Antiwar.com Blog

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?

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.