Antiwar.com Blog

As mentioned earlier, the Web is abuzz with talk of the Libertarian Purity Test. Let’s forget the purity bit for a minute and talk about the ideas. My main gripe is that everyone seems to be posting scores instead of talking about specific areas of assent/dissent, which might make this quiz a useful opening for debate. Upon reading that Julian Sanchez–who has defended consensual cannibalism, for Pete’s sake!– scored a meager 79 (out of 160), Radley Balko hit a tepid 98, and so on, I began to wonder how people were answering specific questions. Of particular relevance to this blog are the following:

(1 point questions–Are you more libertarian than, say, Bill Kristol?)
25. Are you against national service?
26. Are you against the draft?
27. Does the U.S. intervene too much in other countries?
30. If it has to fight a war, should the U.S. try harder to avoid civilian targets?

(3 point questions–More libertarian than Ronald Bailey?)
49. Should the U.S. withdraw completely from Europe, Asia, and other foreign bases?
50. Is bombing civilians in an enemy country morally equivalent to murder?

Most of the 5 point questions are about one’s commitment to the broad goals of full-fledged anarchism, but even squishes should take a second look at #61:

Is it morally permissible to exercise “vigilante justice,” even against government leaders?

I would change the end to “especially against government leaders”–those who are most difficult to hold accountable for their crimes through official mechanisms– and ask this question again. If you say “no,” does that mean that the Iraqis had no right to overthrow Saddam Hussein but the U.S. government did? I guess it would go without saying, then, that, in addition to revolution, secession and all forms of conscientious objection (ie, crimes against the state) are also off the table. That’s some kind of libertarianism.

For some related thoughts of interest, see this by Jesse Walker.

A U.S. food subcontractor that runs 10% of the dining facilities in Iraq says it hasn’t been paid by a Halliburton Co. subsidiary for months and is threatening to stop serving hot meals to U.S. troops stationed there, NBC News reported Monday.

The company, Event Source, said it’s owed $87 million by Halliburton. Halliburton has a multi-billion dollar contract to feed and house the troops in Iraq.

Event Source claims not having been paid since November, NBC reported. The company prepared U.S. President George W. Bush’s Thanksgiving dinner in Baghdad during his surprise visit there last year. The $87 million collectible includes payment for the president’s Thanksgiving dinner with the troops, NBC reported.

Does that include the plastic turkey?

Cross-posted from UnFairWitness

It’s all the rage.

Try it.

I’m referring, of course, to Victor Davis Hanson’s two hour appearance on C-Span’s Book TV Sunday evening. After reading his essays in National Review for some time, I was paying close attention to the corners of his mouth for rivulets of foam. All in vain, since Hanson the interviewee exudes as much cool and rationality as Hanson the essayist drips callousness and bile. Well, the interviewee’s thoughts on war ran the gamut from callous (casual references to the crimes of Uncle Joe Stalin) to bilious (“‘neoconservative’=Jew”), but they all sounded so … so … so thoughtful.

He did make one brief but valuable point about the philosophical distinction between neoconservatives and the foreign policy “realists” who came before. Among the latter are many heavies from the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I administrations–think of Scowcroft, Eagleburger, and other realpolitik wonks who sometimes criticize Boy Bush. These guys are hardly foreign policy icons in my eyes, but they have their merits. As Joseph Stromberg once put it,

Realists contend that, in a manner analogous to the laws of physics, states in the state-system must behave in certain predictable ways. Reckoning with a mob of geographical and other structural factors, they say that a rising state which seems bent on becoming a hegemonic or dominant state tends to call into being an opposing coalition of the threatened, who will seek to thwart that aspiration by diplomatic means and, finally, war, if it comes to that. This isn’t the worst way to look at things, and in a rough and ready way such insights can be useful.

Contrast this with what Hanson (rightly) called his “idealism”: disdain for “narrow” conceptions of American interests, ie, self-defense; gunboat therapy for the nondemocratic/fundamentalist world; a kinder, gentler white man’s burden whose costs can never be questioned.

As a quadrennial supporter of hopeless presidential candidates, I often hear the lesser-of-two-evils argument. I’ll go along with it this year, on one condition: the Democrats put George H.W. Bush on the ballot.

Top Iraqi scientists, led by Jafar Dhia Jafar, who is known as the father of Iraq’s nuclear programme, said that UN inspectors had “reached total conviction” that Iraq was free of nuclear weapons before the US invasion of Iraq, yet failed to convey that information “frankly” to the Security Council because of pressure from the United States.

Quotes from AP report:

“Saddam Hussein issued orders in July 1991 for the destruction of all banned weapons, in addition to the systems to produce them. It was carried out by the Special Republican Guard forces,” they wrote.

“We can confirm with absolute certainty that Iraq no longer possessed any weapons of mass destruction after its unilateral destruction of all its components in the summer of 1991, and did not resume any such activity because it no longer had the foundations to resume such activity.”

In their paper, the scientists wrote: “The United States and Britain were not content with the United Nations’ reluctance to tell the truth … so they fabricated lies about Iraq resuming its nuclear activity.”

Jafar and al-Noaimi also accused U.N. weapons inspectors of stalling and getting hung up on “marginal issues” on the weapons of mass destruction programs.

Inspectors, they wrote, “researched in detail and realized that there was no presence of any banned armament activity in Iraq. They did not declare that frankly for reasons they know, and most probably the special (weapons) commission and the (International Atomic Energy) Agency were under strong pressure from the United States not to declare Iraq free of these weapons or activities related to it.”

Jafar is calling for a UN probe into the issue.

“It was clear that reports of the United Nations to the Security Council should have been clear and courageous,” Jafar said. “I believe the United Nations should also investigate the facts that were known before the war and why they (nuclear inspectors) did not declare them to the security council.”

BAGHDAD (AFX)

The spiritual guide of Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has called the country’s new transitional law an obstacle to a permanent constitution.

AP reports Al Sistani has issued a fatwa :

“Any law prepared for the transitional period will not gain legitimacy except after it is endorsed by an elected national assembly,” al-Sistani said in a fatwa, or religious ruling, released on his Web site.

“Additionally, this law places obstacles in the path of reaching a permanent constitution for the country that maintains its unity, the rights of its sons of all sects and ethnic backgrounds,” he said.