Category Archives: Middle East

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.

UPDATED: The Vexing Case of the Vanishing Iranian Scientists

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Intelligence, Iran, Israel, Middle East

I fully expect to hear former CIA operative Michael Scheuer on Judge Napolitano’s Freedom Watch tonight. I expect Scheuer to implicate the Israeli Mossad in the killing of an Iranian nuclear chemist by motorbike assassins. For once, I expect I to agree almost completely with what Scheuer will posit on the show (if Nap’s producers have been quick on their feet, as I expect they have).

If Israel has indeed been eliminating Iran’s intellectual arsenal, it may be acting in bad faith, in seriously bad faith. It knows that the US has zero credibility with the Arab world. No surprise there. America’s lack of credibility in the Middle East is well deserved. Israel knows full well that if Hillary Rodham Clinton, “the gorgon who heads Caesar’s state department,” denies doing the deed, as Clinton has, no one will believe the woman who cackled, “I came, I saw, I conquered,” when she was informed of Col. Muammar Gadhafi’s execution by her proxies.

If Israel had indeed “recruited Iranian operatives on the ground,” as it is alleged to have done, to carry out these precision killings, Bibi’s government has placed the Obama administration in a very dodgy position.

UPDATE: I stopped listening after a while; I have an allergy to truth deniers such as Erika Payne. I think the story was not covered on Freedom Watch. Perhaps tomorrow.

UPDATED: The Year of the Killer Drone

Barack Obama, Criminal Injustice, Foreign Policy, Middle East, Military, Technology, War

A drone can be “an idle person who lives off others; a loafer, a drudge,” also known as Barack Obama. A drone is also “a pilotless aircraft operated by remote control,” frequently utilized by the aforementioned “idle person who lives of others” to kill others.

“When Obama was sworn into office in 2009, the nation’s clandestine drone war was confined to a single country, Pakistan, where 44 strikes over five years had left about 400 people dead, according to the New America Foundation. The number of strikes has since soared to nearly 240, and the number of those killed, according to conservative estimates, has more than quadrupled.” (WaPo)

The New America Foundation breaks it down in a table. Between 2004 and 2007, when Genghis Bush reigned supreme, we killed 112 Pakistanis. The total number of Pakistanis eliminated by drone between 2004 and 2011 was 2,680.

Do the math. Obama is the killer drone.

UPDATED (Jan 1. 012): STARSHIP TROOPERS USA.

UPDATE II: War Games: Smash ‘Em & Put Them Together Again

Criminal Injustice, Ethics, Middle East, Military, Morality, Natural Law, Terrorism, The State, War

Look; isn’t Uncle Sam wonderful? This little Pakistani girl below “was burned beyond recognition by a U.S. drone and left for dead in a trashcan. … She was found by a medical mission team two years ago and was described as ‘lucky’ by staff as two other children found with her were killed by the military attack.”

The child was “brought to the U.S. from her home in Pakistan,” where American surgeons patched her up, sort of. That’s the least we Americans can do. One of her new caregivers named the child Shakira, which means thankful. Evidently some dolt thinks little Shakira should be grateful that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men COULD put little Shakira together again.

UPDATE I (Dec. 23): FROM “JUST WAR FOR DUMMIES” (March 12, 2003):

I’m no pacifist. While I don’t condone the lingering American presence in Afghanistan, and while I doubt the abilities of the U.S. military to contain al-Qaida there, I supported going after bin Laden’s group in that country. That was a legitimate act of retaliation and defense, accommodated within St. Augustine’s teachings, whereby a just war is one “that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects.”
Al-Qaida was responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans. The Taliban openly succored the organization and its masterminding leadership. Mr. Bush had asked the hosting Taliban to surrender bin Laden and his gang. The Taliban refused, insisting on defending their murderous guests.

UPDATE II (Dec. 24): In reply to Theodor Lauppert below: And this writer “isn’t generally considered a source for” the strengthening of the positive law, international or other.