Antiwar.com Blog

Speak favorably of Antiwar.com on the Free Republic website, and you’ll have your logging privileges revoked. Hey, that’s their right, and closed-mindedness is by no means inconsistent with their platform.

But we should be shocked when a writer at a libertarian mag has to preface a reference to Antiwar.com with the following:

The last time I linked to something on antiwar.com, an angry fellow wrote me to say that he was never going to read anything I wrote again. At the risk of losing still more readers. . .

That’s Jesse Walker on Reason’s interactive blog, Hit & Run. (He linked to Justin Raimondo’s article for today.) His reticence is tongue-in-cheek, but the militant liberventionism and Bush worship among Hit & Run readers is real. What gives?

“Turning Tables” — a US soldier “blogging” from Baghdad — Read more…

Kris Johansen defends imperialism before his fellow pinkos in the August edition of Adbusters:

Every spring the bulls charge down the narrow alleys of the Spanish town of Pamplona, their thousand-pound bodies careering around corners, hooves clattering across paving stones, and before them runs a handful of individuals who have overcome their fears and leapt into the moment. In this essay the bulls represent the US administration and the runners are all of the people who, like me, have stepped away from the anti-war camp to support the new American empire. We can still hear our old allies, chanting and waving their tear-soaked handkerchiefs – they are the ones behind the wooden barricades that line the alleys, and we remember when we wasted our time in the same safe places.

Johansen goes on to extol Michael Ignatieff, Chris Hitchens, and other belligerent “humanitarians” for bringing out the rouge in the War Party. He concludes with a classic bit of leftist self-dramatization:

Ignatieff, Hitchens and all my new friends, we will run before the bulls with adrenaline howling in our blood and hoof thunder at our backs, and if we occasionally send wild-eyed looks over our shoulders at the leaping, snorting, hulking beasts of liberation, if you detect the dread and terror mixed amid our hope and pride, then you will suddenly understand why we run so goddamn fast.

Here’s to the bulls.

This Ann Coulter parody in the Weekly Standard made me chuckle.

Of course, the dragoness is more or less correct about one thing (McCarthy)–the only reason the neos have it in for her.

The Spectator’s Paul Robinson suggests another group to blame.

“Jacksonian rhetoric has spearheaded America’s recent wars. The word ‘honour’ is rarely used, but substitutes such as ‘credibility’ abound in official speeches. Nato had to bomb Yugoslavia because the ‘credibility of the alliance was at stake’. Coalition forces had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein was ‘undermining the credibility of the UN’. Saddam was not a threat to the USA, but he was a living insult to its honour. Despite all the efforts of the most powerful state on earth, he had for ten years continued to survive and defy America’s wishes. For an administration driven by sentiments of honour, such an insult could not be permitted. Just as the South could not allow Lincoln to become their President, so George W. Bush could not allow Saddam to continue humiliating his country. Only war could satisfy honour.”

Interesting but unfortunately unexplored is the hormonal difference between Southerners and others mentioned in the first paragraph.

Continue reading “Blame Dixie?”

But at least he isn’t a liar. Writing in Reason, Bailey describes one effect of intelligence-tampering:

The American public and the rest of the world will be understandably skeptical when U.S. intelligence agencies next claim there is a looming crisis somewhere. Unfortunately, there might be a real wolf lurking in the future, but after hearing them cry wolf in Iraq, how can we trust our government agencies either to know that for sure or, more darkly, to be telling us the truth?

Somehow, this doesn’t register with him as an indictment of the ongoing war, but whaddaya expect from a liberventionist? My prewar critique of Bailey’s “libertarian foreign policy” can be found here.