Category Archives: War

Continuously Updated: Rescuing H. L. Mencken From Coulter's Clutches

Ann Coulter, Bush, Media, Neoconservatism, The Zeitgeist, War

On Lou Dobbs’ “Today” show, Ann Coulter anointed herself as the Right’s H. L. Mencken. Coulter is certainly sui generis, but she’s no Mencken.

First, Mencken was “Godless.” I believe he wrote “that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind—that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.”

More material, Mencken was a libertarian. He hated government with all his bolshy being, and was deeply suspicious of power—all power, not only liberal power. To Mencken, all government was evil, and “all government must necessarily make war upon liberty.”

He certainly would have had few kind words for Dubya, the quintessential dirigiste. Coulter, conversely, has shown Bush (who isn’t even conservative) almost unquestioning loyalty, other than to protest his Harriet Miers cronyism and, of late, his infarct over illegal immigration. Such devotion would be anathema to Mencken.

Nor would the very brilliant elitist have found this president’s manifest, all-round ignorance endearing—Bush’s penchant for logical and linguistic infelicities would have revolted Mencken.

About foreign forays Mencken stated acerbically that “the United States should mind its own business. If it is actually commissioned by God to put down totalitarianism, let it start in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Santo Domingo and Mississippi.” He thought that “waging a war for a purely moral reason [was] as absurd as ravishing a woman for a purely moral reason.” Not in a million years would Mencken have endorsed Bush’s war.

Since he was not a party animal, but a man of principle, conformity to the clan would not have seen him fall into contradiction as Coulter has: she rightly condemned Madeleine Albright’s “preemptive attack” on Slobodan Milosevic, as having been “solely for purposes of regime change based on false information presented to the American people.” But adopted a different—decidedly double—standard regarding Bush’s Iraq excursion.

I repeat: Coulter is certainly sui generis, but Mencken she is not.

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Much less charitable than myself has been paleoconservative writer Kevin Michael Grace, who has mused that, “The secret to becoming a successful right-wing columnist is to echo the mob while complimenting yourself on your daring. That’s all there is to Ann Coulter’s craft, the rest is exploitation of the sexual masochism of the American male—he just can’t get enough of the kitten with claws.”

A Chronicle of American Interventionism

America, Foreign Policy, War

In a new book, Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer chronicles America’s interventions in foreign countries. Writes Brian Urquhart for The New York Review of Books:

Kinzer describes three periods of American intervention: first the “Imperial Era” between 1893 and 1910 (in Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, and Honduras); second, the “Covert Action period” between 1953 and 1973 (in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile); and third, the “Invasions” since 1983 (in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq). The original announced aim was to help anti-colonial patriots to achieve success, as in Cuba and the Philippines; and then, to the patriots’ surprise, the US would establish an authoritarian protectorate.

Especially startling are “The parallels between McKinley’s invasion of the Philippines and Bush’s invasion of Iraq.” As Kinzer see it:

Both presidents sought economic as well as political advantage for the United States. Both were also motivated by a deep belief that the United States has a sacred mission to spread its form of government to faraway countries. Neither doubted that the people who lived in those countries would welcome Americans as liberators. Neither anticipated that he would have to fight a long counterinsurgency war to subdue nationalist rebels. Early in the twenty-first century, ten decades after the United States invaded the Philippines and a few years after it invaded Iraq, those two countries were among the most volatile and unstable in all of Asia.

The Rummy Red Herring

Iraq, Politics, Republicans, The Military, War

On the six retired U.S. Marine and Army generals calling for the resignation or firing of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: other than that they are going by the book so as to get a book deal, this amounts to meaningless musical chairs. It suggests that if one could locate the source of dysfunction in this administration, things would be on the mend. That’s an error. The perennial calls for resignations or for a reshuffling serve to obscure profound matters of policy and principle, matters the government and most pointy heads can’t and won’t grapple with due to moral and intellectual deficits.

A Saddamless Iraq — A Free Iraq

Bush, Democracy, Iraq, Islam, Neoconservatism, War

Genghis (Bush) and his gang have recently told Iraqis to get with the program: form a government, or else. There is something really screwy about this administration’s admonitions to Iraqis for not getting it together. As though Iraq ever had it together; Saddam’s reign was one of the more peaceful periods in the history of this fractious people, which did not, I might add, ask to be invaded—and “improved.”

Under our ministrations, Iraq has gone from a secular to a religious country; from rogue to failed state. Put yourself in the worn-out shoes of this sad, pathetic people. Would you rather live under Saddam—who was a brutal dictator, but did provide Iraq with one of the foundations of civilization: order or under a force made up of ideological terrorists and an “Ali Baba” element, all running rampant because they can, and where not even mosques provide a safe haven from these brutes and their bombs?

I know what my answer would be. But then I’ve actually had some experience—nothing compared to the experience of the Iraqis, but certainly something compared to the inexperience of the types (Hannity, O’Reilly et al.) who talk up this war.

I lived under a dictatorship in apartheid South-Africa. So did millions of Africans. Crime was never an issue then. Africans suffered indignities, but not much violence. Unless one made a point of clashing with the authorities, one’s life was secure. Now that “freedom” has come to South Africa, lawlessness is such that the “democratic” government has implemented “an official blackout” on national crime statistics. The place is one of the most violent spots on earth, after Iraq, Haiti, and some other African countries.

A few weeks back I got the news that my youngest brother and his family (wife and new baby) were attacked in their suburban fortress at 2:00am by a gang of Africans. The alarm was bypassed. Luckily they escaped with their lives.

In my father’s upmarket neighborhood, another dad was shot point-blank in front of his little girls, as he exited his car to open the garage gates. The loot? A cell phone and some cash. He begged the savages to take his car and all his possessions and spare his life. Two of my husband’s colleagues are dead; one shot in broad daylight as he left his girlfriend’s apartment.

South-Africa is heaven on earth compared to Iraq. So don’t speak to me about “liberation.” The removal of Saddam is not to be equated with liberty in Iraq; a Saddamless Iraq is not necessarily a free Iraq.

Let us stipulate for the record that Saddam Hussein was a killer, a wicked man indeed. Yet even the invasion’s most avid supporters cannot but agree that Iraq was not a lawless society prior to our merciful faith-based intervention.

In addition to their society’s cultural limitations vis-a -vis the attainment of democracy, if Iraqis appear ungrateful or disoriented it is because they are busy… busy dying at rates much much higher than those claimed by the Saddam = Hitler crowd. In the final days of Saddam’s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: “heart attack, stroke and chronic illness,” according to a Lancet report. Since Iraq became another neocon object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence.

As I once wrote, people “whose lungs are airless, whose hearts are not beating, and whose eyes and limbs are missing are not free and will never be free.” And people who risk such a fate daily are not free in any meaningful way.