printThe Canadian Broadcasting Corporation commemorated the invasion of Iraq with an outstanding Fifth-Estate segment: “THE LIES THAT LED TO WAR: The Political, Diplomatic, and Media Spin that Convinced Americans to Invade Iraq.”
An important point made was that America is no closer to a reckoning that this “adventure” was a great wrong, if not an outright evil. Ann Coulter provided a strident example of this hubris. Tossing her magnificent mane, she mocked Canadians for not getting the goods on how good things were in Iraq. This was how democracies shaped up, Ann “argued.”
A disgrace really. Cruel too.
A question to the fine chroniclers of the war at the CBC: There is a small number of American reporters, pundits, and a few politicians that has always opposed this abominable invasion on the grounds that it violated natural rights, Just War Theory, the American Constitution, the comity of nations—and practically every single stricture familiar to babes on the playground.
(SEE “Just War for Dummies”
& “Unnatural Lawlessness”)
Rep. Ron Paul protested tirelessly; as did this writer (starting in September 2002 in an editorial for Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe And Mail) and her non-Beltway affiliated libertarian colleagues.
(SEE “Why So Many Americans Don’t Support Attacking Iraq,” except that there weren’t so many Americans, despite the titular hope the Globe and Mail expressed.)
Why does the CBC fail to mention our much-marginalized faction? Is it because we are, for the most, of the Old, classically liberal American Right?
Why keep featuring the fiendish Coulter, Malkin, and their Canadian copycat, one Rachel Marsden? [SEE “Lethal Weapons: Neocon Groupies“] Why not help consign them to the dustbin of punditry and look to the principled few (talented too) who stood for the soundest of philosophical principles?
We exist!
I grieved when the death toll in Iraq stood at 289—a lousy landmark I also happened to protest in an op-ed for the Canadian Globe And Mail. (SEE “Bush’s Warfare State”)
I continue to mourn now that it has climbed to 4000—yesterday. My grief at the trashing of Iraqi lives has been a constant in my writing over the last five years—in columns and blog entries alike. (The Archive is here)
Who chose to nominate the average suffering Iraqi as “Person of the Year”? Certainly not Time magazine.
(SEE “My Person of the Year: The Average Iraqi”)
Update (March 25): The Man From Texas and his simply stated, straightforward truth-telling:
“Five years into the invasion and occupation of Iraq, untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead; some two million Iraqis have fled the country as refugees; and the Iraqi Christian community – one of the oldest in the world – has been decimated more completely than even under the Ottoman occupation or the rule of Saddam Hussein.
On the US side, nearly four thousand Americans have lost their lives fighting in Iraq and many thousands more are horribly wounded. Our own senior military officers warn that our military is nearly broken by the strain of the Iraq occupation. The Veterans Administration is overwhelmed by the volume of disability claims from Iraq war veterans.
A study by Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz concludes that the cost of the war in Iraq could be at least $3 trillion. The economic consequences of our enormous expenditure in Iraq are beginning to make themselves known as we fall into recession and possibly worse…”
Women such as Ann Coulter, and men such as Bill Buckley for that matter, and others too, sadden me to some extent. I mean, they are obviously such intelligent and well-versed people, but they have elected to spend most of their professional time defending exactly those particular ideological errors that have been ravaging the American conservative movement.
[A friend sent me the obit for Buckley written by Bill Bonner. I can’t locate a link. But here’s an excerpt:
“Listening to Bill Buckley give a speech was a painful experience. It was like watching an old cow give birth. The words came out so slowly…and then you were inevitably disappointed. You expected more. A man who took so long to choose his words ought to come up with something better. But Buckley’s words were always a little slimy. Still, the pompous tone did its job. The common, naturally-conservative American thought he heard an angel singing…”
Ann is often fun, but seldom profound.–IM]
Why do they continue to feature warmongering pundits? Because it serves the empire. The media love covering crises, and war is the mother of all crises.
I too vote for the average Iraqi as person of the year. Think of their plight: ever constant risk of death, a devastated economy, complete destruction of infrastructure, sewage and rotting corpses everywhere. They are living a nightmare, compliments of Bush and Co.
Our government has gone beyond mere incompetence to one of criminality on a massive scale. It’s time some politicians are rounded up and thrown in the slammer for a very long time for what they’ve inflicted on Iraqis. Is there room in Gitmo?
1. We have been bribing the Sunni warlords to form militias to counter the Shiite militias. This is part of the “surge is working” strategy. Unfortunately, the mindless media, bored with Iraq, is buying off on the Bush-Cheney-Liberman-McCain idiocy.
2. The Arab oil states are basically disfunctional thugocracies. In Iraq, we replaced an odius anti-Iranian thug with (maybe even worse) disfunctional warlordism at a cost of trillions of dollars. Coupled with the mortgage bubble (still being propped up by the Fed), this will cause long term damage to the US economy.
3. The 2 million refugees in Syria and Jordan will be a festering wound which will further destabilize the region for
at least a generation.
4. Al Queda should pin a medal on Bush,
their best recruiter.
5. For pointing this out, this makes you, me, Ron Paul, etc. charter members of the “Hate America” club – at least in the eyes of the Coulter/Malkin crowd.
6. Meanwhile, the “identity politics” Civil War among the Democrats will wind up electing Warmonger McCain – so the farce in Iraq will go on indefinitely.
Ilana asks,
“Why does the CBC fail to mention our much-marginalized faction? Is it because we are, for the most, of the Old, classically liberal American Right?”
Hmmm. I rather think it is because many do not understand the differences among those who call themselves “conservatives.” I suspect that if you ask five people on the streets in America who a “conservative” might be, at least four of them would come up with names like Coulter or Malkin. Some in the media are sharper than that, knowing the distinctions in ideology among “conservative” pundits; but they are playing to an audience here and north of the border that probably does not. [And truth be damned, even if it comes in the form of a presidential candidate.–IM]
Just wanted to add a disagreement with Myron Pauli’s point #6: Hillary Clinton, not Warmonger McCain, will be our next President, as I see it. (That doesn’t mean that troops will be immediately withdrawn from Iraq, however.)
Ilana, one of our greatest intellectual ancestors is Robert A. Taft, senator from Ohio, known as, “Mr. Republican.” Taft was a bitter opponent of Roosevelt and the New Deal. He wrote a monograph, “A Foreign Policy for Americans,” in which he pointed out the dangers of an interventionist foreign policy. Here’s a little bit:
I have frequently written of the danger to liberty at home from the constant increase in the activity, the spending, and the power of the Federal Government, but today the threat from foreign policy is even greater. We have wandered far from its true purpose to preserve the peace and liberty of the people of the United States. Even when the purpose has been correctly understood, mistakes of judgment have led us into dangerous paths. We are embarked on a voyage at this moment in which a continued failure of understanding and judgment may wreck the greatest adventure in freedom the human race has ever known.
When I consider the current Administration, I see little to like. After the tax cuts and judges, it drops off rather sharply. Bush’s foreign policy is right out of Woodrow Wilson’s playbook (Make the World Safe for Democracy!). His domestic policy could have been written by LBJ.
It dismays me that many conservatives are still in love with global power projection and don’t understand the danger that this poses to our republican (yes, the small “r” was intended) traditions.
To add to our rejection of this war, there are the Winter Soldier stories being held by IVAW(Iraq Veterans Against the War).
Numerous accounts of aggression in the name of freedom. And not one MSM covering these atrocities verified by eye witnesses.
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/24/7868/