Antiwar.com Blog

And no one’s laughing? A great article on a global delusion:
The Day Irony Failed, by Gary LaMoshi.
The US State Department weighed in on the Makati crisis by backing “the legitimate civilian government of the Philippines”. The US cleverly avoided use of the word “elected”, but any comment on the Philippines from the Bush administration registers big numbers on the irony scale.

Presidents George W Bush and Arroyo (of the Phillipines) each took office of the same day, January 20, 2001, with dubious Supreme Court decisions substituting for electoral mandates. Each of these offspring of former presidents has deployed the “war on terrorism” as a cover for their failures to mend their national economies.

During the fighting over the last presidential election, The Onion ran the following headline:
Serbia Deploys Peacekeeping Forces to U.S.:
Serbian president Vojislav Kostunica deployed more than 30,000 peacekeeping troops to the U.S. Monday, pledging full support to the troubled North American nation as it struggles to establish democracy.
Anyone who doesn’t understand the humor in this should be barred from holding public office.

Paul Wolfowitz is now saying that fighting the war in Iraq is key to fighting the war against terror. In fact , he is now saying, that’s why the American army invaded Iraq- our intelligence was “murky” but surely everyone can see that without invading Iraq, America would face yet another World Trade Center massacre. Apparently what the new intellectual counteroffensive to justify the war consists of is this thought along with the notion that the deaths of the Hussein brothers have cleared the stage for the growth of democracy in Iraq. I remember listening to Sean Hannity last week announcing on his radio show that he was tired of being on the defensive about the Iraqi war and that the White House was coordinating this new attack to change the intellectual battlefield beginning that day. But the death of the Hussein brothers is underscoring the fact that the guerilla war has other sources besides the remnants of the Baathist regime and of course the relationship between that regime and the revolutionary Muslims is and has always been either non-existent or inconsequential. Nor have we heard much from the intellectual bodyguard of the War Party, with the exception of the Fox News crowd.

Ali Abbas, the Iraqi boy who lost both arms and his family during the war, will be transported to London for prostheses. That the artificial limbs and subsequent therapy alone will cost $675,000 brings to mind Henry Hazlitt’s “blessings of destruction”.

I feel safer already. We have let the Vatican terrormasters run amok for far too long.

Over the last month, the justifications for war offered by the Bush administration have been examined and found wanting. It turns out that the evidence for the military threat posed by Saddam Hussein to the United States was quite weak. But last week there was a revelation made by US Air Force Lieutenant General T. Michael Moseley to the effect that the Air Force began bombing Iraq in June, 2002 under the guise of patrolling the “no fly” zone in the south of Iraq. Some 391 targets were bombed in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003. Any proposed mission likely to kill more than 30 civilians had to be personally approved by Don Rumsfeld. The Air Force submitted some 50 requests and the Secretary of Defense approved each one. Furthermore, according to Moseley, the White House had given orders to the Air Force in late 2001 to draw up plans for a war on Iraq.
The existence of these operations exposes the acts of the Bush administration in the fall of 2002 as one sustained con game played upon the American people. Even when Little Bush was strutting before the United Nations that fall, the war against Iraq was under way. The intellectual bodyguard of the Bush administration has spent the last month repeating its mantra about Bush being a man of his word and a courageous leader. This revelation reveals the entire administration as a group of dedicated and ingenious liars. Just as the true facts regarding this war have taken some time to be absorbed by the American medica, so to will this latest bombshell come to be accepted by the American public and its media.

About spreading freedom at gunpoint. Drug prohibition seems to be out the window in liberated Afghanistan– which is why we’ll soon be invading them again.
From the Christian Science Monitor:
Bumper year for Afghan poppies

BATIKOT, AFGHANISTAN – Gul Hazrat Bacha has turned his attention from his fields to building a new house for his family – a dream fulfilled by his recent opium poppy crop.

Only two years ago, Mr. Bacha and his four brothers grew wheat – and fell deeper into debt each year. Now, they make 12 times their former income, have paid back lenders, and see a future for the family. “Honestly speaking, whatever I have is because of poppy,” says Bacha with a smile. “Money, happiness, and the house … everything.”

Afghan farmers are producing a bumper crop of poppies this year, despite a ban imposed by President Hamid Karzai’s government, and just three years after the Taliban clamped down on cultivation.