Will all the pundits who relied on the discredited 2007 NIE on Iran now admit that they were wrong? That they bought into and kept citing, without any serious questioning, the now clearly politically skewed analysis in the so-called National Intelligence Estimate of that year? You remember: the considered consensus wisdom of the entire U.S. intelligence community, which misled the world into believing there was nothing to worry about Iran’s nuclear program, that it had virtually ceased.
Bring in the “congressional intelligence committees”! Heads must roll! Someone call 911″because those shifty-eyed spooks who gave us the NIE [.pdf] knew, knew about this “secret facility” and still they insisted the Iranians had given up their nuclear weapons program in 2003. Has Tehran infiltrated and taken over the CIA?
Well, uh, no. It’s just that, unlike Rosenbaum, the spooks operate in a world where logic rules and what’s required before reaching a conclusion is something we call “evidence.” This is a matter Rosenbaum and the “bomb-bomb-bomb Iran” crowd couldn’t care less about: Iran is evil, the Qom facility is (or was) secret, so what else do we need to know in order to start World War III? Surely not something so pedestrian and wimpy as solid evidence. After all, it’s only lives—many thousands of lives lost to murderous sanctions, as well as the inevitable war to follow—that are at stake.
The mere fact that the CIA issued their NIE “ averring “with high confidence” that the Iranians had ceased their previously undisclosed nuclear weapons program “in the fall of 2003″—with full knowledge of this sinister, secret facility should tell Rosenbaum something: not that our CIA is a front for the Iranian Republican Guard, but that he knows less than they do about what is really going on in Qom. After all, they’ve had years to conduct surveillance and analysis. Is it possible they know more about Qom than Rosenbaum does?
But of course not. According to Rosenbaum, the NIE was a “lie,” deliberate “disinformation” planted by those traitors in the CIA who ought to be brought up before a congressional committee and grilled until they’re as overdone as Rosenbaum’s histrionics. Yes, and all those pundits, too, who took the NIE as gospel and were “had” “ when are they going to “fess up”?
Coming from someone who supported the Iraq war”a war based on completely made–up“intelligence”—Rosenbaum’s posturing takes the cake. But then again, as someone who sees Hitler under every bed, it wasn’t hard for Rosenbaum to be “had,” as he puts it: he and his pro-war confreres on what today passes for the Left”Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman, and the rest of that Legion of Lost Souls—were ready, willing, and perfectly able to be let themselves be deceived, because they didn’t care one whit for the truth.
They still don’t. The accusation that Iran is going nuclear in order to make a bomb that it plans to drop on Israel is nonsense, and they know it. It is enough for them that Iran exists, and, for some, that it opposes Israel.
The one word these people don’t want to hear is “Dimona”—the site of Israel’s nuclear weapons research facility. As Juan Cole puts it:
There is no good evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. It has offered to allow regular International Atomic Energy Agency inspections of the newly announced facility near Qom, which would effectively prevent it from being used for weapons production.
“There is a secret nuclear facility in the Middle East, however, producing plutonium and not just enriched uranium, which has the capacity to make 10 nuclear warheads a year.
The idea that Israel could indefinitely maintain a nuclear monopoly in the region”enforced by the U.S. military—was never a very practical one. Israel’s attorneys in this country who argue that Iranian success in joining the nuclear club would set off a regional arms race are a bit late: the race started the moment Israel stole the technology from the West and made its own nukes with French assistance and over U.S. opposition. Israel has been threatening to attack Iran for years, and who is to say they wouldn”t nuke Tehran? Indeed, one prominent Israeli writer, Benny Morris, made the case for just that, no doubt with the encouragement of his government. It could be a bluff”but why take the risk?
Instead, what we need is, yes, sanctions! Backed up with a UN resolution, of course; these things have to be done properly. And when we’ve degraded life in Iran to an almost unbearable degree, embargoing such military-related items as incubators, toilet paper, and toothbrushes”just as we did in Iraq—then we can move in for the kill. Just as we did in Iraq, and just as Rosenbaum and his war-crazed cohorts would like to do in Iran.
The propaganda blitz is starting right on schedule, with Obama in the Israelis’ pocket and sanctions a nearly foregone conclusion. The shooting war may be a bit down the road, but it’s coming. Be patient. There will be a lot of palaver about “intelligence,” with the Israelis and our European allies feeding us their own interpretations of what little real information they can glean about Iran’s capabilities “ views skewed (indeed, determined) by simple geography.
Check out this New York Times piece, which has the Germans saying the Iranians never gave up their nuclear weapons program and the French saying the IAEA is covering for Tehran. The Israelis, naturally enough, are the most hysterical. The Americans, on the other hand, are sticking to their guns “ in spite of Rosenbaum”and offering the most conservative estimate, which is that the Iranians gave up on nukes six years ago and haven’t restarted their program. Roughly speaking, the closer one is to Iran, physically, the more one tends to interpret the intelligence to reflect one’s deepest fears, editing out facts that don’t fit.
The facts are these: Iran has revealed the existence of the Qom facility and opened it up to international inspection. Which means it can’t be used to make a nuclear weapon. In a rational world, that would be the end of the story. In the world we live in, however “ a world in which the Israel lobby wields inordinate power in Washington and every other Western capital “ it is just the beginning.
Never mind the facts: they can be spun this way and that. Our own intelligence community, with America’s interests in mind, may hold out for quite a while, but, in the end “ just like last time—they’ll be inundated by their rivals among our allies, principally (but not limited to) the Israelis, who are quite good at feeding disinformation into the intelligence pipeline without leaving too many fingerprints. That’s one of the disadvantages of being an empire: we are held hostage by our own satraps, who depend on us for their very survival”and are therefore passionately committed to shaping our decisions any way they can.
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Iran is challenging both the U.S. and Israel in a region of the world that we and our allies have long dominated. If they are allowed to get away with it, other “rogue” nations will get ideas, and then there’s no stopping the unraveling of the “world order” we have worked so long and hard to maintain. We may bankrupt ourselves in the process, drive the price of oil up to $200 a barrel, and start World War III”but confront them we will, of that you can rest assured. It’s only a matter of time. The pro-war ads have already begun, and the “liberal” media is lining up behind its commander in chief. All the actors are in their places, and now the drama—an all-too-familiar drama—begins. “Weapons of mass destruction," phony intelligence, a compliant media: all the ingredients are there. All that’s needed is a spark that sets off the conflagration…
]]>The sinister atmospherics start out right from the beginning, as bin Laden greets his audience:
Praise be to God, Who created people to worship Him, ordered them to be just, and permitted the wronged to mete out fair punishment to the wrongdoer.
You can almost hear an organ groaning in the background and smell a whiff of sulfur. Halloween comes early this year. His Satanic Majesty continues:
American people: This address to you is a reminder of the causes of 11 [September] and the wars and consequences that followed and the way to settle it once and for all. I mention in particular the families of those who were hurt in these events and who have recently called for opening an investigation to know its causes. This is a first and important step in the right direction among many other steps that have deliberately gone in the wrong direction over eight barren years that you have experienced.
I have to give bin Laden points for chutzpah: here, after all, is the perpetrator of the 9/11 terrorist attacks calling for an investigation into the "cause" of the nefarious deed committed by none other than his nefarious self!
“The entire American people should follow suit," the Evil One continues, "as the delay in knowing those reasons has cost you a lot without any noteworthy benefit." Okay, let’s start translating, because interpretation is necessary at this point.
To begin with, the "cause" of the 9/11 terrorist attacks was and is none other than al-Qaeda, which conceived, planned, and carried them out. If we translate "reasons" to mean al-Qaeda talking points, however, bin Laden starts to make sense. Indeed, he makes so much sense that one despairs we will ever be rid of his perfidious spawn.
It may be true, as George W. Bush and his supporters claimed, that bin Laden and his cohorts hate us "for our freedom," that is, they hate America per se. That, however, is totally irrelevant as far as their operational strategy and tactics, including their propaganda, are concerned: they must come up with concrete accusations, rather than abstract denunciations based on pure theology, in order to recruit, mobilize, and spur their followers to action. They must, in short, point to the record of the United States government in its relations with the Muslim world, and there is no shortage of grievances to be found in this regard. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda feed on these grievances like vultures on carrion, and in order for his movement to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the Muslim masses these complaints must have some basis in fact—otherwise bin Laden would be just another crank living on the margins, with few followers and no influence. As it is, he presents an analysis that must seem incisive not only in the Muslim world, but to any thinking Westerner:
At the beginning, I say that we have made it clear and stated so many times for over two decades that the cause of the quarrel with you is your support for your Israeli allies, who have occupied our land, Palestine. This position of yours, along with some other grievances, is what prompted us to carry out the 11 September events. Had you known the magnitude of our suffering as a result of the injustice of the Jews against us, with the support of your administrations for them, you would have known that both our nations are victims of the policies of the White House, which is in fact a hostage in the hands of pressure groups, especially major corporations and the Israeli lobby.
A government held hostage by pressure groups: who can argue with that? The corporate powers-that-be have long considered the U.S. military their private police force and have acted accordingly, using it to secure their profit margins ever since America’s debut on the world stage as a full-fledged imperial power. As for the decisive influence of the Israel lobby, it is indisputable.
After all, what other nation on earth could get away with placing an entire people in subjection, creating a system of legal apartheid, and relentlessly expanding its territory by means of conquest“and still remain the number-one recipient of U.S. foreign aid?
Bin Laden goes on to cite a book by someone who sounds very much like the author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, getting the title wrong, as well as Jimmy Carter’s book, remarking on the former president’s latest trip to the Middle East, where he denounced the treatment of Gazans. Bin Laden also cites Obama’s Cairo speech as acknowledging the suffering of the Palestinian people. The plight of the Palestinians, he avers, is "tragic beyond limits," and this tragedy is made possible due to "the influence of the Israeli lobby in America," the details of which "are explained by two of your fellow citizens. They are John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their book The Israel Lobby in the United States."
The hate-Mearsheimer/Walt brigade “ such as Bibi Netanyahu’s American PR director, Jeffrey Goldberg over at The Atlantic, and neocon Peter Wehner at National Review“are over the moon on account of this "endorsement." To the guilt-by-association school of book reviewing, the contents of a book”or an argument”matter little, but as the redoubtable John Derbyshire points out to Wehner:
"The Walt/Mearsheimer book seems, from a reading around it, to argue that lobbies on behalf of Israel are more powerful in Washington than lobbies for a foreign country ought to be, and have an undesirable influence on U.S. foreign policy. Those assertions are either true, or else they’re not. People with an interest in the matter should peruse Walt & Mearsheimer’s arguments, compare them with counter-arguments (which I can’t imagine are hard to find), and tell us their conclusions.
"Osama bin Laden thinks Jews are evil, so it is not very surprising that the thesis of the Walt/Mearsheimer book appeals to him. What I resist is Peter’s implication that his endorsement tells us anything about the quality of the book’s arguments. It doesn’t…. Arguments have to be studied, weighed, and compared with the facts of the world, not laughed out of court because some nutcase has endorsed them.
That this needs to be said at all speaks volumes about the sad state of our public discourse, yet I would take Derbyshire’s point and raise him one: the same objectivity ought to illuminate our view of bin Laden’s arguments. He may be a nutcase, and a murderous one to boot, and yet he is a very smart (and dangerous) nutcase, one whose analysis we would do well to take seriously”or ignore at our peril.
"After reading the suggested books, you will know the truth and you will be severely shocked at the magnitude of deception that has been practiced against you. You will also know that those who make statements from inside the White House today and claim that your wars against us are necessary for your security are in fact working along the same line of Cheney and Bush, and propagating the former policies of intimidation to market the interests of the relevant major corporations, at the expense of your blood and economy. Those in fact are the ones who are imposing wars on you, not the mujahedin. We are just defending our right to liberate our land."
This is what bin Laden has maintained all along: that he is fighting a defensive war, not a war of aggression, and there is merit in his argument “ as anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Western meddling in the Middle East can readily tell you. This nonsense about al-Qaeda establishing a "worldwide Islamic caliphate" is a rather fanciful invention, created by "clash of civilization" types who need to rationalize their view of Islam as being somehow intrinsically aggressive.
If bin Laden actually tried to recruit jihadists to the cause of somehow conquering the West, including the U.S., and subjecting it to sharia law, he would have far fewer recruits. No, he must present his jihad as a desperate battle against foreign invaders and occupiers”a role that we have done much to legitimate in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and throughout the world.
If you thoroughly consider your situation, you will know that the White House is occupied by pressure groups. You should have made efforts to liberate it rather than fight to liberate Iraq, as Bush claimed. The White House leader, under such circumstances, and regardless of who he is, is like a train driver who cannot but travel on the railways designed by these pressure groups. Otherwise, his way would be blocked and he would fear that his destiny would be like that of former president Kennedy and his brother.
Who writes Osama’s material? I suspect it’s this guy. In any case, the author of the following words surely has an unusual grasp on the essentials of our present foreign policy conundrum:
In a nutshell, it is time to free yourselves from fear and intellectual terrorism being practiced against you by the neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby. You should put the file of your alliance with the Israelis on the table of discussion. You should ask yourselves the following question so that you can determine your position: Do you like the Israelis’ security, sons, and economy more than your security, blood, sons, money, jobs, houses, economy, and reputation? If you choose your security and stopping the wars”and this has been shown by opinion polls “ then this requires that you act to stop those who are tampering with our security on your end. We are prepared to respond to this option on sound and fair foundations that have been mentioned before."
