Category Archives: Iraq

Andy Sullivan’s Struggle

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Media, Middle East, Neoconservatism

Like the late Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan lacks a philosophical core. Unlike Hitchens, Sullivan is not a formidable intellect, rhetorician and writer. Hitchens didn’t have to struggle to stay interesting. Sullivan does. The fruits of Sullivan’s Struggle are splayed on the latest cover of Newsweek, provocatively subtitled, “Why are Obama’s Critic’s So Dumb?”

A caveat: I [Andy] write this as an unabashed supporter of Obama from early 2007 on. I did so not as a liberal, but as a conservative-minded independent appalled by the Bush administration’s record of war, debt, spending, and torture. … If I sound biased, that’s because I am. Biased toward the actual record, not the spin; biased toward a president who has conducted himself with grace and calm under incredible pressure, who has had to manage crises not seen since the Second World War and the Depression, and who as yet has not had a single significant scandal to his name. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” George Orwell once wrote. What I see in front of my nose is a president whose character, record, and promise remain as grotesquely underappreciated now as they were absurdly hyped in 2008. And I feel confident that sooner rather than later, the American people will come to see his first term from the same calm, sane perspective. And decide to finish what they started.

Crunchy Con Andy would like his followers to forget what I documented last in “Confess, Clinton; Say You’re Sorry, Sullivan:

Senator Hillary Clinton and neoconservative blogger Andrew Sullivan share more than a belief that “Jesus, Mohamed, and Socrates are part of the same search for truth.” They’re both Christians who won’t confess to their sins.
Both were enthusiastic supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, turned scathing and sanctimonious critics of the war. Neither has quite come clean. Both ought to prostrate themselves before those they’ve bamboozled, those they’ve helped indirectly kill, and whichever deity they worship. (The Jesus-Mohamed-and-Socrates profanity, incidentally, was imparted by Sullivan, during a remarkably rude interview he gave Hugh Hewitt. The gay activist-cum-philosopher king was insolent; Hewitt took it .)
I won’t bore you with the hackneyed war hoaxes Sullivan once spewed, only to say that there was not an occurrence he didn’t trace back to Iraq: anthrax, September 11, and too few gays in the military—you name it; Iraq was behind it. Without minimizing the role of politicians like Clinton, who signed the marching orders, pundits like Sullivan provided the intellectual edifice for the war, also inspiring impressionable young men and women to sacrifice their lives and limbs to the insatiable Iraq Moloch.

Everything You Need to Know About Perry But Were Afraid to Ask

Elections, Foreign Policy, Iraq, John McCain, War

As you know, Iraq is imploding, as it has been since the US took out the glue that held it together by hook or by crook: Saddam Hussein.

Seventy five percent of Americans have, belatedly and at long last, realized that we have to leave that godforsaken place. Presidential candidate Rick Perry obviously counts himself in the minority when he promised to “send troops back into Iraq. …”

STEPHANOPOULOS: Now?
PERRY: I — I think we start talking with the Iraqi individuals there. The idea that we allow the Iranians to come back into Iraq and take over that country, with all of the treasure, both in blood and money, that we have spent in Iraq, because this president wants to kowtow to his liberal, leftist base and move out those men and women. He could have renegotiated that timeframe.
I think it is a huge error for us. We’re going to see Iran, in my opinion, move back in at literally the speed of light. They’re going to move back in, and all of the work that we’ve done, every young man that has lost his life in that country will have been for nothing because we’ve got a president that does not understand what’s going on in that region.

As informed is John McCain, who has called for the deployment of a “residual force” to Iraq.

How about Meghaan McCain? She qualifies as a “residual” spent force.

UPDATE II: Diane (Sawyer) in Disneyland (The Homo-eroticism of Left-Liberalism)

Crime, Drug War, Family, Homosexuality, Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Military, Paleoconservatism, Race, Racism, Religion, Republicans, Ron Paul

Watching Diane Sawyer struggle to come up with a remotely coherent question to the Republican presidential front-runners in Manchester, New Hampshire, was a reminder of the ABC “news” network’s close ties to the Walt Disney Company. What a gushing imbecile is Sawyer.

Here are some impressions off the top of my head, since, naturally, transcripts are not available from ABC:

Ron Paul was hardly approached on any matter. He ought to have certainly butted in on the proper perspective on marriage, gay or other. Leave it up to the churches and synagogues to decide who to marry. The state has no place solemnizing any marriage, gay or other.

Mitt Romney thinks that state infrastructure projects are different in their economic “stimulative” effects to other state spending. And he says he understands the economy? (He merely understands economics better than Barack.) The funds for both kinds of projects come from the same source: taxes, or deficit spending. I’d like to know how certain state spending generates plenty, and how these smart Republican statists can calibrate these finer points.

