Antiwar.com Blog

To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the assassination of our last Yankee president The Wall Street Journal published an article by Christopher Hitchens, “Where’s the Aura?”. Hitchens is glad that the Kennedy cult is dying, and, having grown up in Massachusetts, I agree, the near-nuclear war Cuban missile showdown by itself being reason enough – see “Cuban Missile Crisis Closer to Nuclear War Than Believed.” (And, no, the fact that civilization wasn’t destroyed doesn’t disprove the point; there’s a very good chance of surviving a round of Russian roulette, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. Ask any successful options trader you happen to meet about the risk /reward profile.)

Hitchens:

“In a recent ill-phrased speech, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts referred with contempt to the combat in Iraq as something cooked up ‘in Texas.’ He thereby gave vent to a facile liberal prejudice that still sees the Galahad of Camelot as having been somehow slain by Dallas itself, or by Texas at any rate. And what do we think of, or what are we supposed to think of, when the word ‘Texas’ is invoked? Why, cowboys and gunplay and irresponsible capitalist dynasties.”

This brings to mind Glenn Danzig’s song for Jackie O:

“Texas is an outrage when your husband is dead,
Texas is an outrage when they pick up his head,
Texas is the reason that the president’s dead.”

Who should we believe – wobbly late-Hitchens or classic early Misfits-era Danzig? (Here’s the full song in Real Audio – Warning! Language, adult content, nihilism and mature themes: “Bullet.”)

According to The Yankee and the Cowboy War conspiracy theory, much of the past half-century of US history can be explained as the results of an East Coast – West feud. Nixon, cowboy. Reagan, Yankee turncoat (Illinois to cowboy actor in the West, Roosevelt Democrat to Goldwater Republican), cowboy.

But can’t they just get along? Yes! US spycraft (Yankee) and oil (Cowboy) meet in the person of Bush I, who actually moved from East to West. Bush II made the reverse migration. Which brings us to James Baker III.

“Baker fuses patrician chill with Texas saltiness: He’s a hyperefficient control freak dressed up in cowboy boots and chaw. He rocketed through the political hierarchy from President Ford’s undersecretary of commerce to Reagan’s chief of staff to secretary of the treasury to Bush’s secretary of state. … With the smugness that only the combination of Texas and the Ivy League can produce, Baker settled for an aide’s role because he knew he was better than the pols he served.”

– “James Baker – The Bush family janitor,” by David Plotz

The hereinreality.com website has a nice bunch of links about Baker and and his law firm, Baker Botts:

“He led the campaigns of the last four Republican presidents. He watched the September 11 attacks at the Ritz-Carlton with the Bin Laden family. He’s defending the Saudis against a trillion-dollar lawsuit brought forth by the September 11 families. Some say he’s the most powerful lawyer in the world. …

“He’s the Senior Counsel for The Carlyle Group, a company that invests pension funds in defense and telecommunications companies around the world. The Carlyle Group is the nation’s 10th largest defense contractor, with extensive ties to Enron, Global Crossing, Arthur Andersen, the Saudi Royal Family, and the Bin Ladens.

“Through his law firm, Baker & Botts, he is also working to assist American oil companies in the Caspian Region. This work right now involves a pipeline to be built through Afghanistan, a pipeline that Texas oil companies were negotiating with the Taliban to build before 9-11.

“Is this the same James A. Baker that works for the Department of Justice as the Counsel for Intelligence Policy? ‘The Office serves as adviser to the Attorney General and various client agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Defense and State Departments, concerning questions of law, regulation, and guidelines as well as the legality of domestic and overseas intelligence operations.’ …”

That’s right, Baker, like Cheney and the Bushes, is one of the Big Oil, Saudi royalty–partnering, national security statists who brought us international jihad, the Gulf wars, and the “occupation of the land of the two sacred mosques.” It wasn’t easy but that’s why they get the big bucks.

A few months back, President Bush sent Baker to meet with the president of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze. Shevardnadze has recently been deposed, and Mark Ames, for one, thinks these events are connected: “Georgia in the Crunch.”