If any phrase sums up the strategy and tactics of the neocons during the past eight years or so, then surely "intellectual terrorism" is it. This juxtaposition of Israeli and American interests as increasingly antithetical, with the former being pursued at the expense of the latter, is similarly powerful. What’s interesting here, however, in light of recent reports that al-Qaeda is faltering, both organizationally and ideologically, is this apparent offer of a truce, or even an end to the hostilities. He’s done it before, in previous messages, but this pointed polemic has about it the air of someone who is desperate to get his message across: many of his previous pronouncements have been framed in terms of a message to the American people, yet his real intended audience seemed always to be the Arab/Muslim world. In this missive, however, with its references to American authors and political figures, one has to wonder whom he thinks he’s persuading: the offer of a cease-fire, or even a peaceful resolution of the conflict, displays an odd naiveté.
Obama, he argues, is a prisoner of his own office, who would surely suffer the same fate as John F. Kennedy if he ever tried to break the pattern of U.S. interventionism worldwide. While that, perhaps, is a bit melodramatic, it speaks to a basic truth: the American elites and the policymaking process they direct is biased in favor of interventionism, as the history of the last 60 or so years makes all too clear. Like many of Obama’s disappointed liberal supporters, bin Laden is asking: Where’s the "change"? With President Obama in office, we have neoconservatism without neoconservatives, or, as bin Laden puts it, "The days will show you that you have changed only faces in the White House. The bitter truth is that the neoconservatives are still a heavy burden on you."
He’s right about that. It’s almost like having Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz in charge, for all the difference it makes in terms of the conduct of American foreign policy. Again and again bin Laden displays his acute political sense, as well as his cruelty:
This is a losing war, God willing, as it is funded by money that is borrowed based on exorbitant usury and is fought by soldiers whose morale is down and who commit suicide on a daily basis to escape from this war.
It was bin Laden, you’ll recall, who predicted the impending bankruptcy of the U.S. as a result of its endless wars, and this fillip stings all the more since it is uttered post-crash, as the U.S. economy continues its downward slide into what seems like a bottomless abyss.
This war was prescribed to you by two doctors, Cheney and Bush, as a cure for the 11 September events. However, the bitterness and losses caused by this war are worse than the bitterness of the events themselves. The accumulated debts incurred as a result of this war have almost done away with the U.S. economy as a whole. It has been said that disease could be less evil than some medicines.
He ends with poetry:
Endless war will not tire me
For I am now fully grown and strong,
For this, my mother begot me,
Peace be upon those who follow guidance.
Endless war will eventually destroy us, not due to bin Laden’s efforts, but on account of our own. This is what they call "blowback," in CIA parlance: the consequences, however unintended, of U.S. actions abroad.
The boomerang effect is already taking a heavy toll, and it will get heavier still “ which is what bin Laden is counting on.
Given the direction our leaders are taking us “ more wars, and bigger ones, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now Somalia—bin Laden is not wrong to count on our exhaustion and coming defeat. He simply has to wait us out “ and time is on his side.
We have, it seems to me, never taken bin Laden and al-Qaeda all that seriously, and that, ultimately, will be our undoing. In him we face an unrelenting and devilishly intelligent enemy, one who knows our weaknesses and leverages them to his advantage.
The only way to defeat bin Laden is to change our foreign policy”not by putting lipstick on a pig and murmuring sweet nothings in the ear of the Muslim world, as Obama did in Cairo, but by doing a complete about-face and abandoning our dreams of empire. Short of that, bin Laden’s satanic self-confidence, I’m sad to say, is fully justified.
]]>In the years and months prior to 9/11, the terrorists remained undetected: there was not a hint, and certainly no warning, that we were about to experience the worst terrorist attack in our history. In spite of all the billions spent on “anti-terrorism” programs during the Clinton years, and the combined efforts of our intelligence community and those of our allies, Mohammed Atta and his cohorts managed to evade detection until the day they emblazoned their vengeance across the sky and pulled off the biggest terrorist attack in US history.
That, at least, is the official story. As to what the real story is”well, we’re not allowed to ask.
President Obama’s “green czar,” one Van Jones, was recently pressured into resigning. His crime? He had once signed a letter originating with one of the “9/11 Truth” organizations calling for a new investigation of the terrorist attacks. No, he hadn”t declared that 9/11 was an “inside job,” as some of the more flamboyant “truthers” assert: indeed, he hadn”t challenged any one specific aspect of the official story. All he had asked for was a new investigation “ and once this got out (thanks to Fox News nut-job Glenn Beck), he was shown the door.
This is the way our society deals with uncomfortable questions about “official” explanations for the inexplicable “ by purging all dissenters, and even anybody who asks a question without necessarily having a ready-made answer. To the stake with them! Burn the heretics! Move along, nothing to see here “ and don”t ask questions unless you want to completely marginalize yourself, lose your job, and be subjected to an intensive hate campaign.
We are asked to believe that 19 men, armed with the most basic weapons, somehow managed to elude the biggest, most expensively-accoutered intelligence apparatus in the world”and the intelligence agencies of our allies, to boot. Utilizing nothing but box-cutters and the knowledge gleaned from a few weeks at flight school, these supermen somehow managed to steer those planes into two of the most visible potential terrorist targets in the US, one of which had been successfully targeted by terrorists before. They did this with no help from any foreign intelligence agency, no nation-state in on the plot, and they did it for less than $100,000.
Really?
The more distance in time from the actual event, the odder such an assertion seems. Eight years to the day, the official account of 9/11 seems more anemic”and inadequate”than ever. Yet anyone who questions the official story”the narrative of 19 Arab dudes going on what would seems to be a rather quixotic jihad, haphazardly making their way through a strange foreign country on their own, all the while readying themselves for The Day That Changed History “ is denounced as a “conspiracy theorist,” a crackpot, and worse.
Of course, some of the people who challenge the official story are, indeed, crackpots: they think some kind of “controlled demolition” took place inside the World Trade Center, and that no plane hit the Pentagon.
This is very convenient for enforcers of the Official Truth: it’s easy to write these people off as nutso, and even easier to tar everyone who questions crucial aspects of the approved narrative with the same broad brush.
More critical minds, however, will not be deterred, and will certainly home in on the many discrepancies and holes in the official version of events, as well as the central implausibility of the whole affair, which is this: those nineteen hijackers simply could not have pulled it off without outside assistance of some sort, by which I mean to say help from a foreign power acting covertly in this country. The sheer complexity of the operation would no doubt have been enough to deter anyone, even al-Qaeda, from launching it in the first place: the sheer odds against it succeeding were simply too great. There had to have been some form of outside assistance”outside al-Qaeda, that is “ for the plot to have gone as far as it did right up until zero hour: and I believe there was, because there is plenty of evidence that strongly suggests it.
A few weeks after 9/11, I was the first—and, as far as I know, only”writer to draw attention to the fact that, along with the thousand or so Muslims rounded up in the wake of the attacks, as many as 200 Israelis were also taken into custody by then Attorney General John Ashcroft and the feds. The subhead in the Washington Post story was quite explicit that these guys weren”t picked up for ordinary visa violations: “Government calls Several Cases ‘of Special Interest,” Meaning Related to Post-Attacks Investigation.“
What, I wondered, was the Israeli connection to 9/11? In any case, from that point on it was a legitimate question to ask, and, indeed, unknown to me, the news department over at Fox News was asking it — and, a few weeks after my column appeared, they answered it.
In an astonishing four-part series on Israeli spying in the U.S., top Fox News reporter Carl Cameron detailed how Israeli agents on American soil had tracked the hijackers, as they moved amongst us, and, in addition, had launched what appeared to be a wide-ranging and quite aggressive intelligence-collection operation directed at US government offices across the country. The allegations contained in his report were denied “ and the story (which soon disappeared from the Fox News web site) was never followed up, but Cameron’s reportage haunts us today, and mocks us from the archives where it has been gathering dust for eight years. “Since September 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations,” reported Cameron:
“A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States. There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are “tie-ins.” But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, “evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.””
Over the next three nights, Cameron detailed the existence of an underground Israeli army in the US armed with a dazzling array of hi-tech spying devices and techniques that enabled them to penetrate our vital communications, including those utilized by law enforcement. His reports also described the consequences for any law enforcement officials who dared raise questions about this: their careers, Cameron told us, would be effectively over.
Cameron’s reporting was viewed by millions. Of course, the Israelis and our own government denied everything. Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli government, scoffed: Israel, spying on the United States? Why, who ever heard of such a thing?! The US government, for its part, disdained all such reports as “an urban myth.” The Israel lobby moved quickly to make sure the Cameron reports were thrown down the Memory Hole, and Cameron was accused of “ you guessed it! “ “anti-Semitism,” on account of having spent time in the Middle East in his youth.
Yet the story persisted. Die Zeit, the respected German weekly, ran a piece entitled “Next Door to Mohammed Atta,” in which further evidence the Israelis had been tracking the hijackers quite closely was cited as coming from French intelligence sources. This was followed up by a story in Salon “ hardly a bastion of anti-Semitic agitation “ which gave a long and detailed account of the Israeli spying operation, as outlined by Cameron, and concluded that it was in large part meant as a diversionary tactic. The same author did a comprehensive follow-up in Counterpunch, after The Nation spiked it. Reputable newspapers like the Scottish Sunday Herald reported the known facts.
Yet the 9/11 Commission did not so much as mention this aspect of the 9/11 story. Nor has Fox News ever followed up on Cameron’s reporting: they haven”t disavowed it, either. They, along with the rest of the “news” media in this country, simply pretend it never happened. When Arianna Huffington purged me from blogging on the Huffington Post, she cited my own reporting on this story as the reason: “Oh, come on, Dhaaa-link! You know dat’s anti-Semitic!”
Really? Is Fox News anti-Semitic, too? Is Die Zeit? Salon? Le Monde? How about The Forward?
Of course, Arianna is an airhead, but her instinct for self-preservation at all costs”yes, even at the cost of the truth”is indicative of what’s involved here. I was told, before I undertook to challenge the “official” 9/11 story, that I would pay for it by being cast out of the “mainstream” whilst being mercilessly smeared. In any event, since I was never all that interested in being considered “mainstream””in part because I knew the whole concept of “mainstream” was very over“and because the prospect of being viciously attacked didn”t faze me in the least, I was undeterred. And I remain so to this day.
What I want to know is this: does Fox News stand by Carl Cameron’s reporting on the question of Israeli foreknowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attacks? Yes”or no? If so, then what is their loudest mouth”I refer, of course, to Glenn Beck”doing smearing someone as a “Truther” who is asking the same sort of questions asked by Fox News reporter Cameron? If Van Jones must go, because he’s supposedly a “Truther,” then Cameron must go, too.
No, I don”t expect an answer to my question any time soon”or, indeed, any time at all. I just want my readers to contemplate the implications of that, and what it says about the veracity of the “official” 9/11 narrative.
]]>Take, for example, Pat Buchanan, who marks this anniversary with a reiteration of the theme of his excellent book, The Unnecessary War, which makes the case that war was never inevitable, and that only the pernicious idea of “collective security””the Franco-British “guarantee” to Poland”made it so. Buchanan also makes the indisputable point that if only the Poles had given Danzig back to Germany, from whom it had been taken in the wake of the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, a negotiated peace would have been the result”a much more desirable one than 56,125,262 deaths and the incalculable toll taken by the war in terms of resources and pure human misery.
Oh, but no: to the “bloggers,” left and right, this is a case of “Pat Buchanan, Hitler Apologist.” In the political culture constructed by these pygmies, any challenge to the conventional wisdom”especially one that involves questioning WWII, the Sacred War”is something close to a criminal act, one that separates out the perpetrator from the realm of polite society and consigns him to an intellectual Coventry, where he can do no harm. And of course attacking US entry into WWII is considered a “hate crime” because “ well, what are you, some kind of “Hitler apologist”?!
But of course WWII was not inevitable, and Hitler was indeed amenable to negotiations: he never wanted to go to war with the British”whom he admired”and the French, whose influential native fascist movement had good relations with their German co-thinkers. Instead, his gaze was fixed on the East, specifically the Soviet Union, and the lands of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is stated quite plainly in Mein Kampf, where the whole idea of lebensraum was broached: Hitler envisioned the Nazi empire bestriding the Eurasian landmass, basically replacing Russia as the preeminent transcontinental power.
As it was, antiwar sentiment in the years prior to Pearl Harbor was the dominant trend in America, so much so that not even Franklin Roosevelt dared go up against it: in the course of the 1940 election, with war a looming possibility, he infamously declared:
I have said before, but I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.
FDR was a much better liar than George W. Bush, but you”ll never get anyone over at TPM or the Center for American Progress to admit it. Or, maybe you will: maybe they”ll take the line of historian Thomas A. Bailey, who admired Roosevelt and wrote: “Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor.” Oh but it was a Good Lie, because: “He was faced with a terrible dilemma. If he let the people slumber in a fog of isolationism, they might fall prey to Hitler. If he came out unequivocally for intervention, he would be defeated” in the 1940 election. The people need to be lied to by a Wise Leader if it’s for their own good: that’s the consensus in Washington, D.C., at any rate, and nothing appears to have changed since that time.
In any case, the “Good War” was neither good nor inevitable: it was, instead, a war that saw its prelude in the Spanish Civil War, where the international left actively supported the Spanish “Republicans,” i.e. Stalinist Communists and their socialist and left-anarchist allies, and labored mightily to get the West to intervene on their comrades” behalf. In spite of the official Communist party line that WWII was an “imperialist war,” the groundwork for a fulsomely pro-war tack had already been laid as the commies and their liberal-leftie friends agitated mightily on behalf of “Republican” Spain and drummed up Western ire against Japan in the form of economic boycotts and attempted economic strangulation (a tactic that limned the later US embargo on steel and oil imports and provoked the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor).
