murderous regimes could have been ended without invasion. Postwar inquiries, such as David Kay’s, add weight to these beliefs by revealing how shaky Saddam’s control of the country was in the last few years.

We may have our own subjective judgments about this matter, but we should at least have the honesty to recognize that they are completely irrelevant. Completely. Unless the population is at least given the opportunity to overthrow a murderous tyrant, as they did in the case of the other members of the rogue’s gallery supported by the US and UK (including the current incumbents), there is no justification for resort to outside force to do so. Another truism, which has repeatedly been pointed out — and systematically ignored within the doctrinal system.

That is sufficient to undermine the arguments contrived by Blair and Bush, or their handlers, after the collapse of their official reasons for invasion: WMD and Iraq’s alleged ties to terror. On different grounds, these arguments have been thoroughly refuted by Human Rights Watch in the introduction to its latest annual report. But there are further considerations as well. It was predicted by just about every serious specialist that the invasion of Iraq would increase the threat of terror as well as proliferation of WMD. The first prediction has been amply verified, with terrible consequences and probably more to come, and Iraq itself has admittedly become a “terrorist haven” for the first time. The second prediction is also considered to have been confirmed by many regional specialists and strategic analysts, and is unfortunately all too plausible. There is more. Uncontroversially, the invasion struck a serious blow at the system of international law and institutions that offers at least some hope of saving the world from destruction. And though victors do not tabulate the consequences of their crimes, there is little doubt that the numbers of Iraqis killed is in the tens of thousands. And there is a good deal more.

Read the rest here.

William Marina posts the following on the Liberty & Power blog:

March 26, 2004 | Daily Mislead Archive

White House, 4/01: Focus on Bin Laden “A Mistake”

A previously forgotten report from April 2001 (four months before 9/11) shows that the Bush Administration officially declared it “a mistake” to focus “so much energy on Osama bin Laden.” The report directly contradicts the White House’s continued assertion that fighting terrorism was its “top priority” before the 9/11 attacks 1.

Specifically, on April 30, 2001, CNN reported that the Bush Administration’s release of the government’s annual terrorism report contained a serious change: “there was no extensive mention of alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden” as there had been in previous years. When asked why the Administration had reduced the focus, “a senior Bush State Department official told CNN the U.S. government made a mistake in focusing so much energy on bin Laden.” 2.

The move to downgrade the fight against Al Qaeda before 9/11 was not the only instance where the Administration ignored repeated warnings that an Al Qaeda attack was imminent 3. Specifically, the Associated Press reported in 2002 that “President Bush’s national security leadership met formally nearly 100 times in the months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks yet terrorism was the topic during only two of those sessions” 4. Meanwhile, Newsweek has reported that internal government documents show that the Bush Administration moved to “de-emphasize” counterterrorism prior to 9/11 5. When “FBI officials sought to add hundreds more counterintelligence agents” to deal with the problem, “they got shot down” by the White House.

Sources:

1. Press Briefing by Scott McClellan , 03/22/2004.

2. CNN, 04/30/2001.

3. Bush Was Warned of Hijackings Before 9/11; Lawmakers Want Public Inquiry , ABC News, 05/16/2002.

4. “Top security advisers met just twice on terrorism before Sept. 11 attacks “, Detroit News, 07/01/2002.

5. Freedom of Information Center , 05/27/2002.

Source links and more here.

Nir Rosen describes the remarkable progress U.S. social workers are making in Iraq:

In the beginning of the occupation I entered a taxi and asked the driver what he thought of the events in Iraq. He looked away and started crying. I asked him if somebody in his family had died. “We all died,” he told me. Now taxi drivers talk only of the latest explosion and how much they hate the Americans and want to kill them. One taxi driver drove by a mosque and saw Americans in the courtyard. “Look what they’re doing!” he shouted hysterically. “They even enter inside mosques! They are dirty Jews, I swear if I had an RPG now I would shoot them!”

Now tell me which of the two arguments from this earlier post sounds more plausible.

Can anyone read Juan Cole’s posts for today and not wonder if the civil war in Iraq has already begun?

Did the Republicans try to kill the 9/11 commission to prevent Richard Clarke from testifying? Is that why his book was in “security review” at the White House for three months?

Hashim Taqi, the former KLA fuehrer “affectionately” known as Snake, has laid his cards on the table in a screed published (not surprisingly) by the London-based IWPR (a.k.a. Institute for War Propaganda Reporting).
In it, Taqi claims his “Kosova” would be:
“a multi-ethnic society, in which people of different races lived and worked together peacefully with equal rights and with tolerance and respect for different religions.”
Brilliant reading of the script, Hash. And if no one knew you used to be (still are?) in charge of the KLA – something the IWPR emphatically does not mention anywhere – it might even sound plausible. Continue reading “Taqi Speaks, IWPR Unmasked”

He said it:

Israel may be the Jewish state, but as American Jews, it is not our country. It belongs to us only insofar as we share a spiritual connection to it with Jews the world over. If you’re planning to make aliyah in the near future, go ahead and make Israel your flagship issue come November. On the other hand, if you’re like the vast majority of American Jews who have no intention of moving to Jerusalem, stop pretending domestic policy matters less to our communal future than Israel.

They used to say Jews were a Democratic bulwark to be taken for granted. Now we’ve become something worse, a single-issue voting bloc devoid of nuance. While we cling to feel good rhetoric and praise a hands-off approach that has produced only diplomatic stagnation and three years of bloodshed, traditional Jewish positions on a host of domestic issues have been undermined.

It’s time we reshuffle our political priorities, and move Israel down the list.

Gutsy essay by Bradford Pilcher. Here’s his new-to-me blog.