In Ames’ other excellent article in the current issue of The Exile, he shares advice from a Russian friend of his regarding conspiracy theorizing: Vsyo gorazdo prosche – It’s always much more simple than the analysts portray it.

Great featured essay today by Chris Leithner on non-interventionism. Of the Founders, he writes,

Far from being backward, xenophobic and the like, many possessed a keen interest in foreign languages, history, culture, technical and economic developments. Indeed, several ranked among the best literary, technical and commercial minds of the late-eighteenth century. On cultural, scientific and economic grounds, most (Hamiltonians were perhaps an exception) favoured extensive and unfettered private associations with foreigners.

I needn’t take the obvious (and painfully true) jabs at the current president here, for his affliction is America’s. His ignorance is hardly exceptional. Ironically, as the U.S. imperium has grown, with peals of self-applause from the “internationalists,” Americans’ interest in and knowledge of the world has shrunk. Eighty-five percent of the young adults taking this simple survey could not find Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel on the map. This contrast has been drawn before, of course, but usually by those who see only a funny coincidence. I find no humor and very little simple coincidence any longer.

Over at NRO, Laurie Mylroie blows the Istanbul bombing case wide shut: It’s proof of an al Qaeda-Saddam connection! Meanwhile, the Turks, probably in an act of obeisance to their al Qaeda masters, say the terrorists were Kurds, with connections to U.S.-supported Bosnian forces, the once-U.S.-supported Osama bin Laden, but not to the once-U.S.-supported Saddam Hussein. Still, they may well have been in Iraq, albeit in the no-fly zone, protected from Saddam by the U.S. government.

The Christian Science Monitor posts one item that is only for the Web: their Daily Update. Each day they pick a subject and do a review of the Web for that subject, like a single blog entry.

Today they report on the FBI spying on the Antiwar Movement. Right in the middle, a single paragraph:

Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com says he believes the only reason the memo was ‘leaked’ was to chill the antiwar movement because “who wants their name to be on a government list of possible ‘extremist elements,’ as the memo puts it, who might be ‘planning violence’?”

The American Spectator dislikes little old me. True, when I stopped subscribing several years ago, I cut their readership by a quarter, but they should thank me now. Without the links I’ve been sending them, their online audience would consist of two guys grousing about the lack of Mena coverage.

UPDATE 11/24: Jeremy Lott really cares about my opinion. Good press, bad press, so long as someone is talking, eh? And as for what I’m slamming and my knowledge thereof, keep posting that one antiwar piece by John Corry. It’s good, Jeremy, but damn, even National Review has run some antiwar stuff. You’re under no obligation to “celebrate diversity” or anything, but on the eclecticism tip, all you can say is that you’re better than the Weekly Standard.

The latest issue of Newsweek warns that al-Qaeda is building toward a “spectacular” attack.

Intelligence sources tell Newsweek that “the neocons in the Pentagon have been undermining that relationship by accusing (without much proof) the Syrians of encouraging jihadists to cross into Iraq and of hiding Saddam’s WMD inside Syria.”

The report goes on to reveal the longtime dream of “many in the Bush administration, especially the neoconservatives in the Pentagon centered on Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, that a democratized Iraq will be both a beacon and a base in the fight against radical Islam.” Newsweek warns that “some senior of-ficials worry, though usually not out loud, that the war could backfire. A leaked memo from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointedly asked whether Islamic religious schools, fueled by anti-Western rage, are creating terrorists faster than American soldiers can kill or capture them.”

Newsweek concludes that the war in Iraq has “almost certainly diverted resources” from the war on terror. “Meanwhile, in Washington, transcripts of electronic intercepts of possible terrorist conversations pile up, unread and untranslated for weeks. Similarly, many Special Operations soldiers who had been chasing through the mountains of Afghanistan looking for bin Laden and his followers were shifted over to Iraq to spend months fruitlessly searching for weapons of mass destruction.”

Meanwhile, officials tell Newsweek that they have no idea who is behind the most recent deadly bombings in Iraq. They have evidence of many different sources, but it is beginning to look more like “Murder on the Orient Express,” where literally everyone is guilty.