Tag: Antiwar movement

Ouch!

I’m glad to see what’s-his-name Matthew Yglesias is back in form after the transition to his new home on The Atlantic‘s blog — and remind me never to get on his bad side.

Clearly, there are too many candidates to give all of the different points of view a fair hearing. What to do? I suggest two podiums. Behind podium one, Ron Paul; behind podium two, the other nine, in an orderly, grade-school water-fountain line. After each question from the moderator, Ron Paul answers. In rebuttal, the other nine take turns howling “America, F*ck Yeah!“

From the latest issue of The American Conservative, a review by Peter Hitchens (the Good Hitchens) of John O’Sullivan’s The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World:

“I might add that Poland, though freed from the iron manacles of Moscow, is now instead wrapped up in the sticky marshmallow bonds of the European Union, a despotic, secretive, and lawless empire with the strong potential to get much worse than it already is.”

The death of communism was brought about by what seems to O’Sullivan to have been the very hand of Providence, a benevolent God who deemed that Reagan, Thatcher, and Wojtyla should all have attained their offices simultaneously. O’Sullivan’s thesis is that these three coalesced in a divine concatenation of forces, as it were, that brought down the godless Soviets. As “one of the last Protestants still standing in Britain,” Hitchens is inclined to believe in this miraculous manifestation of divine will, and yet:

“I cannot quite share John O’Sullivan’s awe at these things, even though I once did, and even though I should like to. As I read, and enjoyed, his fond recollections of Margaret Thatcher’s resolve and Ronald Reagan’s humorous squashing of liberal idiocy, I kept thinking, ‘Yes, so it was, but why in that case have we ended up as we are?'”

As more conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic begin to ask that question, the base of the War Party will start to crack.

I see this isn’t online, which is often the case with TAC‘s best stuff: which means that you’ve really got to subscribe to what is, to my mind, the most interesting magazine of political opinion in America.

Michael Scheuer, the former head analyst at the CIA’s bin Laden unit, has weighed in on the controversy surrounding the Republican Presidential debate held Tuesday May 15, when Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) stated that American foreign policy was a “contributing factor” in the 9/11 attacks.

“They attack us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years.” Paul said. He was then denounced by former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani who said it was “absurd” and that he’d “never” heard such a thing before demanding a retraction.

In an interview with Antiwar.com’s Antiwar Radio on May 18, Scheuer, who was the head analyst at the CIA’s bin Laden unit, Alec Station, and authored the books Through Our Enemies Eyes and Imperial Hubris, said “I thought Mr. Paul captured it the other night exactly correctly. This war is dangerous to America because it’s based, not on gender equality, as Mr. Giuliani suggested, or any other kind of freedom, but simply because of what we do in the Islamic World – because ‘we’re over there,’ basically, as Mr. Paul said in the debate.”

Scheuer also agreed with Dr. Paul’s statement in the debate that the war in Iraq was a diversion from capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and that bin Laden was “delighted” that the U.S. is occupying Iraq as it has become a training ground and recruiting tool for new jihadists joining the movement.

MP3 here.

Michael Scheuer is a 22-year veteran of the CIA and the author ofThrough Our Enemies Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America and Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror.

From the May 12-18 Economist:

“Soldiers in Iraq: Contaminated“:

Of the 1,767 troops questioned by the Pentagon’s mental-health advisory team last September… less than half (47% of soldiers and 38% of marines) felt that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect, as required by the Geneva Conventions. …

More worrying, only around half said they would be willing to report a member of their unit for killing or injuring an innocent non-combatant….

The more often and the longer that soldiers were deployed in Iraq, the more likely they were to suffer mental-health problems and to mistreat civilians.

—

“Afghanistan: Hearts, minds and death“:

THE American army this week delivered an apology, and blood money, too, to the families of 19 Afghan civilians killed and 50 wounded by a special forces unit of American marines near Jalalabad on March 4th. …

In the wake of the … shootings, Afghan journalists were quickly on the scene. Several were threatened or had their film erased by American soldiers. One reporter was told: “Delete the photos or I delete you.”

The Economist encouraged the invasion of Iraq.

I read the Economist so you don’t have to.

Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic discusses America’s descent down the path of militarism, secrecy, empire, authoritarianism and destruction, the role of the military industrial complex and the mass media and hope for a mass movement to restore the constitution.

MP3 here. (37:19)

Chalmers Johnson is president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific. He taught for thirty years, 1962-1992, at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California and held endowed chairs in Asian politics at both of them. At Berkeley he served as chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies and as chairman of the Department of Political Science. His B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in economics and political science are all from the University of California, Berkeley. He first visited Japan in 1953 as a U.S. Navy officer and has lived and worked there with his wife, the anthropologist Sheila K. Johnson, every year between 1961 and 1998.

Johnson has been honored with fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Guggenheim Foundation; and in 1976 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written numerous articles and reviews and some sixteen books, including Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power on the Chinese revolution, An Instance of Treason on Japan’s most famous spy, Revolutionary Change on the theory of violent protest movements, and MITI and the Japanese Miracle on Japanese economic development. This last-named book laid the foundation for the “revisionist” school of writers on Japan, and because of it the Japanese press dubbed him the “Godfather of revisionism.”

He was chairman of the academic advisory committee for the PBS television series “The Pacific Century,” and he played a prominent role in the PBS “Frontline” documentary “Losing the War with Japan.” Both won Emmy awards. His most recent books are Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000) and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, which was published by Metropolitan in January 2004. Blowback won the 2001 American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation.