printThe women of the neoconnerie have been instrumental in keeping their fans tuned-out, turned-on, and hot for war. Neocons, in particular, enter a dangerous state of heightened emotional arousal as soon as war is around the corner. Sarah Palin’s war euphoria was on display during “On the Record,” with host Greta Van Susteren, when Palin practically panted for a show of even greater, and certainly grislier, force in Libya. (Here)
“America’s interests” in Libya, Mrs. Palin asserted, lie in either “killing or capturing” Qaddafi. Nothing else will do. If Obama does not order these deeds, “America’s interests” will have been compromised. A non sequitur, if you ask me. Sarah is presuming something not in evidence. If Qaddafi is not murdered, how will this meshuga (here) “seek revenge” here in the USA? Flood our markets with gaudy gowns? Hinder the housing market with his spacious tents?
A good war must also inspire: both Greta and Sarah were agreed. Sarah expressed disappointment that the president didn’t deliver an inspirational war speech. (Transcripts) Following the lead of other countries—“getting in the back of the bus,” as she put it—doesn’t do it for her; doesn’t inspire.
You ask: Can the US not LEAD and INSPIRE the world with its productivity, products; its professionals, and their inventions? Forget about it. Mrs. Palins, like all neocons, conflates the American state—its war making proclivities and powers, in particular—with national greatness.
Like many a criminal, the act of committing crimes (in this case vicariously via the state apparatus) further lowers the war monger’s inhibitions. This base condition accounts for the tolerance for atrocities, and shameless, atavistic call for assassinations and killings.
In her war euphoria, Sarah even forgot that we’re broke, in hock to the tune of $14 trillion and growing. In wondering why Libya, she boasted: “America could intervene with our power and our resources in many other areas.” We can afford to? Really?
By the way, I have a feeling that Obama’s casus belli, embedded in the following excerpt from his speech, will turn out to be a lot like WMD in Iraq:
In the face of the world’s condemnation, Gaddafi chose to escalate his attacks, launching a military campaign against the Libyan people. Innocent people were targeted for killing. Hospitals and ambulances were attacked. Journalists were arrested, sexually assaulted, and killed. Supplies of food and fuel were choked off. The water for hundreds of thousands of people in Misratah was shut off. Cities and towns were shelled, mosques destroyed, and apartment buildings reduced to rubble. Military jets and helicopter gunships were unleashed upon people who had no means to defend themselves against assault from the air.
Confronted by this brutal repression and a looming humanitarian crisis, I ordered warships into the Mediterranean.
Few things irritate me more than women who push for wars with such bravado. They’ll talk about how tough we are and how we can’t let other countries push us around, yet they’ll expect their men and their boys to get their hands dirty (or blown off). Like women who will get you into a fight for you, they should be avoided at all costs.
As you said, if we have to fear leaving Qaddafi alive, we’ve really lost our edge. Didn’t America’s enemies used to be powerful at least? All this war just makes me ill.
With the change of a few words, my thoughts went right to a Lincoln justification for the siege of Atlanta. Not that I think Gaddafi is Lincoln or vice versa, but the point that seems to be ignored is this: Does the government of any nation now have the right to defend itself against rebellion? What about the humanitarian disaster that will ensue when the rebels start slaughtering Gaddafi’s people? And most important — by what right do other nations invade Libya to take sides in what is an internal matter? Where does that stop?
Gaddafi is a bad guy. No one disputes this. His people have a right to stand up against repression. Maybe he has at least a governmental right to maintain the government system, good or bad. But why is this somehow the business of the UN or the US or NATO (read UN or US)? It seems to me that we have more right to military action in Somalia to stop piracy than we have in Libya to put our nose where it is not justified. Unless, of course, we are talking about a need to boost Obama’s leadership credentials.
I’m reminded at times like these that the great leader LBJ once said, during the 64 campaign, let Asian boys fight Asian wars. I am sorry that those Libyan boys may die and may lose and Gaddafi may win, but this is a Libyan issue, and not an opportunity for Obama to pretend to greatness.
“Military jets and helicopter gunships were unleashed upon people who had no means to defend themselves against assault from the air.” True, almost all of them said “USA-USA” And, sweet little Sarah wants to double down. I’ve finally found a reason for the fountain of youth, I’d have the ability to leave this mess.
