A War Miscellany

Here is a miscellany of items on the war that have been accumulating over the past few weeks. Instead of creating a separate article for each item, I am combining them into one extended blog entry. They are roughly divided into three sections: the antiwar right, the antiwar left, and war supporters. Enjoy.

Roberts approvingly reports on efforts to impeach Bush as war criminal

Will Bush be impeached? Will he be called a war criminal?

These are not hyperbolic questions. Bush has permitted a small cadre of neoconservatives to isolate him from world opinion, putting him at odds with the United Nations and America’s allies.

What better illustrates Bush’s isolation than the fact that he delivered his March 16 ultimatum to the U.N. concerning Iraq from an air base in the Azores, where there was no prospect for massive demonstrations against his policy. Standing with Bush against the world were Britain and Spain.

The U.S., once a guarantor of peace, is now perceived in the rest of the world as an aggressor. Its victim is a small Muslim nation unable to defend its own air space, much less to project power beyond its borders. If Iraqis attempt to resist invasion, they will be slaughtered.

Roberts also compares a supposedly forged document used by the Bush administration to Hitler’s Big Lie that launched the invasion of Poland and World War II:

Hitler used SS troops dressed in Polish uniforms to fake an attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz on Aug. 31, 1939. Following the faked attack, Hitler announced: This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory.

As German troops poured into Poland, Hitler declared: The Polish state has refused the peaceful settlement of relations which I desired, and has appealed to arms. The German High Command called the German invasion of Poland a counterattack.

Thanks to his neoconservative cadre, outside the U.S. Bush is now a disliked and distrusted politician. Bush’s enemies will exploit parallels to naked aggression. After many decades of U.S. leadership in building an international order, Bush’s enemies will hold him accountable for his defiance of this order.

And Roberts leaves no doubt that he is among those who will hold Bush accountable for defying the “international order.”

Amidst his crazy comparisons of Bush to Hitler, Roberts makes one good point. Bush had elevated the importance of the UN, constantly appealing to its resolutions as the enforceable basis of international law, while simultaneously asserting America’s right to act on its own. He thus enflamed the very “world conscience” that then pilloried his actions. An example of compassionate conservatism in action.

Paul Craig Roberts’s wrong facts and amazingly wrong predictions

In his April 3, 2003 column, “A strategic blunder?”, Roberts seems driven by unconstrained animus against everything the American government now does. He gets the known facts of the war so helplessly wrong, that his larger predictions have no credibility at all.

His wrong facts: that the White House, the Pentagon, our troops, and the public were surprised that Saddam Hussein did not “collapse after the first whiff of gunpowder,” as Richard Perle, the principle architect of the war, had optimistically predicted.

That “[t]he promised ‘cakewalk’ quickly bogged down into a stalemate, and other major setbacks have occurred.”

That “our vaunted invasion force” has been “halted” by “lightly armed Iraqi irregular troops and tribesmen.”

That “[t]he American invasion has made a Muslim hero out of Saddam Hussein, a secular dictator who has spent his political life suppressing Islamic political parties.” [Italics added.]

That the invasion has “radicalized” the entire Arab world against America.

Now that Roberts has given us his spectacularly off-base picture of the current facts, he announces his Big Prediction for the future: “[T]he U.S. invasion of Iraq is likely to succeed in toppling … British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush, the Republican Party and American neoconservatives.”

Question: How does a man go on writing columns after (1) being this wrong, and (2) being so righteous about it? Answer: When you’re fueled by rage, reality doesn’t matter.

Haider is pro-Saddam

A once-promising white nationalist slips down the anti-West, anti-American, pro-terrorist rathole.

Austria’s Haider Offers Iraqi Minister Asylum
Thu April 03, 2003 08:17 AM ET

VIENNA (Reuters)—Austrian far-right leader Joerg Haider, a vocal backer of Iraq against the United States, offered asylum in his Alpine province to Iraq’s foreign minister in an interview published on Thursday.

Haider, a long-time friend of Foreign Minister Naji Sabri and a harsh critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East, was asked if Sabri could count on refuge in Carinthia, where Haider is governor, if the Iraqi leadership is forced to flee.

“There is always room in my home for a friend,” Haider told the Austrian magazine News. The two have been friends since Sabri was ambassador in Vienna in the 1990s.

Haider last month praised Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as an Arab visionary. He was forced to quit national politics last year amid uproar after he met Saddam in Baghdad and expressed support for the Iraqi leader.

Haider accused the United States of going to war for Iraq’s oil. “I personally would be delighted if the Iraqis succeed in defending themselves from this aggression,” Haider told News.

Chronicles issues formal, signed statement supporting the war

It’s nice to see that some antiwar paleos are not completely loony. But why would they need to issue a formal (and pro forma, given the minimalist nature of the support expressed) statement such as this, unless to cover themselves from their previous furious campaign against the war?

STATEMENT
ON THE WAR IN IRAQ

The editors of Chronicles support the American forces now engaged in combat in Iraq. We hope and pray for an American victory in conformity with the rules of civilized warfare, for the speedy and safe return of our troops to their homeland, and for a humane and just resolution of the conflicts in the Middle East.

Thomas Fleming
Scott P. Richert
Aaron D. Wolf
Samuel Francis
Christopher Check
Paul Gottfried
Katherine Dalton Boyer
Wayne Allensworth
George McCartney

Author on Hussein predicts “real war” begins now (April 4) in Baghdad

On the Canadian Broadcast Company, Friday night, 4/4/03, the bald, funereal, terminally depressed-appearing anchor man, who like most liberals seems miserably caught in a world that doesn’t fit his expectations, interviewed Con Coughlin, author of Saddam, King of Terror. Coughlin said that the “real war” only begins now, in Baghdad, that Hussein has all kinds of terrible things waiting in store for us, that this has been his plan all the time. He was completely positive about Hussein.

