Category Archives: Iraq

Twenty Years Ago: Dissident From Day One

Bush, Democrats, Elections, Iraq, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Republicans, The Establishment, War

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To be branded Dissident from Day one and cancelled is untenable. Destructive. A career killer

LOOKING FOR mention in my own works of the remarkable Dennis Kucinich, I came across “BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE” (July 16, 2003), one of many antiwar columns written at the time.

It still haunts. What passion (as Hillel, Jewish sage and genius, said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”). I believed in the power of pellucid prose and reason to persuade. Instead, I got cancelled from day one.

It’s easy to become a dissident when such a pose is trendy, and is struck once one has enjoyed 20 years of work in the Establishment.  To be branded Dissident from Day One and cancelled is untenable. Destructive. A career killer.

But then I did liken the “bring ’em on” grin on the face of Bush, beloved of most rightists back then, to the grin “on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis.” LOL. Totally worth it. I think.

…Reducing this administration’s single-minded will to war to an erroneous 16 words ignores the big picture. First came the decision to go to war. The misbegotten illegality that was this administration’s case for war followed once the decision to go to war had already been made. The administration’s war wasn’t about a few pieces that did not gel in an otherwise coherent framework; it wasn’t about an Iraq that was poised to attack the U.S. with germs and chemicals rather than with nukes; it was about a resigned, hungry, economic pariah that was a sitting duck for the power-hungry American colossus.

By all means, dissect and analyze what, in September 2002, I called the “lattice of lies” leveled at Iraq: the uranium from Africa, the aluminum tubes from Timbuktu, the invisible “meetings” with al-Qaida in Prague, an al-Qaida training camp that existed under Kurdish—not Iraqi—control, as well as the alleged weaponized chemical and biological stockpiles and their attendant delivery systems that inspectors doubted were there and which never materialized. But then assemble the pieces and synthesize the information, will you?

Do what the critical mind must do. The rational individual, wedded to reality, reason, and objective, non-partisan truth saw Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was. He saw Bush as the poster boy for ‘the degeneracy of manner and morals’ which James Madison warned war would bring—the same ‘bring ’em on’ grin one can also observe on the face of a demented patient with end-stage syphilis. The rational individual saw all this, and understood that when Madison spoke of ‘war as the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,’ he was speaking of the disposition of this dictator.

AND

…. Members of the media aren’t capable of much more than fragmenting and atomizing information. Integrating facts into a conceptual understanding is certainly not what Howard Fineman, Chris Matthew’s anointed analyst, and the brain trust on MSNBC’s “Hardball” does. To disguise his pedestrian politicking, Fineman discussed who, at what time in the afternoon, as well as when in the estrus cycle of the next-door cow, did an official put the infamous 16 words about nukes and Niger on the president’s desk. That ought to make a nation already bogged down in concrete bits of disconnected data see the forest for the trees, wouldn’t you say? … “BUSH’S 16 WORDS MISS THE BIG PICTURE” (July 16, 2003)

https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/war/page/2/
https://www.ilanamercer.com/category/war/

Dennis Kucinich was always there, along for the lost battle ….

THUS, it’s a bad idea for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to tout Mr. Kucinich, his newly nominated campaign manager, as progressive.

Kucinich, like the great Southern senator and gentleman Robert Byrd, RIP (who also greatly opposed Obama’s constitutional usurpations), is noted for voting AGAINST the detestable Democrats and the GOP in opposing the US war machine and the executive dictatorship.

 

Code Pink (Medea Benjamin): Philosophically Solid, Antiwar Pioneer Of The Old Left

Iraq, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Old Right, Russia, War

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Ukraine is a proxy for NATO. NATO is surrogate for Uncle Sam. These Dis-United States of America are waging a proxy, regime-change-war on Russia.

The formidable Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, founded in 2002, is hip to all this.

I’ve admired her since she, on the Old Left, stood with us of the Old Right against the destruction of Iraq.

Now, Medea is exactly where she needs to be on the Ukraine proxy-war outrage. With the same principles and depth.

Of course, you don’t see her on TV, on account that she’s brighter than the egos in the anchor chairs—by which I mean Ms. Benjamin has had the philosophical integrity and smarts to be on the right side from the onset.

In other words, Medea hasn’t just recently had a conversion—i.e., “I’ve learned something from Tucker Carlson, and now wanna be on his show.” Concepts like “NATO expansion” and the “events of 2014,” where America fomented a Color Revolution in Ukraine, have been as part of her vocabulary as they have been mine for a long, long time.

At the time “Why So Many Americans Don’t Support Attacking Iraq” (2002) was published in one of Canada’s two national newspapers—it was common for those on the Old Left to find commonalities with the Old Right. Like on matters antiwar.

Code Pink are still my pepes, but they get no backing from the war-loving Woke Left or from dopey ConInc., aka the UniParty.

 

UPDATED (3/23/022): Tucker Carlson’s Producers Rewarding Retread Reformed Neocon Tools Like Sohrab Ahmari

Argument, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iraq, Media, Neoconservatism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, War

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On the one hand, Tucker Carlson and his oft-worthy guests make the case that America’s catastrophic institutional rot (MY EXTENSIVELY DEVELOPED TERM, no theirs) is a consequence of there being no adverse consequences attached to being dead-wrong all the time.

On the other hand, the show has a tendency to reward reformed neocons such as newcomer Sohrab Ahmari, who peddles retread banalities (or stuff the Old Right—myself included—had espoused decades ago, and from the get-go, in the case of the Globe and Mail commentary below: September 19, 2002).

Rewarding conveniently reformed, politically pleasing mediocrities makes the practitioner part of the institutional rot.

“PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!” (Ilana Mercer, May 29, 2004) spoke to this repulsive specter:

… So why are insightful commentators whose observations have predictive power generally barred from the national discourse, while false neoconservative prophets are called back for encores?

I got to thinking about the neoconservative talking twits. They’ve been wrong all along about the invasion of Iraq. They’ve consistently dished out dollops of ahistoric, unintuitive, and reckless verbiage. Yet they’ve retained their status as philosopher-kings.
Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens (undeniably a writer of considerable flair and originality), George Will and Tucker Carlson (both of whom seem to have conveniently recanted at the eleventh hour), Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Mark Steyn, Max Boot, John Podhoretz, Andrew Sullivan – they all grabbed the administration’s bluff and ran with it. Like the good Trotskyites many of them were, once they tasted blood, they writhed like sharks. Compounding their scent-impaired bloodhound act was their utter ignorance of geopolitical realities – they insisted our soldiers would be greeted with blooms and bonbons and that an Iraqi democracy would rise from the torrid sands of Mesopotamia.
Their innumerable errors and flagrant hubris did not prevent the neoconservatives from managing to marginalize their competitors on the Right: the intrepid Pat Buchanan and his American Conservative; the quixotic Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. of LewRockwell.com, and Antiwar.com. (Plus this column, of course). Unfortunately for America, there hasn’t been a horror in Iraq that these prescients did not foretell well in advance.

….the opportunity costs associated with consumption of toxic punditry are low or non-existent.

If you didn’t have the cerebral wherewithal to be against the war on Iraq in 2002, you don’t have anything original to contribute on foreign policy and anti-war or Just War thinking now.

Younger offenders can be found agitating against Iran, or scribbling inanities for the War Street Journal and other neoconservative outlets such as Commentary, the Weekly Standard, and Foreign Policy, where Sohrab Ahmari would put out irredeemable and unforgivable content such as “The Costs of Containment.”

It’s one thing to have made a mistake as Tucker Carlson had done regarding the Iraq war of aggression. Carlson apologized profusely and humbly about his Iraq error. Moreover, Carlson had never been the consummate philosophical neocon; which Sohrab Ahmari is. According to the Militarist Monitor,

“the neocons’ favorite Iranian,” Sohrab Ahmari has been a vocal advocate of U.S.-imposed regime change in his native Iran, which he left as a teenager. Rosenberg likened Ahmari to Ahmed Chalabi, the formerly exiled Iraqi politician who curried favor with U.S. neoconservatives ahead of the Iraq War and lent an Iraqi name to the list of those supporting the U.S. invasion.[3]

I’ve watched the likes of Sohrab Ahmari work their magic in the malfunctioning media for decades. I also understand fully that Tucker Carlson has a producer, for he himself cannot research each such well-promoted phony who is resurrecting a career on the solid anti-war arguments of the dissident Old, paleolibertarian and paleoconservative Right.

* Image: Truth-teller on Twitter.

And in defense of The Tuck against mediocrity Claire Lehmann, who generated the non sequitur below: Tucker Carlson doesn’t support the Russian invasion! From the fact he argues unpopular truths–it doesn’t follow that Tucker is not a populist. Most immutable truth is unpopular. Popularity does not equal populism. This woman can’t even define the terms of debate.

UPDATE (3/15): Ukraine: Republicans Revert To The Neoconservative Mean

Bush, Europe, Free Markets, Iran, Iraq, Neoconservatism, Republicans, Trade, War

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Conservatism has tragically and unforgivably reverted to the neoconservative mean. Just as in 2016, 14 years after the invasion of Iraq, rose a presidential candidate against Genghis Bush and that man’s destruction of Iraq—in ten years time, perhaps, the GOP will field a presidential candidate who’ll quit moralizing and demonizing; will strive fiercely to negotiate and accommodate, won’t alienate and sanction, and will trade, trade, trade.

But it might be too late by then for realpolitik.

The Republicans are pushing for war and that no-fly zone. They are admonishing Biden for his so-called weakness—for that is how they frame avoiding a nuclear war with Russia. The War Street Journal has only rebuke for Biden’s policy of “containment against Russia.” On Fox News it’s rah-rah for war (i. e., a no-fly zone over Ukraine) all day long. The female journos and pundits, especially, choose to use incendiary verbiage, pregnant with provocation, such as “a red line”; “this was a red line for Obama… will Biden consider it a red line.. blah-blah.”

Translated it’s, “Come on big boy; sock it to Putin.” War porn.

Rand Paul is no Ron Paul. But at least the senator from Kentucky has berated the forever-war, dastardly GOP for rejecting diplomacy with Iran, the mention of which has not even crossed their lips with respect to Russia.

UPDATE (3/15): War always brings the neoconservative to the fore. Victor Davis Hanson is one. A nice man, but never-the-less, a neoconservative, front-and-center in the enunciation of consummate neoconservative abominations known as “The Bush Doctrine,” which was responsible for the noxious bifurcation knows as, “If you are not with us, you are against us.”

The West has been caught sleeping and … an opportunistic dictator … saw a chance and … took it just like he did in 2014. 

Neocons love sanctions, which are as useless in achieving political ends as they are ruthless in their effects on the most vulnerable. As far as their ultimate outcome—embargoed are counterproductive. “Nicholas Mulder, assistant professor in the history department of Cornell University in New York, is the author of ‘The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War’ (2022)'”:

Sanctions alone have a poor record of halting military adventures. During the 20th century, only three out of 19 attempts to use sanctions as a policy to impede war have been successful: two of these were the work of the League of Nations. It nipped in the bud incipient border wars in the Balkans, between Yugoslavia and Albania in 1921 and between Greece and Bulgaria in 1925. The other successful use of sanctions was American financial pressure on sterling, which forced an end to Britain’s Egyptian military expedition in the Suez war of 1956.