From Pat Buchanan’s current column:
When Greek patriots sought America’s assistance, Daniel Webster took up their cause but was admonished by John Randolph. Intervention would breach every “bulwark and barrier of the Constitution.”
“Let us say to those 7 million of Greeks: We defended ourselves when we were but 3 million, against a power in comparison to which the Turk is but as a lamb. Go and do thou likewise.”
….
Female politicians always seem to have to prove how “tough” they are – Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton disgust me.
And what guarantee do we have that, if Qadaffi is overthrown, someone or something better will follow? Hitler followed the Kaiser, Lenin and Stalin followed the Czar and the thuggish Iranian theocrats followed the Shah. Anyway, we’re broke, and we can’t afford this sort of ridiculous foreign adventure.
According to the State Run Media this morning, the “rebels” (isn’t it funny by the way that if our government likes them they’re rebels, if not they’re “insurgents”) were advancing impressively against Gaddafi’s troops. Isn’t it funny how hundreds of millions of bombs dropped on your opponent before hand will do that? I’m wondering how much press coverage will be given the slaughter that surely awaits the civilians in the pro-Gaddafi towns once the rebels move into those areas? Also, do we plan to bomb Tripoli when the “rebels” reach it (since the only way they’ve been able to advance is with our bombs leveling everything before them)? The whole “this is a humanitarian mission” angle is going to look rather silly (perhaps even to the idiocracy) when this is all done.
Sistah Sarah babbles about Obama’s babbling but she does make (like the clock that is right twice a day) a valid point: that Gadaffi, left in power, would seek revenge on the US. Keep in mind that JFK’s CIA kept trying to assassinate Fidel Castro and that a Castroite, Lee Harvey Oswald ….
So Sarah is possibly correct (as was Powell with the “Pottery Barn” analogy):
ONCE YOU BREAK IT – YOU OWN IT!!!
Where she is wrong is that there is no reason to “break it” or “own it”. I told everyone I could scream at that getting INTO Baghdad was extremely trivial – it is getting OUT OF Baghdad that is nearly impossible. The late libertarian Ron Crickenberger termed this the ROACH MOTEL law of foreign intervention. The US can go in but we never get to leave – witness Italy, Germany, and Japan 66 years after their defeat and we are still there.
Our HUMANITARIAN intervention will cause more Mei Lais and Abu Ghraibs. The locals will resent occupation, little children will target our soldiers to “insurgents” – at which point the entire population of LIBERATEDSTAN become some subhuman species “Gook” or “Raghead” and Americans wind up being the unhumanitarians.
I don’t think this has much to do with women. Rather, we need to recognize that the Republican Party is, at least for the past couple of decades, The War Party. The folks in the Republican Party seem to support all wars, no matter how thin the rationale. And, truly, the rationale for getting militarily involved in Libya is non-existent.
Another point of view, which I cannot discard, is that the Obama Admin is doing this in preparation for a military strike on Israel, as Samantha Power has advocated.
Sarah Palin’s friend, the mad neocon Bill Kristol (who, in a sane society, would be unemployable) can hardly contain his glee about Obama’s war against Libya (via Larry Auster):
This is what passes as respectable conservatism nowadays.
The sad thing is that Kristol will probably get his Republican “leader” who will push for perpetual war abroad and bankruptcy at home.
By the way, I have a feeling that Obama’s casus belli, embedded in the following excerpt from his speech, will turn out to be a lot like WMD in Iraq:
Along those lines how about this blast from the past from Madeleine K. Albright. On April 20, 1999, in front of the Senate foreign Relations Committee, she testified that Serbs were using Albanians as ‘human blood banks.’
…the seizure of civilians for use as human shields and human blood banks,…
Thank God we stopped those vampires.
Israel’s biggest concerns remain Iran, Syria, possibly Iraq & the Muslim Brotherhood & their proxies. I don’t understand Bibi’s decision to expand settlements right now. It just seems foolish–it reduces their buffer zone & plays into the hands of Iran & Syria’s formidable PR machine. AS for Palin doubling down, well, yeah–she would. It gets her ratings & speaking engagements & enriches her. She enjoys conning people because it helps her accumulate stuff. She’s not a pundit or a politician. She’s a reality show tramp who knows how to play her audiene & her base.