Mitt’s Synophobia certainly tracks with that of the atavistic idiot Donald Trump.

Sadly, Sinophobia is sanctioned among American opinion makers. The dislike for China falls within the realm of perfectly respectable economic theory. Accordingly, the Chinese have levered themselves out of poverty not through industry, frugality, and ambition, but by manipulating their money and stealing American intellectual property.

All these asses were apoplectic about Obama’s proposed tokenistic cuts to the sacred military-industrial-complex. By the CATO institute’s assessment, “the Pentagon’s new strategy justifies a minor defense budget cut. The Obama administration wants to grow military spending at a pace slightly less than projected inflation for a decade.”

The US’s military budget is six times that of China. Obama’s proposed “pared-down military” would still leave us with the largest military in the world (and some of the most porous national borders too).

The federalization of marriage and whether Ron Paul would make a third party run: In terms of the debate’s level of abstraction, these topics were all poor Diane could cope with. When matters constitutional were discussed for a little too long, Disney’s Diane protested the flight into abstraction.

This was possibly the worst debate so far.

UPDATE I: CTV ON PAUL’S “LEFTIST RANT.” You won’t find the Paul excerpt below on ABC, which moderated the New Hampshire debate, last night. After all, for ABC, a “leftist rant” is a righteous rant. Canada’s CTV, however, has both excerpted and editorialized about what, in my opinion, was Paul’s misguided, if not unusual, lurch to the Left in calling American cops racists:

Paul also praised civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. when asked about 20-year-old newsletters published under his name containing racist and homophobic themes.
“One of my heroes is Martin Luther King, because he practiced the libertarian policy of peaceful resistance,” Paul said.
He then went on a positively leftist rant about how drug laws are enforced in the United States, pointing out that black men are incarcerated at disproportionate rates.
“How many times have you seen the white rich person get the electric chair?” he asked. “If we really want to be concerned with racism…we ought to look at the drug laws.”

A rightist like myself abjures anti-drug laws on the grounds that they are wrong, not racist. The fact that these laws ensnare blacks is because blacks are more likely to violate them by dealing drugs or engaging in violence around commerce in drugs, not necessarily because all cops are racists.

Cops deal with the reality of crime. It is an error—and wrong—to accuse them all of targeting blacks when the latter actually commit more crimes in proportion to their numbers in the population. This is also a losing strategy with rightists. It is akin to aping Obama, who went hell-for-leather at Sgt. James Crowley, calling him a racist for mishandling his pal Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. That strategy helped BHO lose the midterms.

UPDATE II: The Homo-eroticism of Left-Liberalism.

Myron, your list below is hardly an exhaustive list of why the arrest racial differential is what it is. List of priors, perhaps? As for Paul’s contention, last night, that blacks suffer most from wars waged. I was almost sick. More lefty nonsense. Try poor white kids from the South, who are also least likely to get into college even when they whip black applicants and rich whites with their test results.

There is nothing worse than a left liberal man—he’ll sell his mother for the little pat on the head from the lefty establishment. He’ll watch his son near death because of black racism, against which he never warned the poor soft boy, yet he will reach out to his son’s killer.

I am beginning to think that left-liberal men who keep scrutinizing themselves for signs of racism against their black accusers, and accuse others like themselves of the same—actually derive a homo-erotic kick of bowing and scraping to those accusers.

You guys have read my book, and yet you still believe in the myth of white privilege?! There really is no cure for obsequious left-liberalism. I recommend reading The Cannibal again, although that is not punishment, and one should be punished for lapping up left-liberal nonsense.

Refugees In The Failed State of Iraq

Barack Obama, Bush, Democracy, Iraq, Middle East, Military, Multiculturalism, Neoconservatism, Religion, War

Saddam Hussein ruled over what the state department considered a rogue state, Iraq. The US eliminated Hussein and invaded his country (not in that order). Thanks to the American invasion, Iraq is now a failed state, where the politically weak are forsaken, and a muscular majority exercises its authority (a dispensation also known as democracy). The deposed dictator had kept a lid on the cauldron of sectarian strife, now boiling over in Iraq.

I’ve covered the plight of the millions of Iraqi refugees we helped uproot.

Against the backdrop of “Obama basking in the Iraq withdrawal” comes a reality check: a report, via CNN, on those Iraqis who have been internally displaced.

While war supporters may console themselves with the fact that “displacement is not new in Iraq,” as this Brookings-Institute observes, Iraq since the blessings of Bush is suffering a displacement crisis.