If not for the Polish insistence on keeping Danzig, the Holocaust could conceivably have been averted—and the Cold War would most definitely have been avoided. For Hitler was determined to destroy the hated Bolsheviks, and it was only U.S. entry into the conflict”engineered by FDR, in alliance with the Brits, the Communists, and the left in general—that saved the “workers” paradise” from Germany’s sword.
Like two scorpions in a bottle, the two collectivist powers of Europe would have fought it out to the death—and eventually destroyed each other. Or, at least, one would have been so weakened by “victory” that collapse would have followed soon after.
It is always risky to engage in the construction of alternate histories, but it seems highly unlikely, in any event, that the Third Reich could have survived much beyond Hitler’s lifetime. There was no procedure to ensure the Nazi succession: rival aspirants to the Fuehrer-ship would have arisen, swiftly followed by civil war and the break-up of the “thousand-year Reich.” In all likelihood, the last Nazi would have been strangled over the bones of the last Bolshevik.
Unhappily, it didn”t turn out that way. Instead, we got an Allied “victory” that ensured the survival of the USSR and half a century of “Cold War“ — followed by an American attempt to ensure its permanent hegemony over the whole earth. In short, what we got was perpetual war”and a thoroughly militarized American state that can”t make a decent car but is geared to project force all over the world.
How did this happen? Writing in Salon, columnist Glenn Greenwald lays out the historical record:
There was a time, not all that long ago, when the U.S. pretended that it viewed war only as a “last resort,” something to be used only when absolutely necessary to defend the country against imminent threats. In reality, at least since the creation of the National Security State in the wake of World War II, war for the U.S. has been everything but a “last resort.” Constant war has been the normal state of affairs. In the 64 years since the end of WWII, we have started and fought far more wars and invaded and bombed more countries than any other nation in the world—not even counting the numerous wars fought by our clients and proxies. Those are just facts. History will have no choice but to view the U.S.”particularly in its late imperial stages”as a war-fighting state.
The “Good War,” in short, was the launching pad for the American Imperium, and ever since we”ve been marauding all over the world, likening our foes to Hitler, and building up a mighty apparatus of mass murder answerable to no one and nothing”certainly not to the American people. As Greenwald puts it:
As became clear with Iraq, the “mere” fact that a large majority of Americans oppose a war has little effect”none, actually”on whether the war will continue. Like so much of what happens in Washington, the National Security State and machinery of Endless War doesn”t need citizen support. It continues and strengthens itself without it. That’s because the most powerful factions in Washington”the permanent military and intelligence class, both public and private”would not permit an end to, or even a serious reduction of, America’s militarized character. It’s what they feed on. It’s the source of their wealth and power.
People wonder why I continue to rail on about WWII as the unnecessary war: that’s a hard case to make, they say, so why not leave it alone? Content yourself with opposing the Iraq and Afghan wars, they counsel. But it’s precisely because I oppose both those wars, and all the wars to come, that I persist in trying to get past the mythology and emotion-driven made-in-Hollywood version of “history” which rationalizes and even glorifies a war that killed over 50 million human beings and consigned whole nations to privation and tyranny.
Because you”ll note how every war is likened to WWII: every attempt at negotation is derided as “another Munich,” and every tinpot dictator is yet another “Hitler.” It worked so well in 1940 that the War Party keeps reenacting the same scenario: the Iranians, we are told, are crazed anti-Semites who want to create another Holocaust by nuking Israel. Saddam Hussein, we were told, was a Middle Eastern version of Hitler, and even Manuel Noriega”remember him?”was likened to the German dictator. Hitler“that’s the image they want to keep in front of our faces, the one that evokes hatred and a desire to kill, and even somehow justifies the deaths of multi-millions.
The power of this historical narrative is uncanny. The other day, I got into an argument with a friend of a friend, a nice liberal chap who dutifully supported Obama, and considers himself a good “progressive” with enlightened liberal views. This guy claimed that the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was “necessary” in order to “win” WWII. He made this argument as our mutual Japanese friend sat there and listened, impassively”doubtless quite used to Americans rationalizing the mass murder of his countrymen.
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Ah yes, the “good war,” just like the Afghan war that liberals are following their Dear Leader blindly into”although, it seems, more than a few outside the parameters of Washington, D.C. are beginning to question its alleged goodness.
It takes time, but the truth eventually comes out: it did in the case of the Iraq war, and our alleged “war of necessity” in Afghanistan which is being debunked in record time. World War II, however, remains ensconced in popular mythology as a kind of storybook narrative where Good confronted Evil and the latter was utterly and finally defeated. This myth of the “greatest generation” will likely persist for a while longer, overshadowing our contemporary debates about which wars to fight and why, but it cannot last forever. Eventually, the truth will out, as it always does, and then we can begin the process of dismantling its monstrous progeny, the National Security State.
]]>This ominous development ought to scare the pants off of anyone concerned with the maintenance of a free society—and the continued existence of dissent in an increasingly conformist profession where “journalists” are often reduced to the status of mere stenographers as they eagerly communicate to the masses the words, wishes, wit, and wisdom of government officials.
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The FTC was the progeny of the “Progressive” Era, which, as Murray Rothbard reminds us, “begins around 1900 with Teddy Roosevelt and so forth. Woodrow Wilson cements it with his so-called reforms which totally subject the banking system to federal power and with the Federal Trade Commission, which did for business what the Interstate Commerce Commission did for the railroads. In other words, he imposed a system of monopoly capitalism, or corporate state monopoly, which we now call the partnership of the government and of big business and industry, which means essentially a corporate state, or we can call it economic fascism.”
The creation of the FTC was occasioned by a campaign for the radical expansion of the federal government, and, not coincidentally, the beginning of World War I—a set of circumstances that roughly resembles what we are experiencing today. This gives a particularly sinister edge to the FTC’s sudden interest in the struggling newspaper industry and remarks by FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz to the effect that “Competition among news organizations involves more than just price.”
That’s indubitably true: it’s all about content. Yet one fails to see how”in a free society”the government can concern itself with such matters. Or why it should. That is, until one reads onward in the Times piece, and discovers that Leibowitz “is married to Ruth Marcus, an editorial writer at the Washington Post.”
The Post, like all newspapers, is losing money hand over fist: apparently its niche as the voice of elite opinion and the conventional wisdom isn”t paying off. Those “lunches” with powerful politicians and grasping lobbyists might have made some big bucks, if the whole shady business hadn”t blown up in their faces and forced them to cancel. So, when all else fails, these sorts instinctively turn to the government for some advantage or handout, although the exact nature of the “newspaper bailout“ that all too many journalists have been talking about has yet to take shape. That’s what these “workshops” are for: they”ll figure out a way to feed at the public trough and no doubt come up with a credible-sounding rationale, as per the Times piece:
“Though some may be uncomfortable with government oversight of any aspect of journalism, the F.T.C. seems to be “attempting to play a facilitating and public educational role in gathering together various disciplines and perspectives to talk about the crisis in mainstream journalism,” said Neil Henry, a professor and dean at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. “The government’s willingness to raise the profile of this issue, and to help explain why it is important for a national conversation, I think in general is welcome.”
The tone is unmistakable: those few archaic types who may experience discomfort at the thought of some Washington bureaucrat prescribing a cure for what ails journalistic enterprise are living fossils, ungrateful wretches, and paranoid to boot. No need to worry, though: Professor Henry assures us the Feds are just “facilitating” the “national conversation””but who started this conversation, anyway? A bunch of self-styled “mainstream” journalists and a government bureaucrat married to one, who have a pecuniary interest in finagling federal funding for their cash-strapped employers and stifling the competition, i.e., Internet-based news organization (such as, say, this one).
As the FTC Web site puts it:
The workshops will consider a wide range of issues, including: the economics of journalism and how those economics are playing out on the Internet and in print … online news aggregators, and bloggers; and the variety of governmental policie”including antitrust, copyright, and tax policy “ that have been raised as possible means of finding new ways for journalism to thrive.
So what this means is that the Old Journalism is going to deploy an agency of the federal government to regulate the industry in order to save these tired old dinosaurs who don”t deserve to survive in the first place. They”ll use every weapon in the government’s arsenal to do it: antitrust laws (watch out, Craigslist!), copyright laws (forget about linking to an Associated Press story: that’s copyright infringement!), and “tax policy””if we can”t get them by hook or by crook, we”ll just tax the New Media to death. That‘ll teach them to respect their elders!
Note, also, that the professor is very specific in his concerns: it’s “the crisis in mainstream journalism” he’s oh-so-worried about and that the government is going to find a solution to—as opposed to, you know, the other kind of journalism, which is all icky, not to mention downright disreputable.
So what is it about “mainstream journalism,” anyway, that led to this supposed “crisis,” which government facilitators”such as a man married to a Washington Post columnist “ are going to lead us out of?
Well, I”m just guessing, but maybe “consumers””i.e., readers”weren”t at all happy with the level and nature of the coverage provided by the Old Journalism. Maybe they began to distrust and finally abandon completely all those “news” organizations that reported with a straight face the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Maybe the social and political collusion that goes on in Washington between government officials and “journalists” led them to distrust the latter as much as they disdain the former. It hardly matters that these consumers don”t need or want “protection” from bloggers and non-“mainstream” news sources”but you can bet your bottom dollar they”re going to get it anyway. After all, the Nanny State knows best: we”re from the government, and we”re here to help…
Yeah, right!
The “mainstream” media is, by definition, the instrument and servant of the state. The Washington Post, for example, doesn”t challenge the conventional wisdom; rather, it lives to enforce it as accepted fact. And when the “facts” turn out to be otherwise, as in the case of Iraq’s WMDs”well, then, “Oops! That’s what everybody thought!“
And, of course, the media did a lot to ensure the election of our current president. Without all that favorable”even fawning”coverage, he might not have gotten the Democratic nomination and sailed to victory quite as easily as he did. So this sudden interest in the preservation of “mainstream” journalism is the payoff. In the American spoils system, all the victor’s foot soldiers are rewarded with their fair share of the pelf.
The idea that the FTC is going to start regulating the journalism business”or even start a “national conversation” about the prospect of doing so”ought to send chills down the spines of every real journalist in this country.
Unfortunately, it won”t: most of these guys and gals are self-styled “progressives“ who can”t very well make an argument against government intervention in their industry while they endorse bailing out the rest of the economy. Why, the government is our friend—and if you don”t believe that, you”re a wacko extremist who’s probably bringing guns to town hall meetings.
The way they”ll lull liberals into accepting this unprecedented FTC “interest” in journalism is to aver that this is Obama’s government we”re talking about here, and he would never countenance government control of the news industry. Our guy is in the saddle—so don”t worry about that whip he’s carrying, because of course he won”t actually use it…
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A media bailout is coming. They”ll think up some sort of half-a**ed rationale for it. Leave it to Professor Henry and his trendy confreres; that’s what they get paid for. They won”t call it government control of the news, they won”t acknowledge that’s what they want, but when the first news aggregator gets prosecuted by the FTC for “copyright infringement” and the indispensable Craigslist is slapped with a fine for “unfair competition,” please don”t say I didn”t warn you.
The FTC couldn”t regulate Bernie Madoff, in spite of being tipped off about his activities and presented with evidence of crimes—but they sure can start a “national conversation” about saving the sorry a**es of the Washington Post and the New York Times. Well, I”d like to start a “national conversation” of my own”all about how scared, clueless, and terminally lazy “journalists” and their friends in high places are angling for advantage, at our expense. That’s one conversation Leibowitz, his fellow bureaucrats, and their journalistic handmaidens would never permit.
]]>“In the giddy spirit of the day, nothing could quite top the wish list bellowed out by one man in the throng of people greeting American troops from the 101st Airborne Division who marched into town today.
What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Ba”ath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring?
“Democracy,” the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. “Whiskey. And sexy!”
According to this reporter, the crowd shouted its approval, and, here at home, the warbloggers took up this cry as their signature slogan, celebrating this anonymous Iraqis” apparent joy at the imposition of modernity on Iraq at gunpoint as decisive proof that the policies of the Bush administration were right and the “transformation” of the entire region was on the agenda.
It didn”t quite turn out that way, however: far from “democracy, whiskey, sexy,” the Iraqis got an Islamic “republic” where shops that sell alcohol are frequently bombed, if not outright banned,”sexy” is highly problematic, and democracy such as we conceive of it in the West is still a will-o”-the-wisp.
Now that we are entering phase two of the Western crusade to make the Middle East more like Kansas and it’s Barack Obama’s turn at the plate, Afghans are reacting to the imposition of “democracy, whiskey, sexy” with rather less enthusiasm than their Iraqi brothers. A recent news report on the Afghan election averred:
“Fornication, bare flesh, and a descent into Western decadence”these are Afghan definitions of democracy that expose how little the foreign concept has permeated the national psyche as elections near.”
Actually, it seems to me as if the “foreign concept” has penetrated quite well, if one “Wasim,” described in the report as a 28-year-old waiter in a Kabul kebab restaurant, is being quoted correctly here:
Western democracy is freedom and fornication. This is democracy for Western, American, and European people, and it is developing the same way here.
“Freedom and fornication””a more accurate description would drop the former and focus exclusively on the latter. As long as they”re allowed to fornicate freely, Westerners will believe they”re free and won”t so much mind being slaves.
Mansoor Aslami, a 21-year-old cosmetics shop owner cited in the same news report, also seems to have a pretty good handle on the sort of system we”re trying to export to his country. He “is less than keen on some of the trends he sees among his patrons. “I see signs of democracy among customers with bare arms and necks,” considered shocking immodesty in Afghan culture. “But so long as democracy is according to Islam,” he adds, “it is good.””
I cite these remarks because they illustrate how naïve we were in seeking a “transformation“ of the Middle East by force of arms”or by any other means. In the context of Afghan society”where clan, tribe, hierarchy, and tradition trump all”the equation of democratic values with those of an irresponsible hedonism and even nihilism is perfectly understandable. Aslami, who sees “signs of democracy among customers with bare arms and necks,” understands the issue quite well”far better than our own blinkered grand strategists and counterinsurgency specialists.
The latter seek to “clear, hold, and build“ a functioning Afghan state patterned on the Western model, in which citizens assent to a social contract that imposes social and political discipline in exchange for allowing a relatively wide berth in the personal realm. This places the Americans, right from the start, in total opposition to the last thousand or so years of Afghan history, just as it did the Soviets.
In Afghan society, the realm of the personal is ruled by Islam, and people take their pleasures when and where they can. There is no central state and no social contract: Allah and the weight of history give order and shape to people’s lives. To take one particularly dramatic aspect of the vast gulf that separates the Afghan mind from the American: the role of women in the social and political order is not something that meets the approval of Western feminists”not that this has stopped Western-backed President Hamid Karzai from going along with the notorious “food for sex“ law, which allows Afghan husbands to withhold all sustenance from wives who refuse to perform their wifely duties in the boudoir. It’s election time in Afghanistan, and Karzai is making a populist appeal by wooing tradition-bound voters and criticizing the Americans for what he regards as their lack of concern over civilian casualties in the fight against the Taliban.
This and his reputation for corruption is no doubt failing to win him many kudos from Hillary Clinton’s State Department, and Washington generally, which is why the Obama administration has been nervously edging away from Karzai of late. They would much rather have somebody in there like Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister and academic who lived abroad for 30 years and was an official at the World Bank. Ghani has taken on James Carville as his campaign adviser-manager, a move likely to garner more votes in Washington than on the ground in Afghanistan. In Ghani”registering at 4 percent in the polls “ a less likely populist insurgent can hardly be imagined.
The Americans will probably have to settle for Abdullah Abdullah, scion of a family that served the old Afghan monarchy. Abdullah’s chief claim to fame is his association with the legendary Ahmad Shah Massoud, known as the “Lion of Panjshir,” the charismatic anti-Soviet jihadist and chief figure in the Northern Alliance. Massoud was assassinated on Sept. 9, 2001, after he had warned U.S. intelligence agents of an impending attack by al-Qaeda.
No one knows, of course, how much the favored candidate of the Americans”whomever that might be “ is being subsidized and otherwise assisted, but the outcome depends more on what happens in Washington than on the streets of Kabul. The proliferation of ballots for sale and the almost entirely ersatz voter rolls are bound to make the Iranian election seem relatively credible in comparison. While we breathlessly await the election “results,” let’s understand that the winner will be determined by who is buying up all those phony ballots and how big their budget is.
In any case, the imposition of “democracy” on the face of Afghan society is already liquidating the glue that holds their culture together, destroying the social fabric and replacing it with”what?
Remember the mantra repeated by the high priests of our new counterinsurgency doctrine: clear, hold, and build. After they”ve cleared away the “primitive” tribal structures and religious strictures that give life meaning to Afghans and held it against the onslaught of natural resentment and hatred unleashed against this alien intrusion, what do they intend to replace it with? What, exactly, are they building? In all likelihood a grotesque mutant hybrid of Western mass-democracy and Islamo-feudalism, one that will prove just as incapable of surviving the rough Afghan terrain as the Soviet hybrid did.
The “clear, hold, and build” scenario painted by the Obama administration’s military theoreticians doesn”t tell us the whole story. They”re leaving out an important step. A more accurate way to describe our task in Afghanistan is “clear, hold, build”and keep holding.” The Soviet-backed leftist government never got off life support, and the need to pour resources into the war was an important factor leading to the dissolution of the Soviet empire.
That we will allow ourselves to be similarly drained, and with a similar result, seems almost unbelievably stupid “ but, then again, we never learn from history, do we? After all, our officials believe they stand above history”that they are making history, and not the reverse.
]]>We shouldn”t doubt the scope of the present war effort. Make no mistake: the
Obama administration is radically ramping up the stakes in the “war on terrorism,” which, though renamed, has not been revised downward, as the Washington Post reports:
As the Obama administration expands U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, military experts are warning that the United States is taking on security and political commitments that will last at least a decade and a cost that will probably eclipse that of the Iraq war.”
There are always “warnings” in the beginning, aren”t there? For some reason, however, they are never heeded. Instead, we just barrel ahead, undaunted, into the tall grass where ambush awaits us. War opponents predicted the Iraq invasion would prove unsustainable—and we were right. We said that, far from greeting us with cheers and showers of roses, the Iraqis would soon be shooting at us and demanding our ouster—and we were right. We said the rationale for war was based on a series of carefully manufactured and marketed lies—and that was the truth, now wasn”t it? Yet it seems we are caught in an endlessly repetitive nightmare, where the same prophetic voices are being drowned out by a chorus of “responsible” voices—to be followed by an all-too-familiar disaster.
The problem, however, is that the scale of these disasters seems to be increasing exponentially. As Gerald Celente, one of the few economic forecasters who predicted the “08 crash, put it the other day, “Governments seem to be emboldened by their failures.”
What the late Gen. William E. Odom trenchantly described as “the worst strategic disaster in American military history””the invasion of Iraq “ is being followed up by a far larger military operation, one that will burden us for many years to come. This certainly seems like evidence in support of the Celente thesis, and the man who predicted the 1987 stock market crash, the fall of the Soviet Union, the dot-com bust, the gold bull market, the 2001 recession, the real estate bubble, the “Panic of “08″ and now is talking about the inevitable popping of the “bailout bubble,” has more bad news:
“Given the pattern of governments to parlay egregious failures into mega-failures, the classic trend they follow, when all else fails, is to take their nation to war.”
As the economic crisis escalates and the debt-based central banking system shows it can no longer re-inflate the bubble by creating assets out of thin air, an economic and political rationale for war is easy to come by; for if the Keynesian doctrine that government spending is the only way to lift us out of an economic depression is true, then surely military expenditures are the quickest way to inject “life” into a failing system. This doesn”t work, economically, since the crisis is only masked by the wartime atmosphere of emergency and “temporary” privation. Politically, however, it is a lifesaver for our ruling elite, which is at pains to deflect blame away from itself and on to some “foreign” target.
It’s the oldest trick in the book, and it’s being played out right before our eyes, as the U.S. prepares to send even more troops to the Afghan front and is threatening Iran with draconian economic sanctions, a step or two away from outright war.
A looming economic depression and the horrific prospect of another major war “ the worst-case scenario seems to be unfolding, like a recurring nightmare, and there doesn”t seem to be any way to stop it. Are we caught, then, helpless in the web of destiny, to be preyed upon by those spiders in Washington?
I have to admit that, at times, I”m inclined to believe it: the early years of the Bush era, particularly the dark days right after 9/11, were hard times for advocates of liberty and peace. For us here at Antiwar.com, they were days of nearly unrelieved gloom. As the Bush era drew to a close, however, there were many signs that we were in for a turnaround, that the dark ages were over and a new day was dawning. The Iraq war was discredited, along with its cheerleaders, and the collapse of the War Party’s political fortunes seemed all but assured with the rise of an insurgent movement within the Democratic Party, a movement that happened to coalesce around Barack Obama but could have rallied to any charismatic or even remotely appealing figure, so desperate were people for any sign of hope.
In the beginning, I was enamored of the possibilities of this electoral insurgency against the presumed nominee, Hillary Clinton. By stubbornly sticking to her pro-war position and refusing to second-guess her decision to support the invasion of Iraq, Hillary turned the primary campaign into a tug-of-war between the interventionist faction of the Democratic Party “ centered in the leadership”and the antiwar rank-and-file, many of whom were beginning to develop a comprehensive critique of interventionist foreign policy and were well on their way to becoming principled opponents of imperialism.
Then Obama stepped into the picture.
I am not among those who are currently whining that Obama has somehow “betrayed“his antiwar supporters”prominent among them the organizers of the principal peace coalition, United for Peace and Justice. After all, he’s just doing what he said all along he”d do, and that is fight the “right war,” which, he averred, we ought to be waging in Afghanistan rather than Iraq. At the end of this month, his generals will report to him on how many more troops they need to “do the job,” and you can bet they won”t be calling for any reductions.
History has shown that Afghanistan is practically unconquerable, and we could send an army of a million or more and still fail miserably. But think how the endless expenditures will “stimulate” our economy!
Forecaster Celente has identified several bubbles, the latest being the “bailout bubble,” slated to pop at any time, yet there may be another bubble to follow what Celente calls “the mother of all bubbles,” one that will implode with a resounding crash heard “round the world—the bubble of empire.
Our current foreign policy of global hegemonism and unbridled aggression is simply not sustainable, not when we are on the verge of becoming what we used to call a Third World country, one that is bankrupt and faces the prospect of a radical lowering of living standards. Unless, of course, the “crisis” atmosphere can be sustained almost indefinitely.
George W. Bush had 9/11 to fall back on, but that song is getting older every time they play it. Our new president needs to come up with an equivalent, one that will divert our attention away from Goldman Sachs and toward some overseas enemy who is somehow to be held responsible for our present predicament.
It is said that FDR’s New Deal didn”t get us out of the Great Depression, but World War II did. The truth is that, in wartime, when people are expected to sacrifice for the duration of the “emergency,” economic problems are anesthetized out of existence by liberal doses of nationalist chest-beating and moral righteousness. Shortages and plunging living standards were masked by a wartime rationing system and greatly lowered expectations. And just as World War II inured us to the economic ravages wrought by our thieving elites, so World War III will provide plenty of cover for a virtual takeover of all industry by the government and the demonization of all political opposition as “terrorist.”
An impossible science-fictional scenario? Or a reasonable projection of present trends? Celente, whose record of predictions is impressive, to say the least, sees war with Iran as the equivalent of World War III, with economic, social, and political consequences that will send what is left of our empire into a tailspin. This is the popping of the “hyperpower” bubble, the conceit that we “ the last superpower left standing “ will somehow defy history and common sense and avoid the fate of all empires: decline and fall.
We are in for some “interesting” times.
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]]>That may very well be true, but one has to ask: faced with an essentially impossible task like subduing the Afghans, under what circumstances would the effort have been any less difficult?
Well, the Brits have a few suggestions to make. They, after all, are experts at the business of empire, having had so much more experience than their American cousins, and they are full of advice. The problem, you see, is “the lack of a realistic strategy.”
How enlightening! What the House of Commons would consider “realistic,” however, is rather a mystery. We need only look at the Brits” experience in Afghanistan”and the Russians“, and others” going all the way back to the Parthians and Alexander the Great“to realize the only realistic strategy would be to get out while the going is good. All the czars of Russia couldn”t pacify this indomitable, inherently warlike people, fighters without match anywhere in the world. Obama and all his czars cannot do much more than match this record.
The American answer is that they do indeed have a new strategy, although its newness is up for debate.
The Bushian neocon strategy of “kill, kill, and kill again“ succeeded in establishing a beachhead, and now the Obamaite strategy is “clear, hold, and build.” Theirs is a more “responsible” imperialism, armed with a brand new counterinsurgency doctrine, one that blends the prudent use of force in perfect concert with nation-building and diplomacy. I don”t know what the Brits are complaining about, because this model is based roughly on the popular American conception of the British example, which supposedly introduced civilization into the wilds of Africa and Asia, leaving behind a legal and cultural legacy that persists to this day. Be that as it may, the effect of all this is to give the British the right to lecture us, wagging their fingers and warning:
The ‘considerable cultural insensitivity” of some coalition troops
had caused serious damage to Afghans” perceptions that will be “difficult to undo.”
In Britain, political incorrectness is a crime punishable by exclusion, as Michael Savage found out, and a jailable offense. In a parody of Orwell’s worst fantasy, spy cameras are everywhere, though this hasn”t [.pdf] put much of a dent in the crime rate. An off-color remark that might be deemed offensive to some state-protected minority can land you in prison.
Britain, in short, can no longer be considered part of the free world, which is only half of why their condescension is so obnoxious.
The other half is due to their blindness to the obvious: invading and occupying someone else’s country is inherently “insensitive,” culturally and in every other conceivable sense. The illusion that one is waging war in a “culturally sensitive” manner is bound to inspire war crimes as yet undreamed of, yet this is what the Brits are urging on us. And that is just the beginning of the British solons” critique:
We conclude that the international effort in Afghanistan since 2001 has delivered much less than it promised and that its impact has been significantly diluted by the absence of a unified vision and strategy grounded in the realities of Afghanistan’s history, culture, and politics.
Truly take up the white man’s burden: go native. That’s the trick! Think Lawrence of Arabia“not Rambo!
Oh, and, by the way, unless you come up with “a unified vision””i.e., cut us a piece of the pie”we”re getting up from the table and exiting the door.
The United States is moving rapidly to establish a series of military outposts throughout the Central Asian core, emanating outward from Iraq and extending into the former Soviet “stans, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The result: a ring of military bases encircling both the Iranians and the Russians and guarding multiple pipelines pumping the oil and natural gas reserves of Central Asia along the old Silk Road.
The Europeans want in on this energy bonanza, while the U.S. bears most of the costs of developing, maintaining, and defending the physical infrastructure. So some of this rhetoric reflects a falling out among thieves over how to divide the spoils, while the reflexive anti-Americanism of the Labor Party’s natural constituency is another factor.