I’ll bet that two weeks ago this Coughlin was predicting all kinds of disasters that didn’t occur then either.

CNN’s cover-up is like Dennis Ross’s cover up

The CNN executive who revealed that he had known for years all these terrible things about Hussein but had concealed them, supposedly to protect CNN’s employees. By not reporting on the true nature of Hussein, they were lying to the world, they were allowing the world to think this was not as bad a regime as it really was.

Here’s another example of someone revealing the inconvenient truth only AFTER it won’t cost the liberals anything: In 2002 Dennis Ross gave an interview revealing the full details of the final peace offer made by Clinton and Barak to Arafat in December 2000. They were stunning, including a contiguous Palestinian area in West Bank, Israeli withdrawal from the Jordan valley, and an elevated highway connecting Gaza with the West Bank. Arafat turned it down cold.

Had Ross revealed these details earlier, it would have helped discredit the terror Intifada. Instead, he waited until AFTER the terror intifada had proceeded for a year and a half and President Bush had finally put the kabosh on the “peace process,” and thus there was nothing further to lose by coming out with the truth of Israel’s generosity and Arafat’s obstructionism.

In the same way, this CNN executive only came out with the devastating truth about Hussein’s regime AFTER that regime had been destroyed. If he had come out with it earlier, then the long debate about whether to remove the Hussein regime would have had an entirely different coloration.

Hans Blix’s true self.

Hans Blix reveals his true self. He’s a politically correct liberal who thinks global warming is a bigger threat than war. So naturally he wasn’t serious about his responsibilities as an arms inspector. He says things like this:

At the same time, though, one must not disregard and forget the things that are breeding these terrorist movements. Why do they become terrorists? Why do they become so desperate they are willing to blow up airplanes or buildings? Therefore, we have to look at the social problems as well.

This is classic. “We have to look at the social problems …” The liberal is always sure there’s some social inequality that’s causing the trouble, but he has no idea what it is. His “we have to look” takes precedence over what we actually do know about bin Laden’s motives. It’s a little like Nancy Pelosi’s refrain, which she repeated even after the war was over, that she opposed the war because she had “questions.”

Antiwar liberal admits that antiwar liberals wanted us to lose

Gary Kamiya in Salon:

I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I’m not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings.

Some of this is merely the result of pettiness—ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I feel guilty about, and disavow. But some of it is something trickier: It’s a kind of moral bet-hedging, based on a pessimism not easy to discount, in which one’s head and one’s heart are at odds.

Kamiya, Salon’s executive editor, says that the desire of these liberals to see U.S. forces defeated and American soldiers killed was simply the logical consequence of their anti-Bush, antiwar position:

Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least-bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people. But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative—four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere? [Italics added.]

Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world.

Of course, the liberal outlook Kamiya describes here is only “moral” and “logical” in the sense that ideological relativism is moral and logical. Ideological relativists, covering the gamut from Lenin and Hitler to today’s anti-American and anti-Bush bigots, substitute their own whims, feelings, and ideological preferences for morality. Whatever helps advance their ideology is good and must be promoted; whatever stands in its way is bad and must be destroyed. Such people would even have America undergo a horrible military disaster merely in order to prevent Bush from being re-elected.

Kamiya’s confession confirms that there is indeed a clearly marked, identifiable dividing line between being a loyal critic of America’s policies and being an enemy of America.

The Left wants a “Department of Peace”

Among the goals for the proposed department the GRA sets forth would be the development of “… new programs that relate to the societal challenges of school violence, guns, racial or ethnic violence, violence against gays and lesbians, and police-community relations disputes.”

The ultimate New York Times headline

This headline is so ambiguous you don’t know what it means. The body of the story itself says that 50 U.S. tanks entered the center of Baghdad. Now, isn’t that major, exciting news that any normal newspaper editor would want to announce? But apparently the Times couldn’t stand such a straightforward statement of U.S. victory, which to them is as a cross to a vampire. So instead they came up with

ARMORED FORCE COMES UNDER FIRE DURING THREE-HOUR INCURSION

By PATRICK E. TYLER

KUWAIT, April 5—An armored force of 50 American tanks and other vehicles wheeled suddenly into the center of Baghdad today, taking the city’s defenders by surprise and triggering a rolling firefight along boulevards lined with some people waving and others shooting….

Nice article by William Hague

The former leader of the British Conservative Party explains (1) that America is not an imperialistic country, and (2) that America only intervenes against foreign tyrants and aggressors because if she doesn’t do it, no one else will.

Victor Davis Hanson on the handwringing about the looting

Hanson writes on the madness of all these media attacks on the military, in the midst of one of the greatest victories in history. His only mistake is that he attributes this to an excessively critical attitude rather than to outright anti-Americanism. But to the extent that the problem is criticism and not anti-Americanism, he gives a very good explanation why this has occurred. America functions at such a high level, that people come to expect not merely a high level, but absolute perfection. The result is that anything short of absolute perfection is intolerable.

Arab countries respond to fall of Baghdad

Arab world reels as TV reveals ‘lies’
Washington Times, by Paul Martin

Some Arab professionals concluded that the Iraqi regime’s collapse stemmed from the nature of Arab leaderships.

Saddam’s regime was a “dictatorship and had to go,” said Tannous Basil, a 47-year-old cardiologist in Sidon, Lebanon.

“I don’t like the idea of having the Americans here, but we asked for it,” he added. “They come here because our area is filled with dictatorships like Saddam’s.”

Lucianne.com participant “jond” replies to the above, 4/10/2003 2:31:06 AM:

The “Education President?” Absolutely!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 14, 2003 09:58 PM | Send