Antiwar.com Blog

Retired Canadian general and veteran UN peacekeeper Lewis McKenzie isn’t the first to say that, and may not be the last.

In an op-ed in Canada’s National Post today, McKenzie deals with the very same issues as last week’s Balkan Express: a seemingly (and likely) coordinated effort to ignore or spin away the truth behind the pogrom in Kosovo, going as far as omitting the discovery that gunmen who murdered two UN police were Albanians posing as Serbs.

McKenzie commanded the first UN contingent in Bosnia in 1992, and by managing to open up the flow of humanitarian aid to Sarajevo buggered up the Bosnian Muslim leadership’s plan to provoke a NATO intervention on its behalf. That earned him the burning hatred of Izetbegovic’s toadies and their foreign enablers, who smeared McKenzie endlessly as a “Serb-lover” and even accused him of war crimes! So he knows what he’s talking about, first-hand. Continue reading ““We Bombed The Wrong Side””

Arthur Silber weighs in on the controversy around blogger Kos, who has booted Richard Clarke from the top of the blogosphere’s sh*tlist. If you’ve never had the pleasure of reading such twenty-four hour two minute hates as Little Green Footballs, Silber’s selection of quotations is a fine introduction to the genre.

And again makes it pay twice. Gosh, what happened in Fallujah was bad! Americans are divided on the war. The antiwar people are dumb–how can they be against both the war and the preceding sanctions?! There’s no telling what the future will bring. Yay America!

It’s good to be Cathy!

Though the numbers are still somewhat inconclusive, a total of nineteen soldiers have been killed in Iraq in less than 24 hours.

First, CentCom reported that three soldiers died from combat on April 5th:

Three Task Force 1st Armored Division soldiers were killed during separate attacks April 5-6 in the Kadhimyah district here.

The first soldier died of wounds received during an attack that took place at about 11 a.m. April 5. The soldier was traveling with a southbound convoy when it was attacked with small-arms and rocket-propelled grenade fire.

A second soldier died later that day, at about 9:30 p.m., when his vehicle was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade during a firefight in the same area.

A third soldier died from wounds he received during a rocket-propelled grenade attack on his Bradley Fighting Vehicle at about 12:30 a.m., April 6.

The military also reported the death of four Marines later in the day:

Four Marines serving with the I Marine Expeditionary Force were killed as a result of enemy action in the Al Anbar province April 5 while conducting security and stabilization operations.

Finally, a highly coordinated attack on Marines in Ramadi resulted in the deaths of at least 12. These deaths bring the total American fatalities to 636.

Stay tuned with Antiwar.com for updates on these figures.

But I find Eric’s revelation about martyred “civilian” Michael Teague hilarious. And reading the article about his 2000 trial, I’m struck by the incredible convergence of sleaze in one place and time: Aryan Nation goons like Teague, hate-chasing narc Morris Dees, and late JDL terrorist Irv Rubin. What a delightful bunch!

Just watched The Trials of Henry Kissinger (2002) last night. I have not read the similarly titled book by Christopher Hitchens, whose smug visage appears a zillion times throughout the film to detail Kissinger’s alleged war crimes in Cambodia, Chile, and East Timor, but the film is entertaining and fairly compelling. The film is problematic, however, in that it seems to endorse international war crimes roundups without any thought to their consequences (such as the devastation of Serbia). I also wonder what the film’s makers think of Hitchens’s latest turn as warmonger extraordinaire, given that their site includes a prominent link to Antiwar.com on its front page. I recently heard Hitchens remark that anyone who opposes the Bush wars is in fact supporting “Islamofascism” (which I assume means in turn that anyone who opposed the bombing of Cambodia, the Allende coup, and Suharto’s attack on East Timor was supporting the spread of Stalinism). Note also Kissinger’s less than ecstatic take on the invasion of Iraq.

I’d be interested to hear readers’ thoughts on the film or the book, as well as filmmaker Eugene Jarecki’s thoughts on Hitchens.

(The title of this post comes from Joseph Stromberg’s must-read history of the “realists” who came before today’s neoconservatives.)