In any case, the proper answer to the Brits is that there is no right way to invade and conquer a sovereign people, no “culturally sensitive” method of committing naked aggression, no “unified vision” that could possibly justify such a futile and profoundly immoral mission. To drop a bomb on an Afghan village and then drop leaflets explaining to the survivors we”re doing it for their own good is typical behavior for the sort of soulless, collectivist bureaucracies that rule the Eurosphere. I doubt that even Barack Obama could get away with that sort of thing here “ yet it increasingly looks like he’s going to try.
Already his commanders are demanding more troops for the Af-Pak front, and this takes place against the backdrop of a curious phenomenon. While opponents of the Iraq war, and of military adventurism in general, voted for Obama in overwhelming numbers, his election has not seen the triumph of their cause. Instead of retreating in the wake of Obama’s victory, the interventionists have succeeded in extending their reach, building a new and broader coalition than the one assembled by the neocons in the Bush years.
Today, the War Party extends from Bill Kristol’s “Foreign Policy Initiative“ to the various Obamaite Centers for This “n” That.
On the home front, at least, the “coalition of the willing” is ready for action: what the Brits want is to sort out the international aspect, then we can move ahead”via our “unified vision””with a joint colonialist project carried out in a culturally sensitive and mutually lucrative manner.
So is the British complaint that the mission has yielded “much less than it promised” adding an international flavor to the rising chorus to widen and deepen the West’s military commitment? Not in the least. The House of Commons is deeply concerned about “mission creep,” as they put it:
We conclude that the UK’s mission in Afghanistan has taken on a significantly different and considerably expanded character since the first British troops were deployed there in 2001.”
So we”re doing less than we promised, but even that may be too much. Oh, the ironies of running an empire! It’s certainly a job requiring more subtlety and appreciation for the absurd than Americans are capable of, a thankless task demanding more patience “ and funding “ than we can presently afford.
Speaking of irony, I”ll pause only briefly to note the indelicacy of asking the first black American president to take up the White Man’s Burden in a responsible and “culturally sensitive” manner “ but then again arrogance and outright rudeness is part of the charm of being British, at least as far as we Americans are concerned.
The Obama administration has so far ignored all the early warning signs that their Afghan adventure will prove a costly disaster, of which the balking British are just the latest. They seem determined to venture into this boneyard of empires, and not halfheartedly, like their predecessor.
They are intent on launching a comprehensive and systematic campaign to “clear, hold, and build” a Western sphere of political and economic influence extending from Kabul to the Horn of Africa, walling off the Iranians and the Russians from access to vital trade routes and raw materials, isolating them from the world market and from each other. This is the real “unified vision” of the Western project in Central Asia, albeit not one our British advisers are likely to openly acknowledge.
The Iraq war proved to be the Republican Party’s Waterloo. Will the Af-Pak war turn into the Democrats” Vietnam? The cultists compare Obama to John F. Kennedy, but aside from the glamour factor the resemblance may be closer to Lyndon Johnson, a liberal president with an expansive domestic agenda who let an overseas conflict escalate out of control, in spite of all the efforts of the Best and the Brightest
]]>The Palestinians are ready to negotiate, or, at least, their alleged leadership has taken this stance, but since we have ruled out even talking to the only democratically elected leadership they have, i.e., Hamas, the peace overtures of the Palestinian Authority, presided over by “President” Mahmoud Abbas, are for the most part irrelevant.
Hamas, for its part, has lately shown signs of softening its hard-line stance, but the Israelis “ and the Americans”will have none of it. So that avenue remains closed.
The Israelis, on the other hand, show no signs of favoring a compromise. Quite the contrary. Their stance has hardened with the victory of an ultra-rightist coalition in February’s elections. The collapse of the Labor Party, the marginalization of the Israeli peace movement, and the rise of an outright racist and fascist party, Israel Beiteinu, has moved the Israelis into some pretty dangerous territory, which seems to prefigure a radicalization of the general population that augurs ill for the cause of peace.
Heedless of the enormous obstacles strewn in his path, however, Barack Obama is wading into these treacherous waters and has reportedly laid down the law to the Israelis, demanding that they stop expanding the “settlements,” and otherwise shifted the inordinately pro-Israel bias of U.S. policy toward a more “evenhanded” approach. The United States, this administration promises, is going to be an “honest broker.”
But why, oh, why should we be in the business of “brokering” a compromise over a conflict that has persisted for decades and shows every sign of defying the best intentions? What’s in it for us?
According to the logic of the pro-broker camp, the U.S. has been hampered in its efforts to fight the terrorist threat”al-Qaeda and its allies”by the ridiculously skewed policies of our government in the region. We have supported Israel unconditionally, especially during the eight years of the Bush regime, ignoring the national aspirations of the Palestinian people, and earning the enmity of Muslims everywhere, who identify with their plight. By becoming more evenhanded”i.e., by recognizing the Palestinians” complaints as being based on legitimate concerns, and not just dismissing them out of hand as “terrorists””we gain brownie points in the Middle East and help marginalize the extremists who will hate us in any event.
Another argument is that the Israelis are not the best judges of their own national interests. Israeli intransigence, according to this argument, is not only bad for the Palestinians and the U.S., it is also harming Israel, which will eventually be overcome by demographic realities”ruling over occupied territories that harbor Arabs who are fast out-reproducing their Israeli occupiers, so that the Jewish state will one day be overwhelmed.
These arguments “ on the surface quite plausible “ fall apart when examined up close.
To begin with, the idea that the major complaint of the Arab and Muslim worlds against America has to do with our preferential treatment of the Israelis is largely a myth. Our support for Arab tyrannies, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, is far more of a factor, one that impacts the peoples of those countries in a way that the largely abstract Palestinian problem (abstract, that is, to ordinary people on the Arab “street”) does not. Sure, Osama bin Laden & Co. score plenty of propaganda points on this question, but to believe that the influence of these groups will be neutralized if Obama wins a Nobel for “solving” the Palestinian question is naïve, at best.
Secondly, the creation of a Palestinian state, far from solving this troublesome question, will no doubt create a whole new set of problems for us and for the Israelis”as the latter recognize all too well. So far, the American conception of this state envisions a government that has no army, no means of defense, and no viable foreign policy options”a government that is not, in fact, a government in any meaningful sense of the word. It will not have a monopoly on the use of force in its given geographical domain, because presumably the Israelis will retain the “right” to launch one of their infamous incursions in the event things get out of hand.
The Israelis rightly ask: What guarantees do we have that this Palestinian state won”t turn into just another terrorist entity, one that will wage a relentless war against Israel and launch attacks of the sort carried out by Hamas on a regular basis? The answer is: there is and can be no such guarantee.
So why should they agree to preside over the creation of what promises to be their undoing?
On the Palestinian side of the equation, the objections are even more trenchant: the state we propose can offer them no protection and no means of asserting their national identity in a way that guarantees their security. Nor does it promise the triumph of democracy, or, indeed, any sort of change for the better.
They are more than likely to be ruled over by the same gang of kleptocrats and thugs who have stood at the helm of the Palestinian Authority since the time of Yasser Arafat. The one election they were permitted to hold resulted in the victory of a party deemed unacceptable by both Israel and the U.S.”this in spite of the fact that it was George W. Bush’s idea to hold the election in the first place! Palestinians understandably ask, “What’s in it for us?” The answer, unfortunately, is virtually nothing.
The attempt by the U.S. to impose an “honest” brokership is doomed to failure for these reasons and more, yet the Obama administration is determined to move ahead, provoking a reaction inside Israel that is stoking a radical anti-Americanism, the likes of which we haven”t seen or heard since… well, since Osama bin Laden’s latest missive. At a recent demonstration held by right-wing Israeli “settlers” and their supporters, Obama was denounced as a “racist” and an “anti-Semite,” while one orator limned al-Qaeda’s favorite line that the U.S. would be “destroyed” and the American empire brought down by Obama’s alleged hostility to Israel.
The worst outcome of Obama’s Middle Eastern “peace” project would be for it to succeed, because, in that event, we would engender growing hostility from both sides, as the impracticality of the arrangements caused the Grand Accord to fall apart at the seams.
The desire by the U.S. to take on this thankless task is based in the same sort of hubris that drove us to invade Iraq (twice). It continues to burden the rest of the region”and the world”with the costs of a seemingly endless war. Who are we, anyway, to be “brokering” anything?
Why, we”re the world’s only “superpower””or, as the French would have it, “hyperpower“”and it’s our obligation (yes, a moral obligation!) to lead. Right?
Now we”re getting at the core of the folly that drives U.S. presidents to attempt the impossible, all without a thought for the costs. The “superpower” conceit is one that will die a hard death, but die it must if we are to avoid national bankruptcy and the ruination of the republic. Because, you see, this delusion is unsustainable: we”re bankrupt, and our economy is a shambles on account of our inability to recognize this simple and increasingly unavoidable fact. We cannot continue in this vein for much longer, yet we “ in the person of our president”persist, defying the gods and ordinary common sense in pursuit of Nobel prizes and the favor of future historians.
Are we really a “superpower” the world;s last remaining example of this legendary species, the Overman of international politics? The very concept of a “superpower” implies that this is not just some ordinary major power we”re talking about, but one that can successfully defy the odds and reality itself in successful pursuit of its goals. One that stands above history, instead of being ruled by it, and somehow avoids the fate of all previous empires: inevitable decline and fall.
The term “superpower” began to gain currency in the Cold War era, when it was used to define the two nations that faced off in a worldwide struggle for dominance: the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Both nations had nuclear weapons, and in such number that any conflict started by the other would soon result in mutual annihilation. This seemed to define what it meant to achieve superpowerdom.
In any case, it was unimaginable that either of these two superpowers would ever fall. They seemed to represent two eternal principles, two immortal forces in perpetual conflict, the yin and yang of international politics.
Which is no doubt why almost no one predicted the end of the Soviet Union”certainly not the CIA, which was caught flat-footed as the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. So much for the Soviet “superpower.”
Drained by the Afghan war and the continuing costs of subsidizing their Eastern European and Central Asian empire “ and finally defeated, I would argue, by the impossibility of economic calculation in a socialist system “ the mighty Soviet Union fell victim to what might be seen as a massive heart attack, its vital arteries blocked by clots of hubris that had built up since 1917.
Will America suffer a similar fate?
In essence, the answer to that question is yes. I would qualify that, however, by adding that our own agony is sure to be more drawn out”and, as a result, more painful. The economic powerhouse created by the exertions of an earlier time should not be underestimated: the productive capacity and will to innovate represented by American industry launched a period of unprecedented prosperity, one that, in retrospect, will be looked at by future historians as a golden age. We are still coasting along on the momentum of that great leap forward, but there are many indications that we”re slowing down considerably”and, worse, there are intimations of a coming crash.
The Soviet Union dissolved like a particularly scary nightmare at dawn. Our own demise may be similarly swift, albeit far more nightmarish. If and when it comes, it will have been brought about by the same inability to recognize limitations that laid the Kremlin low. This is how the superpower conceit ends”not in defeat by a better-armed enemy, but on account of its own bloated self-conception.
Forget the Israeli-Palestinian problem. We have problems of our own. If we want to end Arab-Muslim enmity that results from our unthinking and immoral support for Israeli aggression, then there’s a very simple way to achieve this noble aim: cut off all aid to Tel Aviv. Once the $3 billion-plus subsidy is ended, the link between the U.S. and Israel’s racist policies in the occupied territories will end, too. That the Obama administration would never even consider such a “radical” proposal as asking the Israelis to stand on their own feet is all we need to know about the future of our career as an honest Mideast broker. With all this talk of Obama cracking down on the settlement question and demanding “concessions” from the Israelis, when it gets right down to it the president has no real bargaining power. Since Obama can”t, or won”t, threaten Tel Aviv with a withdrawal of funding, Netanyahu and his government can hold out indefinitely, effectively blocking any real progress toward a settlement.
The reason, as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have tirelessly pointed out, is the inordinate power of the Israel lobby to dominate the policymaking process, and specifically the legislative process. The Democratic Party’s fundraising apparatus would suffer a near-fatal blow if the lobby’s wealthy friends decided to withhold their support. Obama may have to choose between a Nobel prize and his party’s political fortunes. And we know which option he”ll choose.
]]>As Israel defies the US on settlement policies and its continuing mistreatment of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, a recent poll shows the American public is undergoing a significant shift in its historically pro-Israel views:
According to the survey of 800 registered voters, which was conducted June 9-11 by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, those who believe Israel is committed to peace has dropped to 46 percent this month from 66 percent last December. The poll found that some 49 percent of American voters call themselves supporters of Israel, down from 69 percent last September, and only about 44 percent of voters believe the United States should support Israel”down from 71 percent a year ago.
What is the reason for this dramatic drop in support for the Jewish state? After all, the Israeli government and its American amen corner spend a lot of money”a lot of it our own tax dollars coming back to haunt us”in pursuit of the good will of the American people. They do this because they know the U.S. is Israel’s lifeline”and that what is essentially a settler colony could not exist for very long if taken off U.S. life support, i.e. if the billions in aid given each year were ended or even significantly reduced. Yet, in spite of this, Israel’s approval ratings are plummeting, fast”and the reason is an exponential expansion of what I call the nutbar factor in Israeli society.
Here‘s a good and quite recent example, reported in the excellent Israeli newspaper Ha”aretz:
The Pope and the cardinals of the Vatican help organize tours of Auschwitz for Hezbollah members to teach them how to wipe out Jews, according to a booklet being distributed to Israel Defense Forces soldiers.
Officials encouraging the booklet’s distribution include senior officers, such as Lt. Col. Tamir Shalom, the commander of the Nahshon Battalion of the Kfir Brigade.
