Antiwar.com Blog

For some reason, foreigners are less than wild about the idea. The great Moja, U.S. Army sergeant in Iraq, thinks he knows why:

i get the feeling these countries offering their support want to make a good impression…they want to be seen as professional world powers…and helpful allies…but still they are only here…so far…in one’zees and two’zees…

but i wonder…how many of my troops would i send from mojaland…to take the burden off a country that started a war…and quite possibly bit off more than it’s ‘1st world mouth’ could chew…how many troops would i be willing to quite possibly sacrifice so that american troops could hop on a plane…and head back to the great states of america…

What are the odds that Spain, Nicaragua, Poland, Ethiopia, or Lithuania will adopt the angry orphan we created?

Azerbaijan, of course. They’re tilting dangerously toward monarchy, and that “poses a grave challenge to Western policy planning,” says the Weekly Standard.

From the Justice Department’s new website pushing the Patriot Act comes this list of supportive quotes from the likes of Daschle, Feinstein, Biden, Edwards, and Schumer (brief pause to spit after enunciating that last one). Note that all of the statements by these and other Democrats, most of whom have come to oppose the Patriot Act, are from October 2001, when our Congressmorons were rushing to pass a bill that none of them had actually read. Who knew that John Ashcroft–who lost his Senate seat to a corpse–was this politically astute?

Anyway, serves the invertebrate bastards right to have their words thrown back at them. They sold their souls (and, I fervently hope, their reelections) without checking the large print, much less the fine.

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”