Category Archives: Neoconservatism

Israel’s War is Not Ours

Islam, Israel, Middle East, Neoconservatism, War

It’s ominous to hear prominent American neoconservatives speak of Israel’s war as our own and the conflagration in the region as the commencement of WWIII. “What’s under attack,” writes William Kristol, “is liberal democratic civilization.”

It’s ominous but not surprising. Hyping a war as a symbolic war gives it momentum—and facilitates its expansion beyond regional confines.

Iran and Syria’s involvement in instigating the recent aggression against Israel is, moreover, hard to ascertain. We know only that both countries are “paymasters” to Hezbollah and Hamas; we have no way of knowing they ordered the attacks, which were, incidentally, the culmination of ongoing and incessant aggression against Israel.

Even if Iran and Syria ordered the hostilities, it by no means warrants an American intervention on Israel’s behalf. It falls to that presumably sovereign country to defend herself, as she is quite capable of doing.

Israelis, as I’ve contended for a while, are stupid and rudderless. To their great credit, this idiocy is because they are no longer a pioneer nation, but a modern people. They want to get on with the productive business of making money and having fun. They would rather head for the beach than the battlefront. Conversely, too many Arabs are still stuck in that pre-modern destructive phase, which accounts for their zeal, savagery, and affinity for terror as a way of life.

(Classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises didn’t go as far as to say that the “Mohammedan countries” were barbaric, but he did genteelly point out that there was a reason the East—far and near—had not contributed anything to “the intellectual effort of mankind” for centuries. You cannot force the culture of freedom and individual rights where it never arose, and where the legal framework that would protect private wealth and guard against confiscation by the rulers is missing.)

In their stupidity, Israelis have conflated America’s unlimited worldwide war on terror with their narrowly delimited battle for survival, conducted since the inception of the Jewish State. Kristol, in particular, argues that Israel’s battle has morphed from an “Arab-Israeli conflict” to an “Islamist-Israeli war.” Maybe so, but it’s still the same struggle for survival—one that is diminished and tainted by the Israeli leadership’s insistence on hitching their cause to the American crusade.

Of course, Kristol’s formulation lends itself nicely to the notion that we must help Israelis in their war. A coherent recognition that Israel is engaged in a just war against war lords that seek her demise is one thing—it has moral clarity. The same moral suasion ought to ensure we avoid mistaking Hamas and Hezbollah’s relative military weakness for moral innocence. The policy prescriptions that we ought to follow are another matter entirely.

Neoconservatives tend to make artificial ideological distinctions, such as Israel’s “old” war with the Arabs vs. her “new” war with “Islamofascists.” These distinctions appear to help conflate our own interests with Israel’s. As far as I can see, Palestinians and their leaders have always channeled Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem. Al-Husseini, Arafat’s hero, “supported the Nazis, and especially their program for the mass murder of the Jews. He visited numerous death camps and encouraged Hitler to extend the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jews of North Africa and Palestine.” How Hamas and Hezbollah’s enterprise differs from his quest, bequeathed to Arafat, is unclear to me.

What I am clear on is the imperative not to be swept up with the neoconservative’s total-war talk.

Israel's War is Not Ours

Islam, Israel, Middle East, Neoconservatism, War

It’s ominous to hear prominent American neoconservatives speak of Israel’s war as our own and the conflagration in the region as the commencement of WWIII. “What’s under attack,” writes William Kristol, “is liberal democratic civilization.”

It’s ominous but not surprising. Hyping a war as a symbolic war gives it momentum—and facilitates its expansion beyond regional confines.

Iran and Syria’s involvement in instigating the recent aggression against Israel is, moreover, hard to ascertain. We know only that both countries are “paymasters” to Hezbollah and Hamas; we have no way of knowing they ordered the attacks, which were, incidentally, the culmination of ongoing and incessant aggression against Israel.

Even if Iran and Syria ordered the hostilities, it by no means warrants an American intervention on Israel’s behalf. It falls to that presumably sovereign country to defend herself, as she is quite capable of doing.

Israelis, as I’ve contended for a while, are stupid and rudderless. To their great credit, this idiocy is because they are no longer a pioneer nation, but a modern people. They want to get on with the productive business of making money and having fun. They would rather head for the beach than the battlefront. Conversely, too many Arabs are still stuck in that pre-modern destructive phase, which accounts for their zeal, savagery, and affinity for terror as a way of life.

(Classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises didn’t go as far as to say that the “Mohammedan countries” were barbaric, but he did genteelly point out that there was a reason the East—far and near—had not contributed anything to “the intellectual effort of mankind” for centuries. You cannot force the culture of freedom and individual rights where it never arose, and where the legal framework that would protect private wealth and guard against confiscation by the rulers is missing.)

In their stupidity, Israelis have conflated America’s unlimited worldwide war on terror with their narrowly delimited battle for survival, conducted since the inception of the Jewish State. Kristol, in particular, argues that Israel’s battle has morphed from an “Arab-Israeli conflict” to an “Islamist-Israeli war.” Maybe so, but it’s still the same struggle for survival—one that is diminished and tainted by the Israeli leadership’s insistence on hitching their cause to the American crusade.

Of course, Kristol’s formulation lends itself nicely to the notion that we must help Israelis in their war. A coherent recognition that Israel is engaged in a just war against war lords that seek her demise is one thing—it has moral clarity. The same moral suasion ought to ensure we avoid mistaking Hamas and Hezbollah’s relative military weakness for moral innocence. The policy prescriptions that we ought to follow are another matter entirely.

Neoconservatives tend to make artificial ideological distinctions, such as Israel’s “old” war with the Arabs vs. her “new” war with “Islamofascists.” These distinctions appear to help conflate our own interests with Israel’s. As far as I can see, Palestinians and their leaders have always channeled Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem. Al-Husseini, Arafat’s hero, “supported the Nazis, and especially their program for the mass murder of the Jews. He visited numerous death camps and encouraged Hitler to extend the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jews of North Africa and Palestine.” How Hamas and Hezbollah’s enterprise differs from his quest, bequeathed to Arafat, is unclear to me.

What I am clear on is the imperative not to be swept up with the neoconservative’s total-war talk.

Gottfried on the Why of Systemic vs. Personal Responsibility

Individual Rights, Intellectualism, Morality, Neoconservatism, Socialism

Professor Paul Gottfried offers this insight as to why, “When speaking about crime and culpability (punishment is not an option), left-liberals like Jolie use the passive voice. Crimes are caused, not committed.”

I think Ilana’s observation about the widespread tendency to blame all non-white and non-Western atrocities on abstract causes such as “violence,” “poverty,” and “white racism” serves a necessary function within the context of (non-neoconservative) leftist thinking. This ascription allows the user to blame morally revolting actions on neither the perpetrator nor any specific person or group of persons belonging to the white Western world. It goes without saying that blacks, who form a martyr people within leftist victimology, cannot be called to account by white Westerners because they rape and murder each other. To do so would undermine the reigning anti-fascist, anti-racist ideology. But neither is it wise to lay the blame for Third World atrocities at the door of one’s parents and associates, assuming they are white, if one intends to maintain civil relations. Therefore the problem becomes “structural” or “economic” rather than personal. And this also suggests that everything can be set right by adopting the right socialist, redistributionist policies.

—Paul Gottfried

War Apologists Still Unapologetic

Iraq, Media, Neoconservatism, War

In a letter to Barely a Blog, in response to Tibor Machan’s Iraqi War Blues,” Lawrence Auster writes rather impatiently:

For the ten thousandth time, the whole world, including those opposing the war, believed Iraq had WMDs, and there was ample reason for that belief.”

This is absolutely false. As someone who was on top of every fallacy promoted by this administration from the onset (as of September 19, 2002, to be precise), and who has been proven right on each and every point, I refuse to countenance this Sean-Hannity inanity. It seems that those who were 100% wrong on the war want to, somehow, retain their credibility and pretend that those of us who got it 100% right, did so by coincidence.

Not if I can help it.

There were many experts, credible ones, who absolutely rejected the contention that there were WMD in Iraq. They were as numerous as the loud voices who promoted this lie. However, the media, the Hannities, the Judith Millers, the dissidents, their handlers, and their followers—shut them, and us, out.

In What WMD?,” I wrote that, in his attempt to find the missing weapons,” David Kay, a former top U.S. weapons inspector who endeared himself to the media as an invasion enthusiast, had done no more than validate some very old verities. No, not everyone was bullish about the Bush administration’s WMD balderdash:

What Kay now parrots,” I averred, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei told the U.N. Security Council before the war: There were no nuclear-designated aluminum tubes in Iraq; no uranium was imported, and no nuclear programs were in existence. Between 1991 and 1998, the IAEA had managed to strip Iraq of its fuel-enriching facilities, tallying inventories to a T. Or in Kay’s belated words: “Iraq’s large-scale capability to produce, and fill new CW munitions was reduced, if not entirely destroyed, during Operation Desert Storm and Desert Fox, 13 years of U.N. sanctions and U.N. inspections.”