The booklet was published by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, in cooperation with the chief rabbi of Safed, Rabbi Shmuel Eliahu, and has been distributed for the past few months.
No, the booklet is not entitled The Protocols of the Elders of the Vatican, but it could be: “On Either Side of the Border” purports to be the testimony of “a Hezbollah officer who spied for Israel.” Inside is a greeting from an extremist rabbi “in the name of the Nahshon Brigade.” Thousands of copies were distributed to IDF soldiers, until the pamphlet was spotlighted by Ha”aretz.
This “spy,” who formerly went by the name “Ibrahim,” and now calls himself “Avi,” claims Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was part of a delegation that journeyed to Italy, France, and Poland, alongside representatives of the Vatican. Apparently the Pope was otherwise engaged, or he would no doubt have joined the Hezbollah chief, but, in any case, according to Ibrahim/Avi, “We knew [the Pope] identified with Hezbollah’s struggle.” Yes, those Hezbollah fighters who drove the Israelis out of Lebanon were really altar boys wearing keffiyehs.
Oh, but I”ve saved the best part for last, because, you see, the endpoint of Hezbollah’s hegira was none other than Auschwitz. Ibrahim/Avi avers:
We came to the camps. We saw the trains, the platforms, the piles of eyeglasses and clothes … We came to learn … Our escort spoke as he was taught. We quickly explained to him: Every real Arab, deep inside, is kind of a fan of the Nazis.
What a fiendishly clever public relations strategy on the part of Hezbollah: telling the world they”re Nazis. That‘s the ticket! No wonder Israel’s poll numbers are going down!
Quite naturally, the public exposure of this loony propaganda has led to disavowals on all fronts. An IDF spokesman averred that “The book was received as a donation and distributed in good faith to the soldiers. After we were alerted to the sensitivity of its content, distribution was immediately halted.”
Translation: We thought we could get away with it.
A spokesman for the publisher, the Orthodox Union in America, also passed the buck, claiming their Israeli office was responsible for the pamphlet, and they knew nothing about it.
Translation: We thought we could get away with it.
Yes, but why did they think that? After all, “On Either Side of the Border” is so obviously nutso that one would think its author would be laughed off the stage in any semi-rational society. Yet, according to one IDF officer, this crazy conspiracy theory is “widely believed” by his fellow conscripts”and, I would contend, this gullibility reflects the growing craziness of Israeli society in a broader sense.
Surely, Israel’s defenders will reply, this is an “isolated incident.” Yet it seems this is not the first such “isolated incident” that had the IDF funneling the demented rantings of Israeli extremists to the ranks. One contributing factor to the sheer savagery of the most recent Israeli “incursion” into Gaza was no doubt a publication issued by the IDF rabbinate that opined:
When you show mercy to a cruel enemy, you are being cruel to pure and honest soldiers. This is terribly immoral. These are not games at the amusement park where sportsmanship teaches one to make concessions. This is a war on murderers. “A la guerre comme a la guerre.”
Then, too, the IDF high command disavowed the material, “reprimanded” officers who facilitated its wide distribution, and claimed that”yes, you guessed right”it was an “isolated incident.”
If the Obama administration is wondering why the Netanyahu government “ with the support of most Israelis— is openly disdaining his Middle East peace initiative, then they ought to review the propaganda put out by the US-funded IDF rabbinate, such as the following, as reported by Ha”aretz:
[There is] a biblical ban on surrendering a single millimeter of it [the Land of Israel] to gentiles, though all sorts of impure distortions and foolishness of autonomy, enclaves and other national weaknesses. We will not abandon it to the hands of another nation, not a finger, not a nail of it.
A Palestinian state? Not if the Israelis can help it. It might have been possible a few years ago, before Israeli society began to really go off the rails. However, these days, such views aren”t extremist “ they”re “mainstream”! And, what’s more, they”re being propagated and reinforced by an Israeli military machine that is funded by the US taxpayer. By the way, I didn”t know the IDF has an official rabbinate, but the Ha”aretz story enlightened me on that score. How many Americans know their tax dollars are going to fund religious fundamentalists in the Middle East?
Imagine if that happened in this country, and the U.S. Army was funding and promoting Christian fundamentalism in the ranks of the American military “ why, you”d never hear the end of it, and, what’s more, the Anti-Defamation League and allied organizations would emit the loudest expressions of outrage.
Well, yes, but you can”t condemn a whole society on account of the fringey frothings of a few extremists”right? True, but the problem is that it isn”t just a few extremists: it’s a whole lot of them, arguably the overwhelming majority of Israelis, who, after all, voted for the current ultra-rightist government. Look who they elected to the position of Prime Minister, and “Bibi” Netanyahu is perhaps one of the more moderate leading figures in the current government. A man who longs to deport all Arabs from the sacred soil of Israel, and who would like nothing better than to nuke Tehran, is, today, the Foreign Minister.
To come up with an analogous situation, what did the U.S. and the Europeans do when confronted with an Austrian government that included the relatively benign Jörge Haider, who merely advocated withdrawing government subsidies from immigrants and restricting their entry into the country? They established a diplomatic cordon sanitaire around Vienna, and refused to deal with the Austrians. Yet Avigdor Lieberman, an open racist and former bouncer who once proposed that Israel should bomb the Aswan dam, is greeted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her European counterparts as if he were a normal, decent human being.
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I have longed warned that Israel’s ostensible commitment to “traditional Jewish values” of openness, democracy, and respect for the dignity of all persons could not long withstand the requirements of maintaining what is essentially a religious-racial caste system. Israel, a settler colony that exists on account of its ability to drive out the indigenous Palestinians and keep them out, is of necessity the Sparta of the Middle East (there is no Athens). Militarism, by its very nature, makes a mockery of democracy, and is the mortal enemy of liberty. It was only a matter of time before this inner contradiction was resolved in favor of creatures like Lieberman, whose rise is a barometer of the ongoing corruption of Israeli society”an indicator of a collective madness.
Speaking of craziness, this generalized derangement in the ranks of the pro-Israel forces extends, it seems, to this country, where George Gilder has just written a book entitled The Israel Test. The book’s theme, as Matt Yglesias dryly notes, is “somewhat unusual in that it hinges in part on what chapter three dubs “The Tale of the Bell Curve,” in other words the innate genetic superiority of the Chosen People relative to the goyim. He offers some intriguing examples to illustrate this point beyond the familiar fact that Jews win lots of Nobel Prizes and are good at chess. For example:
Yes, there is a religious component in anti-Semitism, but there is also a political and economic element, reflected in the objective anti-Semitism of Karl Marx, Noam Chomsky, Friedrich Engels, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, and other Jewish leftist leaders who above all abhor capitalism. Jews, amazingly, excel so readily in all intellectual fields that they outperform all rivals even in the arena of anti-Semitism.
Yes, according to Gilder, those crafty Jews are so damned smart that they”ve even cornered the market on anti-Semitism!
The irony that one of Israel’s most ardent defenders is now using arguments based on a theories of genetic superiority may be lost on that country’s defenders, at this point: political ideologues and other sorts of fanatics are usually lacking a sense of irony.
This has got to be the absolute looniest thesis ever advanced by a “serious” author. In his quest to rationalize the history of our government’s unconditional support for Israel, no matter the cruelty and injustice of their actions, Gilder claims that support for the Jewish state is a “test” of our willingness to defend liberty”and, indeed, ourselves”against the Islamist threat to conquer the world and establish a global caliphate.
The idea that we must support the Israelis on account of their alleged genetic superiority over the Arab race may seem like an “out of the box” opinion, and it certainly is in the United States: but I wonder if it isn”t right in line with Israeli opinion, which, after all, lionizes Lieberman, and has elected the most belligerent”and anti-American”government in its history. The rhetoric of Lieberman and his party, which the other “mainstream” politicians and parties rushed to emulate, routinely depicts Arabs as subhumans.
What we are witnessing in Israel, today, is the degeneration into a military theocracy, one armed with nuclear weapons”and quite willing to use them against those they consider less than fully human. And if that doesn”t scare us into cutting them off”financially, at the very least”then we ought to prepare ourselves for the consequences. Because it isn”t going to be pretty ….
]]>To being with, he avers that “if you can”t beat them, join them””that is, if you can”t beat the multiculti rules and regulations that increasing afflict our lives, then the best policy is one of … surrender. He cites a case where the city of New Haven threw out the results of a test taken by aspiring firemen in which blacks didn”t do as well as the city would have liked. New Haven bureaucrats threw out the test results for all races, not just blacks, and did the whole procedure over again: this, claims Taylor, is anti-white “discrimination.”
While Paul Gottfried inexplicably claims that most of the white nationalists he has met are “libertarians,” it appears that their Maximum Leader is not among them: for the libertarian would argue that the entire procedure and the unfairness inherent in it could be eliminated by simply privatizing the fire department. Of course, it would still be possible to pursue the elusive goal of equality of results through enforcement of the so-called civil rights laws”yet that is precisely what Taylor would do on behalf of “oppressed” whites. This kind of scam is wrong when blacks try to pull it off, but right when engaged in by whites.
The Taylorite commitment to “white racial consciousness” is simply a cracked mirror image of the worst excesses of the “black power” movement”and it is advanced with much less justification. After all, whites can hardly point to a long history of “oppression” at the hands of non-whites: indeed, precisely the reverse is the case. It is whites who engaged in the slave trade, and some of them fought a war to keep blacks in chains. State-enforced racial segregation was the rule and the law in many Southern states, up until relatively recently: where oh where is the history of white “oppression” at the hands of black slave-masters?
Taylor and his acolytes are like those teenage boys who dress in baggy pants hanging down to their buttocks, carry boom-boxes, and “act black” because it’s considered “cool.” They want in on the multi-culti action, and, like “Vanilla Ice,” the wannabe white rapper, he’s baffled when people consider him a joke.
Yet it isn”t a joke. Taylor is dead serious, but what is he serious about? Ostensibly, he’s upset over those white firemen denied jobs in New Haven, but it quickly becomes all too clear that’s not his main beef: what he’s really against is miscegenation, or what his intellectual heirs used to call “race-mixing”:
He then cites a number of commentators who think this trend is desirable, from Michael Barone to the Socialist candidate in the French election for Prime Minister, and then snarks: “If those New Haven firemen got a raw deal, I guess their parents just married the wrong people. “
But what has miscegenation got to do with the issue he supposedly cares about, those poor oppressed white firemen? It’s not clear. What is all too clear, however, is that the real agenda of the “white nationalist” movement has zero to do with legitimate issues, such as the injustice of affirmative action. It is all about race-mixing”an “issue” that, in an age when a mulatto is president of these United States, has a certain explosive quality, as well as an aura of outright nastiness.
This is what has given the “white nationalists” a big shot in the arm, these days: the rise of Barack Obama. The neo-Nazi webmaster of “Stormfront” exulted that, as the election results began to come in, his web site, devoted to the rantings of losers living in their parents” basement, experienced a flood of visitors. David Duke, the heir to the George Lincoln Rockwell wing of Taylor’s movement, expressed grave concern”and similarly rejoiced in the expected increase in his audience.
As the white-collar wing of the same movement, Taylor and his American Renaissance crowd are salivating as the prospect of massive recruitment because one of “them” is in the White House. They hope to infiltrate what they call the “pseudo-conservatives” with their message of genetic determinism and white supremacy, imbuing the rightist critique of Obama and all his works with a racialist tinge.
This, of course, is just what the Obamaites ordered: they would love to marginalize their opposition and banish them to the fever swamps of race-obsessed neurotics and social misfits. Nothing would please them more than to see the rising resentment of their policies ascribed to the spreading influence of racist agitators. If I were the Democratic National Committee, I”d funnel millions into Taylor’s outfit, and like-minded groups, for the same reason that the interventionists encouraged Nazi infiltration of the America First antiwar movement in the run-up to World War II.
To those who want to know why I am taking the time and energy to take on Taylor and his racialist pals, check out the section in my Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement
on the life and career of John T. Flynn, who knew all too well what the War Party was up to.
What I don”t understand, and I doubt Taylor does either, is this: what do the “white nationalists” want? What is their program? They are “nationalists” without a nation. Do they want to expel all non-whites from U.S. territory? Do they want to carve out their own ersatz “nation” in, say, the nether reaches of Idaho and the Dakotas? Do they want to create a caste system based on racial heritage, as the Nazis tried to do, with whites on top and the “mud people””their disgusting term for non-whites”on the bottom? Or do they just want to abolish race preferences in law and custom”in which case they shed their “white nationalist” hoods and morph into white versions of Ward Connerly? Would Taylor outlaw miscegenation if he could? I have no doubt that he would, no matter what he says in public.
Americans don”t like racists, not because they have been indoctrinated by leftist professors and do-gooder social workers, but because “white nationalists” and their ilk are looking for the unearned: they want power, prestige, and money in the bank based on factors over which they had no control, that is, their genetic heritage. That’s why they spend so much time posing as amateur “scientists” and “anthropologists,” extrapolating entire theories of social organization from the results of “intelligence tests” that presume to measure the ineffable. It is a soulless, materialist, dogmatic view of life that has nothing in common with authentic conservatism, and which has all sorts of statist implications”not to mention a history of racialist-inspired statist measures”that make “white nationalism” antithetical to libertarianism.
