Antiwar.com Blog

Jeez, you spend a coupla days in the wilderness without a computer, and you miss all the excitement. I’m referring, of course, to the latest eruption of tensions between Antiwar.com and Reason. Justin vented a bit on Wednesday, Nick Gillespie responded, and Justin made nice all without my getting to throw a single punch. Meanwhile, Jesse Walker and Julian Sanchez pled not guilty to warmongering (see comments under Gillespie’s post), Jim Henley threatened to expose this as-yet top secret blog, and Tim Cavanaugh got one more swipe in slightly after the bell.

By the way, the essay Tim is plugging actually makes oblique reference to my prewar salvo at Ron Bailey, “One Toke over the Line, Sweet Reason.” Shoulda given me props, Tim; this ceasefire is fragile enough without gratuitous ego-bruising.

Brendan O’Neill writes:

For all the claims about saboteurs bringing Iraq to its knees, it was the coalition’s war that devastated Iraq. As the war was coming to an end in late April, the International Committee of the Red Cross claimed that: ‘This country has collapsed. Nothing works – no phones, no electricity, no schools, no proper medical care, no transportation.’ (9) Towards the end of the war, 32 out of Baghdad’s 35 hospitals were forced to close, while the war’s impact on electricity meant that ‘pumping plants are often shut down, cutting off water for hours at a time’ (10). Yet according to yesterday’s Glasgow Herald, it is a ‘wave of sabotage’ that has ‘pour[ed] misery on Iraq’ (11).

Simply, the US deserves as much blame for the dire situation in Iraq as the “guerilla fighters” who are attempting to thwart the occupation.

Serbian news weekly “NIN,” dated August 14, 2003, comments on Prime Minister Zivkovic’s infamous troop offer:
“Given that government representatives first denied the reports from America, then methodically spun the tone of Zivkovic’s offer, and later hastily tried to legitimize it by a vote in the Council of Ministers and the Supreme Defense Council, one gets the impression that the offer of military aid to the US was not conceived before the visit to Washington, but made by the Prime Minister ad hoc, under the circumstances.”
NIN also addressed the recent purge of top Army generals, in light of their service in the 1999 Kosovo war… Continue reading “Serbia troop offer and officer purges”

From Rascia-Prizren Diocese Newsletter, August 14, 2003:

“Yesterday’s crime against the Serb children of the village of Gorazdevac near Pec has deeply shaken all Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija and throughout Serbia and left behind it a numbing pain and an awful feeling of helplessness. The brutality and cowardice of this terrorist act have cast a dark shadow over the entire previous UN mission and KFOR, who in the more than four years of their stay in Kosovo and Metohija have not even managed to protect the Serb population living in militarily protected enclaves, let alone to secure a normal life for all throughout the territory of the Province.
After all, this crime is not just some ‘isolated incident’ committed by anonymous extremists. The massacre of innocent children in Gorazdevac is first and foremost a shocking indicator of the real situation in Kosovo and Metohija that the majority of UNMIK and KFOR representatives, together with Albanian political leaders, are persistently attempting to hide from the global public in order to rationalize their own failures…
[b][/b] Continue reading “Kosovo priest: Murder at Gorazdevac Illustrates reality”

An amazingly flippant take on postwar Iraq from National Review. Alleged humorist Bruce Stockler’s plan to “solve Iraq’s internal problems, get our troops out of harm’s way, save us $14 billion a month, and unite the rest of the world, West and East, left and right”? Reinstall Saddam Hussein.

This is really funny because you didn’t see it coming, right? Or maybe it’s supposed to be less humorous than shocking, like an Andrew Dice Clay routine. Don’t take my word for it:

What message will Saddam’s return send to Iran, Syria, North Korea, and the other axles of evil? This is the brilliant part. Returning Saddam to power is such an unpredictable, confusing, and outside-the-box piece of political strategy that our enemies will spend years trying to divine our motives. No country could draw any rational foreign policy conclusion. Arab nations may question if Saddam is working for the CIA or if he is, in fact, a body double. Our closest allies will be at a loss to understand our motivations as well. Imagine the river of Xanax and Paxil that will be flowing into the U.N. as the befuddled delegates try to move their diplomatic chess pieces around a board we have not only wiped clean but packed away and stuffed into the attic.

Yes, mass murder and machtpolitik– hilarious stuff.

David Klinghoffer, a frequent contributor to National Review, often uses selective readings from rabbinical tradition to push neocon doctrine. Here, he has 12th c thinker Moses Maimonides arguing for National Greatness:

In an “optional” war, the king needs the approval of his legislative branch, the Sanhedrin of 71 expert sages. But with this approval secured, he may go to war to enlarge the nation’s borders, or to pursue “greatness” and “reputation.” Such a “reputation” is a defensive strategy. When other countries cease to regard your nation with awe, for instance if it tolerates violence against its citizens, this invites disrespect, which invites physical attack.

How about genocide?

[I]t will shock modern sensibilities that he is unconstrained by our familiar imperative to distinguish between civilians and soldiers. Women and children are to be saved, but: “If [the enemy] does not accept peace…, one makes war on them [even to the point of] killing all the adult males.” This is a distressing idea; but as recent events demonstrate — with Saddamite guerrilla operatives in civilian dress ambushing U.S. forces — a man out of uniform is no less capable of mayhem than his uniformed counterpart.

Interestingly, Continue reading “David Klinghoffer”