According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Congress in 1999 was privy to intelligence reports which similarly attested to a lack of “any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox (1998) to reconstitute its WMD program.” Accounts of this nature have evidently been available to Congress for years. They reiterated, as one report from the Defense Intelligence Agency does, that, “A substantial amount of Iraq’s chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were [sic] destroyed between 1991 and 1998.”

“Kay’s news ought not to have been new to the blithering boobs in Congress,” I observed. The CEIP further bears out that in October of 2002, Congress was apprised of a National Intelligence Estimate, a declassified version of which was released only after the war. Apparently, entire intelligence agencies disputed key contentions that the administration—its experts, and its congressional and media backers—seized on and ran with.”

“While clearly pandering to policy makers, U.S. intelligence reports were still heavily qualified by conjectural expressions such as, “we believe Iraq could, might, possibly, and probably will.” The State Department and the White House, however, cultivated a custom of issuing “fact” sheets with definitive statements from which all traces of uncertainty had been removed.”

“Condoleezza Rice (who had categorically denied she possessed the analytical wherewithal to connect the dazzlingly close dots between Arab men practicing their aeronautical take-off skills and terrorism) was suddenly doing nothing but connecting disparate dots. She, Powell, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush never stopped gabbling about a reconstituted Iraqi nuclear-weapons program, chemical and biological blights, Scuds and squadrons of unmanned aerial vehicles streaking U.S. skies, and traveling laboratories teeming with twisted scientists. The language they used… ignored the deep dissent in the intelligence community.”

All that information addressing pre-war knowledge was culled from my column, What WMD?”

Coalesced in Ink Stains and Blood Stains” is information I had given my readers in 2003-columns such as Bush’s 16 Words Miss the Big Picture” and “High crimes vs. Hillary & Her husband,” among others. In Bush’s 16 Words Miss the Big Picture,” I beseeched readers to somehow show an ability to “see Bush’s sub-intelligent case for war for what it was”:

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,” I implored, “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?”

In Rationalize With Lies” I dealt a blow to the Hannity inanity Mr. Auster now advances, namely the creative post-hoc arguments made to justify the unnecessary war the United States waged on a sovereign nation that had not attacked us, was no threat to us and was certainly no match for us.” The argument resembles the one Tibor Machan makes today on Barely a Blog. I wrote:

“To say that Saddam may have had WMD is quite different from advocating war based on those assumptions. It’s one thing to assume in error; it’s quite another to launch a war in which thousands would die based on mere assumptions, however widely shared. It was not the anti-war-on-Iraq camp that intended to launch a war based on the sketchy information it had. The crucial difference between the Bush camp and its opponents lies in the actions the former took.”

Second, it matters a great deal when during the last decade someone said Saddam was in possession of impermissible weapons. To have said so in 1991 is not the same as saying so in 2003, by which time Iraq had so obviously been cowed into compliance and was crawling with inspectors.”

Naturally, at certain times during Iraq’s belligerent history, opponents of this war would have agreed he had a weapons program. But by 1998, sensible people realized that Operation Desert Storm, followed by seven years of inspections, made the possibility of reconstituting such a program remote. The Defense Intelligence Agency reached the same conclusion in September 2002, writing that, “A substantial amount of Iraq’s chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998.” President Jacques Chirac said as much to both Bush and Blair, who pretended not to hear.”

I (and my fellow libertarians) was right all along because I am not a partisan who genuflects to Our Side. To arrive at the correct conclusions about Bush’s undeniable drive to war, I employed facts and reality, the Jewish teachings which instruct Jews to robustly and actively seek justice, Just War Theory, developed by great Christian minds like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, the libertarian axiom, which prohibits aggression against non-aggressors, the natural law, and what the Founding Fathers provided”:

A limited, constitutional republican government, by definition,” I wrote in March 12, 2003, doesn’t, cannot, and must never pursue what Bush is after—a sort of 21st-century Manifest Destiny.”

I was right because, like many of the silenced, I adhered to reality and followed immutably correct intellectual and moral principles. I’ll be damned if I allow anyone to deflect from the intellectual and moral corruption of those who failed to do the same.