Richard Spencer makes a big deal out of how “open-minded” and un-PC Takimag is in publishing Taylor’s tirade against “race-mixing.” I cannot share his enthusiasm. There is a good reason to avoid the Taylorites, and their even cruder brothers-in-spirit in the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazi netherworld, and it has to do with maintaining the intellectual and spiritual integrity of the American Right. I agree with Pat Buchanan, who, in pointing out the disparity between his own ideas and those of David Duke, averred: “We come from different traditions.” Indeed we do. Taylor’s is the legacy of Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, the Count de Gobineau, and that failed portrait painter from Vienna: ours is the legacy of Christianity, which recognized the centrality of the individual soul, and rejects collectivism, including racial collectivism, as inimical to freedom, reason, and just relations among men.
“If you can”t beat “em,” says Taylor, “join “em!” The paleoconservative answer to this must be: Never!
]]>“The whole thing was hidden from the public”but not from congressional leaders, who were informed of the harsh interrogation methods and never objected or revealed what they knew.
“This last is key to understanding one good reason why no one is being prosecuted, and why the top Obamaites (although not their rank-and-file followers) are generously declaring it’s time to “move on.” Going after the torturers, we”re told, would be too divisive. Well, yes, it would divide the Democratic Party, first and foremost, as the complicity of Pelosi & Co. is made all too clear and it turns out that torture is a bipartisan sport.”
Just about two weeks later, in Friday’s [May 8] edition of the Wall Street Journal, we read:
“Congressional leaders were briefed in detail about techniques used in the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program, according to a new intelligence document.
The document appears to conflict with recent statements from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was then the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee. Ms. Pelosi has said she hadn’t been told that the CIA was using the technique known as waterboarding, or simulated drowning. According to the document, Ms. Pelosi was one of the first lawmakers briefed on the interrogations in 2002….
“The document lists 40 briefings provided to lawmakers on intelligence, judiciary and other panels, the first of which was provided to then-House intelligence committee chairman Porter Goss, a Florida Republican, and Ms. Pelosi of California on Sept. 4, 2002. That briefing is described as covering “enhanced interrogation techniques.” It included the use of the techniques on detainee Abu Zubaydah, background on legal authority, and “a description of the particular [enhanced interrogation techniques] that had been employed.”
“A recently declassified Justice Department memo on the CIA program dated May 30, 2005, states the CIA used waterboarding to interrogate Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times during August 2002.””
What did Pelosi know and when did she know it suddenly becomes an important issue: will she be a victim of the Democratic-run “truth commission”? Like the French Revolution, will the Obama-ites wind up turning on their own leaders (except, of course, for the Dear Leader)?
It’s not like suspicions of Democratic complicity in use of torture are anything new. In a televised interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, broadcast earlier this year, Pelosi denied having been briefed on EITs employed against “enemy combatants” by US government personnel:
“No. No,—the fact is, they did not brief…well, first of all, we’re not allowed to talk about what happens there but I can say they did not brief us with these enhanced interrogations that were taking place. They did not brief us. They were talking about an array of interrogations that they might have at their disposal.
MADDOW: Techniques in the abstract, as if they were not being used?
PELOSI: We were never told they were being used.
MADDOW: You were told they weren’t being used?
PELOSI: Well, they just talked about them, but—the inference to be drawn from what they told us was that these are things that we think could be legal. … But I can say flat out, they never told us that these enhancement interrogations were being used.“
Caught in a web of lies, Pelosi is going to make quite a spectacle of herself trying to claw her way out of it. She”ll probably do no better than Calamity Jane Harman, whose recent outing as a would-be obstructor of justice in the AIPAC espionage case has the bigmouthed Democratic hawk spluttering with rage and phony indignation. Pelosi will no doubt be less theatrical, certainly less articulate—and it looks like Lanny Davis has another client. While Harman and her supporers are yelping that the charges against her are the concoction of Republicans such as Porter Goss, the former CIA director and very partisan GOP congressman, it was Leon Panetta’s CIA that released the documents fingering Pelosi, albeit at the request of congressional Republicans.
Suddenly, the idea of prosecuting high government officials for war crimes under the statutes prohibiting torture is a lot more appealing”providing, of course, that we can get all those who were in the loop and said nothing. The trial of Nancy Pelosi for war crimes”now that’s a prime candidate for Court TV.
]]>He was a great one for self-discipline: all good businessmen are, and he was the epitome of the entrepreneur in an almost Randian sense. As the proprietor of Camino Coins, he was in the gold business for decades, as long as I knew him: he was a principled businessman who knew the value and the meaning of what he was doing, and did it with zest.
I met Burt through our mutual friend and mentor, Murray Rothbard, the libertarian philosopher, economist, and prolific author and activist whose career as an intellectual entrepreneur spans the life of the modern libertarian movement. Burt was an enthusiastic supporter of Rothbard’s intellectual and political projects, from the Center for Libertarian Studies in the old days to the Ludwig von Mises Institute in the 1990s, from the Libertarian Forum, Murray’s feisty little newsletter started in the early 1970s, to the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, the last issue of which was dated sometime in the mid-1990s. Whenever there was something to be done, a practical matter to be attended to, a conference to put on or a special project that had to be undertaken in order to preserve the integrity and good order of the libertarian movement, Burt was there, with his clear-eyed no-nonsense view of things and his invariably affable manner.
Burt was in many ways like a father to me: he tempered my more angular personality traits and patiently helped me”in spite of myself”to survive my misspent youth relatively intact, and ceaselessly urged me to focus on the one project out of many that eventually became successful: Antiwar.com. It was Burt who graciously offered to take Antiwar.com under the wing of the Center for Libertarian Studies when we converted to the nonprofit model and professionalized our organization. Without that kind of assistance, we would never have survived.
Burt had a generous personality, and I mean that in several senses at once, including an ability to stand outside his own prejudices and see the humor in situation. I remember one time, at a Libertarian Party national convention held in Seattle, I believe, in which Ron Paul was slated to become the LP presidential nominee. It was one of those rare times when Burt and I were on opposite sides of the barricades: I had left the LP, along with a small group, having decided that the third-party strategy was a dead end, and that it was time to build a libertarian faction inside the GOP. This was 1987, or thereabouts: you might say I was a premature Ron Paul Republican. This meant”in 1987″that it was necessary to oppose Ron Paul, who was running on a third party ticket and not in the GOP primaries. So a contingent of us “Libertarian Republicans” showed up at the LP National Convention, with all kinds of printed propaganda, including a rather scurrilous and wrong-headed pamphlet attacking Ron”think of Matt Welch, only well-written. Indeed, there were two such pamphlets, both authored by yours truly, in which poor Ron was raked over the coals for every deviation from strict libertarian principle”both real and imagined”I could throw at him, and then some.
There I was, handing out these screeds at the front entrance to the convention, when who should walk up to me but Burt, with a more-in-sadness-than-anger look on his face. “Justin, Justin, Justin,” he said, shaking his head as he perused the contents of my screed and giving me a mischievous half-smile. “If only we could take all that energy and harness it for good.”
Well, later on, and not much later on, he did manage to harness it for good, as he and Murray eventually got sick and tired of the LP and its curiously non-political shenanigans. The Cold War was ending, and the divisions between libertarians and old-style conservatives were less important than the similarities. Burt was tremendously excited by the possibilities, and plunged into activities of the then-brand new John Randolph Club, meant to be a “bridge” organization uniting libertarians and traditionalists in opposition to the neocons. Murray was the first president of the group, and Burt served, I believe, as the treasurer”a role he often played in our little projects, and a vital one it was.
It was around this time that I decided to write my first book, Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement, a history of the “Old Right” in American politics from the New Deal to the present day. Murray encouraged me to write it, and, once it was finished, Burt naturally took a leading role in seeing that it was published. The first thing he did was get me a good editor”an idea that had never occurred to me, and would never have occurred to me. After all, I didn”t need an editor, or thought I didn”t. In any case, this decision was a godsend, as it cut down the size of my book to a manageable length, made it much more readable, and gave me the book the sort of polish it would otherwise have sorely lacked. Burt arranged for the actual production of the book”printing, binding, etc.”and when it came time to publish a new edition, he gave the go-ahead without a moment’s hesitation, although, of course, he knew that the whole enterprise was a money-losing proposition.
Armed with our new book, which was hot off the press, we”Burt and I”descended on a “National Review West” conference, and therein lies a story, one that is emblematic of Burt, his salutary influence on me, and his mindset in general.
One day, shortly after the publication of Reclaiming, I was thrilled to get an invitation to speak at a West Coast conference sponsored by National Review magazine. This was back in the (relatively) good-old-days when John O’sullivan was editor-in-chief, and there was still some life in the old girl, albeit not much. I naturally attributed the invitation to the appearance of my book, which, I assumed, the conference organizers had no doubt read. However, as it turned it, that was very far from the case. Indeed, the National Review-niks had heard of me, but not, alas, of my book: and what they had heard about me apparently qualified me to appear on one of their panels, entitled “The New Sexuality: A Conservative Response,” or some such nonsense.
I was aghast. A book on the history of the Old Right was of no interest to them, but my, uh, private life was: what kind of a conservative movement was this? I was determined to go to the conference, burst their bubble, and let them know just what I thought of their ridiculous priorities. Burt, however, reined me in: “Don”t say anything, Justin. Just keep your mouth shut. Go along with their game, for as long as you have to, and then when you get to the speakers” podium”let them have it with both barrels! Let this be our Pearl Harbor!”
My panel was the second-to-last or perhaps the last one on the last day of the conference: we had to sit through an entire two sessions of this Soviet-like congress of neocons without giving ourselves away, and I have to tell you that I almost gave away the show on more than one occasion. Sitting at dinner with Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Jack Kemp, and a host of mini-cons, deep in a discussion of the benefits and absolute justice of unlimited immigration, was quite an experience, the culinary equivalent of being waterboarded. Burt had to kick me under the table more than once.
Finally, the last day of the conference dawned, and I sat through the perorations of the various speakers wondering how the audience would respond. The panel was chaired by Bill Bennett, who was at that time engaged in a nasty public spat with Pat Buchanan. Bennett had called Buchanan a “fascist,” and the inevitable comparison to Father Coughlin had naturally come up. Pat was running for President (it was his first presidential campaign), and the neocons were going after him hammer and tongs.
The attacks on Pat made Burt furious, particularly the charge of anti-Semitism. We had been hammering away at the neocons in the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, defending Pat from these odious accusations and showing how the definition of “anti-Semitism” had somehow morphed into anti-neoconservatism. Burt, being Jewish, took all this very personally, and he was determined that the neocons wouldn”t”mustn”t”be allowed to get away with it unchallenged.
I had plans for Señor Bennett, that living incarnation of neocon “morality,” and I was savoring the look of horror that would take hold of his features once I began speaking. But that moment was far, far in the future, or so it seemed, as David Horowitz droned on, and on, and on. His subject: homosexuality, and its attendant evils, illustrated by a rather lurid tale of his trip to a gay bathhouse.
As Horowitz’s motor mouth droned inexorably on, his voice excited as he described the various exotic sexual practices”some of which not even I have witnessed or even heard of!”and I could see the faces of the white-gloved little old ladies in front turn a paler shade of white. All I could think about, however, was the spectacle of Horowitz’s fat hairy misshapen body revealed in all its unglorious imperfection except for the decency of a towel wrapped around his thickened middle, the stomach spilling over the knotted rag”a sight that must have sent the gay boys running in the opposite direction with all speed.
Bennett finally cut the loquacious Horowitz short, who swiftly and mercifully concluded his oration, giving way to Midge Decter, who hectored us about the evils of feminism whilst exhibiting all the annoying mannerisms of the species she derided. The floor was then given to a Marine colonel who rambled on about the “Lavender Threat,” theorized that the gay movement was really aimed at sapping our military strength, and possibly connected to International Communism, which was in turn just a front for the Democratic Party. Midge Decter, by the way, sat next to me the whole time making sympathetic noises and patting me on the hand, as if to comfort me in the face of this unrelenting barrage of “homophobia.”
I appreciated the gesture, and smiled at her in turn, but, honestly, I couldn”t have cared less what anyone there thought of homosexuals, myself, or anything else for that matter. I just wanted the chance to strike…
When that chance finally came, I took full advantage of it. With one more squeeze of the hand from Midge, who smiled at me as I walked to the podium, I thought: “Boy, is she ever going to be surprised!” At which point I launched into a discussion of how and why “civil rights” for homosexuals became part of the litany of the Politically Correct. It was all derived from the black civil rights movement, and the idea that discrimination, of any sort, was socially and politically verboten, which conservatives had adopted uncritically. And yet, I averred, Barry Goldwater had been right to oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbade “discrimination” in housing and employment, because once conservatives acceded to that, and joined the cult of “saint Martin Luther King,” the jig was up, and they had”by the force of sheer logic”to accept all the other “civil rights” revolutions that followed in the wake of King’s movement”the women’s movement, the “differently abled” movement, and, yes, the gay civil rights movement.
Like Goldwater, I said”looking straight at Burt, who was sitting up front and smiling”Pat Buchanan was and is right to oppose the “gay rights” agenda, and reassert the conservative position”a stance for which he has been excoriated “by some sitting right here in this room,” said I, looking pointedly at Bennett. The rest of my speech was a campaign stump speech for Buchanan”and I even got in a jab at the Kosovo war (avidly supported by all the neocons in attendance) by remarking that I had seen a “Free Kosovo” contingent in that year’s Gay Freedom Day parade in San Francisco, and that Buchanan was right to oppose the American effort to export “gay rights” to the former Yugoslavia at gunpoint.
The audience loved it, as the sustained applause indicated, but I was only looking at Burt, who was giving me an enthusiastic thumbs-up.