Obama is uncomfortable with conflict unless it’s on the basketball court. He tries to run the oval office like a faculty meeting–consider his selection of top advisors. He is, literally & technically African-American but so is Ilana. Obama isn’t a socialist or a radical. He’s a policy wonk who probably wishes he was helping a PhD student with his dissertation right now. I WISH he was, too. He’s not very good at this President thing. But the likelihood of Obama doing something truly radical (for good or for bad) is pretty bloody low. Dairy Queen is more radical then Obama.
It just drives me nuts when otherwise sensible folks ascribe improbable intents & patently unlikely motives based on tribal loyalties & political assumptions with minimal evidence to back their claims. Very little in life is a priori. Thread jacking is kind of jack move & I am sorry if I have offended.
For what it’s worth, Henry, I’m none to fond of Samantha Power either. She reeks of HuffPo-style left wing anti-semitism. But she only has so much power. And Obama, whatever his faults, has is almost pathologically phlegmatic. Clinton is probably a more dangerous bigot where Israel is concerned. She has a Mel Gibsonesque history of anti-Jewish tirades & a lot more clout.
It’s an interesting thing that at times like these we seem to get sucked into this idiocy that one must favor war to be a real American, and if you favor peace and oppose war, you are somehow un-American. I speak as a Vietnam Era vet. Do you remember when Vietnam used to be a war, and now it’s an era? How do we get pulled into this thinking, especially when we’ve been there before and can see the outcome? The outcome being no outcome, it never ends. I don’t mean we like you and me, but the nation. And it seems to always come back to leadership of lack thereof. These dim bulbs get elected and their machinations carry them, and us, away on these lunatic adventures. And always our reactions to them are supposed to be a measure of our loyalty to the nation.
I think, too, that events are way out in front of the Obama regime, and they have to keep trying to look like they have their hands on the reins, but they don’t. And it’s not just him, but the neocon crowd supports this adventurism as well. They just don’t like the way Obama is doing it. They could do it better, I’m sure.
We are at the mercy of traitors and blind guides and fools. Are these dopes the best we can do?
I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head their, Stephen. I just wonder how much is machination & how much is sheer momentum.
As a wise man once said, Jane, stop this crazy thing!”
I’ll tell you, Graham, I’m not seeing anyone on the horizon in the GOP willing to talk sense but Ron Paul and Son. I don’t know where Bachman is on this Libya thing. Nobody talks about the constitution outside the tea party group.
I read years ago that many during the days of the collapse of Rome commonly believed that there was a great conspiracy in Rome to ruin the empire, because people could not believe that their government was so inept by accident. It had to be on purpose. I don’t know what other conclusion we can draw when we see the blatantly treasonous behavior in Washington. Certainly, some of them are fools and idiots. But many are worse. It’s the rare voice you hear calling for sanity. Conspiracies big and small, shallow people inept and vicious and corrupt. Everybody angling for advantage or posturing for position and influence, lining their pockets and lying like rugs.
Is it any wonder the streets are full of criminals? The halls of power are full of them. And the lone voices who speak up are shouted down as cranks and extremists. These criminals have to go. The Constitution must be saved, because, to paraphrase the idiot in chief — it’s the only thing that stands between us and the pitchforks.
When the president won’t defend the Constitution and openly betrays it, he needs to be fired and we need to hire somebody with honor and good character who will defend it. Something has to give here pretty soon. What’s happening now ain’t working. Throw the bums out. Damnocrats, neocons, crooks, liars, bed wetters, self styled saviors, all of them.
Excellent discussion of war-mongering and the role that so-called “neo-cons” have played in our sad history of same. Wonder what we’d do, however, if war came to these shores? Is all-out everything OK then?
We’ll see what Sarah thinks of war when her son who is in the military comes back in over sized Ziploc from the Middle East. [G-d forbid. However, Palin was FOR war when her son was in “Eyeraq.” That’s what a Moloch worshiper she is.]
For more on my thoughts on it all, please see the following letter: http://www.vdare.com/letters/tl_051609.htm#b3