Category Archives: Iraq

Wordless About The War

I attempted to explain to conservative Australian writer, Rob Stove, why, after chronicling the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I’d fallen silent:
When my daughter was seven-years old, her school assigned her the task of describing her parents. On her father, daddy’s darling heaped unrealistic praise (the tables have since turned. Excellent!). For her affection-starved mother, the little lady reserved a matter-of-fact appraisal. “My mother,” she wrote in her girly cursive, “is a quiet woman who speaks mainly when she has something to say.” (Rob’s riposte: “if everyone rationed speech thus, the entire mainstream punditocracy would cease to exist.” Amen.)
Pinpointed by my perceptive chatterbox of a child, this economy explains the lack of gush on Barely a Blog. And it explains why I’ve not written much lately about “Mess-opotamia.” I’ve nothing new to say. Few have. This is not to say there’s no place for repetition. But it’s not my place. I’ve said what I have to say, starting in September 2002. And here .
Fine, I’ll elaborate on a fresh observation Lawrence Auster originated: Bush and his devotees showcase their underlying hate of America by continually comparing the carnage in Iraq to the constitutional cramps of early America. As The Wall Street Journal put it, “There were a few glitches 200 years ago in Philadelphia too.”
Yes, the hoots, hollers, and blasts emanating from members of Iraq’s tribal troika capture to a tee the tone of the debates in, what’s that document called? The Fedayeen Papers?
Jalal (Talabani), Muqtada (al-Sadr), and Muhammad (Bahr al-Ulum) are just like James (Madison), John (Jay), and Alexander (Hamilton). Why didn’t it occur to me? Only a fool would fail to trace the philosophical link between the feuding Mohammedans and the followers of John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu. Mr. Auster is right: what a hateful comparison.
The war is even more hateful. And everything that needs to be said about it has been said—to no avail. Words have failed to bring us closer to a moral reckoning. So watch Do You Ever Wonder What 2000 Looks Like—and weep (link courtesy of antiwar.com).

Just Deserts For Judith Miller

Iraq, Neoconservatism, War, WMD

At least one good thing has come of Karl Rovegate: Judith Miller is in jail. Yes, the Gray Lady’s prized reporter has been incarcerated, albeit for the wrong offense. She’s being held in criminal contempt for failing to cooperate in “the investigation of who may have unlawfully leaked the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame to the media.” But, as I said to talk-show host Robby Noel two weeks back, I’ll take justice when and where I can get it. Ahmad Chalabi and the White House fed the voracious birdbrain with misinformation and lies about WMD. And in response (presumably), Miller shilled for the Iraq war like there was no tomorrow. No tale was too tall for her and no fabrication too fantastic. Clearly, she’s in the business of cultivating sources—a conduit for government propaganda, not for the truth, whose reporting about the dangers Iraq posed to America had the veracity of Sheherazade’s Tales of the Arabian Nights. Maybe justice does, on occasion, work in mysterious ways. In any event, I’m not the least bit sorry that Miller, the sycophantic face of American journalism, is being punished… for something.

Murderers As Libertarian Role Models?

Iraq, libertarianism

I can think of quite a few ordinary and not-so ordinary individuals who exemplify brave resistance to government tyranny. The Iraqi insurgents are not among them. In contrast, some libertarians feel (for they can’t be thinking) that these cold-blooded murderers ought to inspire Americans in their quest to reclaim lost liberties. “The-Iraqi-resistance” is how these libertarians refer to the ragtag entity that is purported to have hitherto, intentionally, taken the lives of 12,000 Iraqis over the past 18 months.
One such libertarian urges (in long compound sentences) “patriotic Americans” at home to “take a lesson from the growing Iraqi insurgency and the response of that nation nearly destroyed by our pretext-laden invasion and the American neo-Jacobin possession of that country.”
Note how the distinction between Iraqis in general and Iraqi insurgents—the murdered and the murderers—is collapsed. Once she messily conflates the Iraqi nation (is there such an entity?) with the insurgents and their offensive, the writer leads her readers, in a text suffused with moral confusion and Lawrenthian romanticism, to conclude that these interchangeable entities are united in common purpose—resisting the occupier under a benevolent, all-encompassing faith.
No doubt there are points of intersection: some Iraqis support the insurgency; and some insurgents don’t support the slaughter of innocent Iraqis. But if Iraqis are united in a decision to “pursue one or more of the countless paths of resistance to the state, why are ordinary Iraqis being slaughtered by the underground they purportedly support? Have they consented to supply the blood that soaks the streets? Or does the writer simply agree with the creed that innocents can be sacrificed in a greater cause?
Next, the writer holds up the falsely equated Iraqis-cum-insurgents as inspiring role models of resistance to government tyranny. American patriots: meet your new heroes!
Have Libertarians allowed righteous rage against an unjust invation to turn into fawning admiration for killers of innocents? This misplaced deference an interlocutor of mine has characterized perceptively as typical of the Left’s “Rousseauian sympathy for the Symbolic Savage, any savage, wherever he may be, whom they fantasize as fighting nobly against the stifling strictures of Civil (and civilizing) Authority.”

Ludwig von Mises, a great classical liberal, considered romanticism, which is what this moral miasma reflects, to be man’s revolt against reason.