Antiwar.com Blog

From Reuters:

The White House on Tuesday ruled out three top aides as the source of a news leak identifying an undercover CIA officer whose husband was critical of Bush administration Iraq policy.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said he had talked to each of the aides ahead of a 5 p.m. deadline on Tuesday for officials to turn over information in a Justice Department probe of the leak.

He left open the possibility the leaker would never be found. “I think all of us in this room know that it sometimes can be difficult to determine anonymous sources. But let me emphasize … no one wants to get to the bottom of it more than the president of the United States,” he said.

So the White House simply asked Karl Rove, Lewis Libby, and Elliot Abrams whether they committed a felony or not, they said “no,” and they’re cleared? And they mocked Hans Blix’s interrogatory methods in Iraq?

If you’re a Bush-supporter, that steady sucking sound you hear might be defecting libertarians. This article from The American Prospect should give Bushies the fear. It’s gonna be hard to win the next election with an even smaller second-place showing than they managed in the last one.

Or just bored by the self-amused oxyconservative? Check out a real alternative to the establishment media: the Philip Dru show. It’s on-air in Austin, but the website features audio interviews with the likes of Ivan Eland, Greg Palast, Alan Bock, and Jesse Walker– talent on loan from God, you might say (but please don’t).

Every once in a while someone will point out some theme that I disagree with in an article posted on AWC & ask me why, if I disagree, I bother doing the work of editing the site’s letters section, etc. But, in fact, it’s not possible (never mind necessary or desirable) to agree with everything since AWC presents such a wide variety of viewpoints.

Take two of today’s highlights, for example: Justin Raimondo’s “Israel is the Problem – Our Problem” and Christopher Layne’s “The Cost of Empire” (The American Conservative). Both reject the stated reasons for the invasion of Iraq, & suggest other motivations. Justin: “the strategic doctrine at the heart of U.S. Middle Eastern policy” is “the installation of Israel as regional hegemon.” Bush went to war “for Israel’s sake.”

Layne, on the other hand, doesn’t mention Israel as even a partial motivation. Instead, Layne claims, the invasion was a logical outcome of the “offensive realism” theory of international relations, which has guided US foreign policy since World War II. Specifically:

“The administration went to war in Iraq to consolidate America’s global hegemony and to extend U.S. dominance to the Middle East by establishing a permanent military stronghold in Iraq for the purposes of controlling the Middle Eastern oil spigot (thereby giving Washington enormous leverage in its relations with Western Europe and China); allowing Washington to distance itself from an increasingly unreliable and unstable Saudi Arabia; and using the shadow of U.S. military power to bring about additional regime changes in Iran and Syria.”

Antiwar.com, the politics website where everyone doesn’t have to agree on everything.

Lest anyone think that my take on patriotism in today’s article is meant to dismiss the concept altogether, please read this great essay by Joseph Sobran. Relevant to folks right and left.

In, The Last Nuclear Moment, after telling of Moshe Dayan’s suggestion that Israel use nukes to prevail in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Avner Cohen says:

“Mrs. Meir’s decision not to accept Mr. Dayan’s pessimism not only avoided a nuclear catastrophe, it demonstrated to the world that Israel was a responsible and trusted nuclear custodian.”

No, it shows that without the US to literally keep Israel’s Army from being utterly destroyed, the Middle East would be a big chunk of green glass right about now. The Israeli Army CAN NOT defend itself against the forces of its neighbors. Only the US’s can. Golda Meir was a monster who would have killed every Arab in existence if she could — and not have nuclear fallout rain down on Israel in the aftermath. THAT is why she chose to beg Nixon for help (also because, I mean, why NOT get free stuff from Americans?), not because she was a “great stateswoman” or any such crap like that.

“There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed.” (Golda Meir, June 15, 1969)