Category Archives: Iraq

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.

UPDATED (3/4): NEW COLUMN: Uncle Sam Still King Of All Invaders: Ukraine, Realpolitik & The West’s Failure

America, Bush, Europe, Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Iraq, Morality, UN, War

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NEW COLUMN, “Uncle Sam Still King Of All Invaders: Ukraine, Realpolitik & The West’s Failure,” is now on WND.COM , The Unz Review and The New American, my new home. MY FAVORITE LINE IN IT has been retained only for the Unz Review:

If Putin belongs in the Hague’s International Court of Justice, so do Genghis Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and their countless culprits. Colin Powell is already in the Hadean afterworld for his role in the invasion of Iraq.

Excerpt:

… There is something utterly obscene—as rudely shocking as the front-row viewing of the “Shock and Awe” visited on Iraq—about watching the displacement of people and the destruction of innocent lives in real time, on television, without lending a hand.

And I don’t mean a military hand.

Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky—who is the toast of the town simply because he did not skedaddle from the mess in which he mired his country—to this ass with ears goes a special award for recklessness. Not fleeing a situation largely of your making does not a hero make. Curiously, we Americans have offered Zelensky the coward’s way out, when we ought to have forced him to sit down with his foes.

Granted, America, as British paleolibertarian Sean Gabb quips, is “some kind of zombie apocalypse plus nuclear weapons that might not yet be past its use-by date. It has not won a war against an equally-matched power since it defeated itself in 1865.” However degraded, the onus is on the USA, the only so-called responsible superpower, to calmly negotiate with Putin on behalf of his innocent, weak victims. Instead, world leaders watch the suffering on TV and bemoan the fate of the sufferers. Both sides are a disgrace and a failure to have brought us thus far. Ditto NATO and the EU.

This is precisely what President Joe Biden should be shamed into doing now: talk to Putin; thrash out a cease-fire, ASAP; haggle for the lives of the population under siege because led by imbeciles. …

… Ukrainians, for their part, are tireless and wily lobbyists in Washington, way more cunning than their American counterparts. To all intents and purposes, Zelensky, head of the corrupt American client statelet that is Ukraine, had tethered the fate of his country to America, NATO and the EU, constantly trying to bend these foolish and feckless entities to his will; too much of a clown to look out for his countrymen’s safety, rather than his own popularity in the West.  …

… Having sat out the ‘67 and ‘73 wars in Israeli bomb shelters—I still remember what old-school diplomacy and statesmanship—realpolitik—sounded like. Diplomatic tools like substantive talks, a cease-fire, and an agreement between warring sides, however, have been absent from the repertoire of the two tools, Presidents Biden and Zelensky. …

… READ “Uncle Sam Still King Of All Invaders: Ukraine, Realpolitik & The West’s Failure,” is now on WND.COM, The Unz Review and The New American, my new home.

UPDATE (3/4): follyofwar says on the Unz Review:

Ms. Mercer is a top-notch intellect and excellent writer. I am ashamed of my country and disgusted by the Euro weenies who refuse to extricate themselves from America’s “Iron Heel,” (a novel by Jack London).  

HERE.

Thanks, Martin on Twitter: