Antiwar.com Blog

FOB Antony S. comments on “Why There’s No Left Left“:

Point taken, but do these people really own all this stuff, or are they just renting it from banks and loan companies?

Justin Raimondo’s column yesterday, along with his piece on Neal Boortz brought in more hate mail than any time since the height of the Iraq War.

Very few of the letters appeared to be from libertarians defending Boortz as one of our own. Most of them appeared to be vocally pro-war and pro-Bush. Many were also attacking Justin’s homosexuality, which they learned about on one of the pro-Boortz blogs.

Boortz certainly has a lot of supporters, and I am sure the ever-opportunistic Libertarian Party will welcome the addition of these pro-war and anti-gay members. No doubt the LP will get their money’s worth for the $7500 they are spending on Boortz’s speaking fee.

I was not allowed to show what happens to an American soldier when they get killed in that way. But I can say that war is a horrible thing. And with large caliber weapons, people don’t just get red spots and collapse, they come apart, pieces all over the place. …

I didn’t want that piece of tape to end up on the trash heap of history. And through some coaxing on my part, we showed some of the tape, which included badly burned and blown up bodies. So often we don’t show those things on television. But I remember saying that if it wasn’t appropriate for broadcast at that time of day then we shouldn’t be fighting wars at that time of day. Not to show it is a lie.
—NBC cameraman Craig White, on battle footage from the invasion of Iraq

Read the CBC’s great collection of interviews with folks who were there.

(Thanks to Strike the Root.)

Interesting piece in the Washington Post today partially reveals how the recent “revolution” in the Caucasus nation of Georgia (Gruziya) was modeled after the Serbian coup of 2000. This confirms the rumors and news of Serbians “training” Georgian opposition groups over the past year. Now, Gruziya has been an obedient US vassal and bitterly hostile to Moscow, plus it sits on top of the projected Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline. Why would the Empire help topple its leader? For it is the Empire that did it; Serbians were just the cat’s paw… Continue reading “The Imported Georgian “Revolution””

In today’s New York Times , neocon Leslie Gelb advocates a partition of Iraq into three ethnic statelets. Then he invokes a “precedent” (sic): Yugoslavia. According to Gelb, it was held together by Tito’s laudable coercion, but the supposed Serb coercion to that end was pure evil, and had to be fought until Yugoslavia fractured into “natural states” such as Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Of course, Bosnia is not natural, Kosovo is a textbook case of settler takeover, and Croatia was “free” only after an ethnic cleansing that put the WW2 genocide there to shame – but Gelb doesn’t bother with facts if they get in the way of a good argument. Continue reading “Double standards: Iraq and Bosnia”

Now that another NRO voice has joined the general exchange of ignorance about the Istanbul bombings, it’s high time for a corrective from, of all places, The Wall Street Journal. Interesting analysis by Norman Stone, a scholar who actually lives in Turkey:

Do significant people want Turkey out of the way–destabilized? Someone is out to undermine Turkey, maybe to get rid of the government, which, for the first time in years, has a respectable majority and promises some sort of continuity. The world is pointing fingers at al Qaeda, and there is much assertion that that group is out to punish Turkey for its modernity, its relations with Israel, and its history of hostility to adamantine Islam. There is also the uncomfortable example, in Tayyip Erdogan’s government, of Muslim moderateness at work.

But let us not forget that Turkey was at best a reluctant partner, to put it with saccharine kindness, on Iraq, and that it did not, in the end, send troops there. So we must look beyond the suspects thrown up by prevailing fashions, and various glib analyses–and think “outside the box,” as younger Americans say. If you believe, as I do, that the real aim was to damage Turkey, this looks to me, very possibly, like the PKK, the violent, leftist Kurdish separatist outfit. They have the local experience and expertise, and took their lessons in the old communist world–their propaganda, shared with the Sendero Luminoso, talks of anti-imperialism, and of eradicating the comprador class. What has been going on in Turkey–the next target is said to be Ankara, where I sit–has nothing to do with the Jews or the English, or Iraq. The target is Turkey–the only place between Athens and Singapore where people can live a decent life. And no one hates Turkey more than the PKK.

Not those lovable Kurdish freedom fighters! How are we gonna spin Saddam into this, Ms. Mylroie?