The neocons, on the other hand, were glum-faced all “round. The horrific Horowitz was horrified: he jumped up out of his seat, screaming that I was a “racist” and that I just didn”t understand “this country,” and no one should pay any attention to me. Incorrectly claiming that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was all about securing voting rights for blacks, he demanded that this sacrilegious crime-think be disavowed, ignored, and sanctioned. “I cannot sit here silently,” he yelled, and I thought: ain”t that the truth. I was limited in my rebuttal to correcting his egregious description of the Act, since Bennett was practically frothing at the mouth. Ms. Decter turned to me, and said: “That was the ballsiest speech I”ve ever heard!” Of course it was, I thought”Burt helped me to write it.
After my speech, we got out our literature table, and started selling my book: dozens of copies were sold to rank-and-file National Review-niks, most of whom were good people and enormously sincere, and all of whom congratulated me on my speech. Only Bill Kristol failed to compliment me as he slithered up to the table and bought a copy: obviously it did him no good, but, what the heck, we”ll take anyone’s fifteen bucks.
I could fill an entire volume with similar stories of my adventures with Burt in the ideological jungles of the American Right, but the hour grows late, and, by now, my readers have some idea of just who Burt Blumert was and what he meant to the freedom movement”what a gift he was, one that we didn”t always deserve. Yet he just kept right on giving, right up until the end.
I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for Burt in his final days. The diagnosis of pancreatic cancer took us all by surprise: Burt, after all, was a pillar of our movement, a veritable rock. It was no more possible to imagine him felled than it was for me to imagine the giant redwood outside my front door leveled to the ground. And he was the one who found his condition most unimaginable of all: he insisted on making a trip to New York right after his diagnosis, and a trip to Auburn, Alabama, where the Mises Institute is located. When I first moved into my Sonoma county digs, way up north of him, he made the long trip to see me: we had lunch outside on my deck, under the looming redwoods, and talked of the dark days ahead”Obama was sure to win, he thought”and our hopes (and fears) of the future. I shall not soon forget that sun-dappled day, and Burt’s boundless optimism and good humor in spite of everything.
Writers don”t have a lot of friends”close friend, I mean, the kind you can turn to in times of trouble as well as times of celebration”and this writer is no exception. Burt’s passing thins their ranks considerably: indeed, there is a great gaping hole where our friendship once flourished, like a garden flower of rare beauty that has suddenly and unexpectedly expired. Yet Burt’s impact on the world, his wisdom and his spirit, will leave more than mere memories of a good man and his works: he was a nurturer of ideas, and he understood their importance. The ideas that he championed”the freedom philosophy”will live on in large part due to his efforts. In that sense, he is still alive”and still cheering me on to one, two, many “Pearl Harbors” on behalf of liberty.
]]>Rio Nido””river nest” in Spanish”is an idiosyncratic collection of some 250-odd summer cabins, and a few rather more substantial structures, about a mile and a half away from the resort town of Guerneville, on the north side of the Russian River. Endowed with a post office, its own zip code, and the faux-Tudor style Rio Inn, this little hamlet nestled in the redwoods was once a thriving and picturesque summer retreat for San Francisco’s oldest families, mostly Irish Catholic firefighters and policemen who came up here with the brood on the old Northwestern Pacific railroad, which, in better days, used to run from the City to the wilds of Sonoma county. When that artery was cut, by the general failure of railroads in favor of a government-subsidized highway system to benefit the auto industry, the lifeblood was slowly drained out of all the communities along the Russian River, most especially Rio Nido.
This little fairy-tale hamlet of clapboard cottages and imaginatively redone two and three-story homes is curled up in a canyon, sheltered under the thick canopy of a redwood forest. Stylized runrays slant through the gloom and settle in pools of light on the forest floor, mist rising from the ground as if from underground fires. The older homes have names: “The Hideaway,” “Joy Joynt,” “Dewdrop Inn.” Cats slink noiselessly through the shadows while giant blackbirds”their caws like mordant laughter”hover overhead.
At the mouth of the canyon is River Road, and you can pass underneath it through a garbage-strewn tunnel. On the other side is the river, and what was once the beach, now overgrown and virtually impassable.
Photos from the time show the bridge that crossed the river to the wide beach, still extant, on the sunny southern side. A 1915 postcard shows a redwood arch spanning the river and floating changing houses forming a little bay on the northern side, while swimmers frolick in the shallows. The railroad ran from the farming community of Fulton, all along what is now River Road, through vineyards and the Korbel Winery, stopping at Rio Nido and going on to Guerneville, Monte Rio, and the wilds of Cazadero.
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From a mining town, Guerneville was soon a center of the burgeoning lumber industry, but as this declined, the area became San Francisco’s summer playground. Mark Twain’s remark that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco is all too true. Starting in the late eighteen-hundreds, when the first railroads snaked northward from Baghdad-by-the-Bay, the City’s inhabitants sought sunlight and fresh air along the banks of the Russian River, a tradition that persists to this day, albeit in very attenuated form.
The big band era was Rio Nido’s heyday. A 1930 photo shows a gathering at the Inn featuring “Ran Wilde and his Orchestra,” as several zoot-suited characters lounge around the entrance to the Rio Inn. The Inn is a structure whose architecture “ and fate “ in many ways captures the history and essence of the place. A three story building with some thirty or so rooms, built in the vaguely Germanic style of a country inn, with overhanging rafters and steeple-towered roofs, it crouches in the midst of towering redwoods, half Hans Christian Anderson, half Alfred Hitchcock. The interior is solid redwood, with bay windows and details that recall the Arts and Crafts movement, roughhewn and often whimsical. Today its carved doors and main hall”where once bigtime band-leaders like Muzzy Marcellino, Ken Baker, Griff Williams, and Ozzie Nelson played to crowds of GIs and their sweethearts “ are covered in a thick layer of dust and neglect. The antique furniture is frayed, and water-stained, and a moldy smell wafts through the upstairs hallways, which are redolent with the smell of marijuana and other less benign substances.
As the Big Band generation gave way to the Beatles, and the demise of the railroads choked off the vital link to urban centers, the Inn went through a succession of owners, each more incompetent and indifferent than the last. During the sixties, the summer people”the descendants of the old San Francisco families who have been coming up to the River for generations”were shocked by the hijinks that went on. One woman told me that she once received a midnight phone call at her home in San Francisco, informing her that a tribe of local hippies had decided to “squat” in her cabin.
The Seventies brought in the gays, who bought up homes, fixed them up, and injected some much-needed cash into the local economy. As the eighties rolled around, however, so did AIDS”and the gay playground on the Russian River was hit hard. In the wake of this sudden depopulation, another darker element appeared: in the eighties, the biker subculture found refuge in Rio Nido, and across from the Inn, the Rio Nido Roadhouse garnered a reputation as a biker hangout”and the center of attention for the Guerneville cops. With the bikers came meth”methamphetamine, the home-made drug of choice for the country’s rural lumpen”and Rio Nido was a notorious node of the trade. A crackdown in the late nineties, pretty much stamped it out: that and a local neighborhood watch, headed up by the local colony of lesbians who make up a substantial portion of the population, put an end to the crime spree.
The Rio Nido beach, which had lured generations of Bay Area vacationers from the dusty pavements of the City, was by this time overgrown with weeds: the bridge, long gone. One Rio Nido postcard in the archives of the Russian River Historical Society depicting swimmers with bathing caps and boats with crossed oars promises: “Memories that will last.” Yet those halcyon days are little remembered, except in the archives of historical societies and the mind’s eye of the avid researcher. From those archives, we retrieve idyllic scenes of Arcadian serenity: the radiant faces of happy families idling in the summer sun, floating down the river in fanciful boats and laying on a beach now thick with brush up to the water’s edge. A bathhouse, a hotel, and the Inn, along with a dime store and the dining room, where members of the Eagle Lodge supped and drank local wine from the winery just down the road”all of it gone, replaced by waves of successive countercultural colonizers, although a few remnants of the old crowd “ retired firefighters, mostly, or their spouses”are still a big influence in the local homeowners association.
When I hear the catchphrase “shovel ready,” in relation to the public works programs recently approved by the Obama-ites and touted as the salvation of the nation, I think of Rio Nido: if ever a place was in need of “infrastructure,” then this is it. The roads are as pockmarked as the surface of the moon, and the gutters”they don”t exist. When it rains, as it does often and torrentially, the water careens down the road in a veritable river, down into my driveway, into Rio Nido Creek, which runs directly underneath my house. If the drain clogs, my property floods”but since Rio Nido barely merits streetlights, in the eyes of the county government, gutters are out of the question. And don”t even think about sidewalks”which might be out of place, anyway.
Today,. Rio Nido is a ghost of what it once was: the Inn is owned by a psychologist who works at San Quentin: he has taken to using it as a halfway house for recently released inmates undergoing “rehabilitation.” The place has been for sale for ages: it needs more repairs than anyone can afford these days, and there it sits. The same landowner also runs a trailer park in the Armstrong Woods area, near a state park, which has been cited more than once for health violations.
It wouldn”t take much to restore Rio Nido to its former glory, but there’s no bailout for this rural enclave of eccentrics: there’s nothing to be gained politically, and our little unincorporated area has about as much clout in Washington as I do”i.e. zilch. Aside from which, restoration has little to do with the nature and mission of government, especially on the federal level: if, by some miracle, some of that “stimulus” money were to be spent in our neck of the woods, it would most likely go to protect some heretofore unknown species of salmon or to fund a homeless shelter for the people who live under the bridge in downtown Guerneville.
The economic hard times are hitting these parts pretty hard: the other day some ragged looking types, a toothless man and woman, came to my door looking to do “chores.” Half the storefronts on Main Street are empty, and the local unemployment rate is skyrocketing, along with the foreclosure rate. My own house was a foreclosure that I snapped up pretty quick, and one down the street, which was recently sold, yet more are in the pipeline, especially as you go down the canyon toward the Inn and River Road.
Yet the people endure, and a new wave of homeowners has taken up the battle to preserve the character of this little redwood glen. The guy across the street is a contractor who describes himself as an “urban pioneer,” and works on his house on weekends: he’s redone it from end to end, painted it bright yellow, and it stands, like so many of Rio Nido’s houses, with its gabled windows and whimsical turrets, along a street of well-kept homes. Down the hill, toward the road, a new business has opened up in one of the Inn’s outbuildings: a copy center and notary public. Another new business has opened up in Guerneville, run by a Rio Nido resident: a bike rental place and fabric store. Signs of new life spring up amidst the decay. Maybe we don”t need any of Obama’s “stimulus” largess: being here, living in what looks for all intents and purposes like a cathedral, is stimulus enough.
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Jack Shafer, in Slate, writes:
“Nobody in TV news stir-fries his ideas and serves them to the audience faster than MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. Drawing from a larder filled with old anecdotes, unreliable metaphors, wacky intuition, and superficial observations, the always-animated Matthews steers whatever’s handy into the hot wok that is his brain. The sizzling free-associations skitter through his limbic system, leap out his mouth, and look for a resting spot in the national conversation, where they steam like fresh lava in untouchable heaps.
“Anything can set Matthews to cooking, but nothing summons his inner chef like a National Event of Great Importance such as yesterday’s inauguration. If you watched MSNBC’s coverage, you understand why Keith Olbermann wears a body apron and totes a fire extinguisher whenever they co-host: to keep the flying grease from setting his suits aflame.”
The List
Forbes magazine offers up this list of the 25 most influential liberals in the US media. Number 1 is Paul Krugman, the uber-Keynesian whose economic prescription for what ails us is the ne plus ultra of Bizarro World economics: we can spend our way out of penury! Nothing too surprising there. However, scattered amongst the liberal lefty-but-not-too-left bloggers (Kevin Drum, Glenn Greenwald, Markos Moulitsas), is Number 19 “ Andrew Sullivan, described thusly:
“A granddaddy of Washington blogging and a former editor of The New Republic, he clings unconvincingly to the “conservative” label even after his fervent endorsement of Obama. His advocacy for gay marriage rights and his tendency to view virtually everything through a “gay” prism puts him at odds with many on the right.”
“Unconvincing” is putting it mildly “ but, then again, Sullivan’s alleged liberalism is equally illusory. After all, here is someone who demanded the US drop a nuclear bomb on Iraq, accused opponents of the Iraq war of being a “fifth column,” and set himself up as the arbiter of the post-9/11 version of political correctness, which included an attempt to censor poetry he disapproved of as treasonous. Liberal? Not in any meaning of the word I can discern, but then again neither is he conservative, in any sense that the readers of this blog would recognize. He is, instead, a total opportunist, whose opinions vary with the Zeitgeist (as he perceives it), and this is his “talent” “ an uncanny ability to see where things are going, and get out ahead before anybody else.
Number 14 is Christopher Hitchens, the militant atheist and warmonger, who is in reality a neocon par excellence, a former Trotskyite who “ like his friend, Sullivan “ is a political fashionista. He turned against Bush II when the public did, and jumped on the Obama-wagon when it was convenient to do so: now he’s an influential “liberal.” He may be influential, but he’s no liberal “ Hitchens is just another neocon who wants to get invited to all the right parties.
My favorite, however, is Number 2—Arianna Huffington, who was unconvincing as a “compassionate conservative,” and is a bit more credible “ albeit not much “ as the doyenne of the Obama-oids. She’s described as “the leading curator of liberal commentary online,” and is supposedly “credited with helping put Barack Obama’s bandwagon firmly on its way to Washington.” Hmmmm. I think the millions Obama scarfed up from his Wall Street bailout-buddies has a bit more to do with it than the Arianna’s bromides uttered as if they were the Sermon on the Mount. “She has,” we are told, “an uncanny ability to marry attitude and authoritativeness.” Well, that’s one way of putting it. Another is: she has an uncanny ability to marry money.
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