The madness of the antiwar right, cont.

The madness of the antiwar right, cont.

A review of James Bovard’s Terrorism and Tyranny by Justin Raimondo in the September 22 issue of The American Conservative serves as a good example of the ideological mania that lies at the core of the antiwar right. Here are several excerpts from the piece, with my comments:

No one is spared in Bovard’s merciless review of our spectacularly unsuccessful war on terrorism.

Does anyone outside the precincts of lewrockwell.com, TAC, and The Nation believe that the war on terrorism has been “spectacularly unsuccessful”? Such a bald assertion of such a manifest falsehood sets the tone for Raimondo’s article, and is sadly consistent with virtually everything else TAC has published on the war.

Having failed to learn the lesson of the first war on terrorism, we stumbled into a second more serious and wide-ranging conflict. Its roots, however, are not in abstractions, such as the terrorists’ alleged hatred of our way of life, but in blood-and-flesh realities such as the March 8, 1985 car bomb that went off in a Beirut suburb. The intended target, a radical Muslim leader, was shaken but left alive. Eighty others, mostly women and children, were killed, and 200 were wounded. The bombing, according to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, was the work of CIA director William Casey, who had enlisted the co-operation of the Saudis. Retribution was not long in coming.
A few months later, Arab terrorists took over a TWA flight from Athens and executed a U.S. Navy seaman on board, as they railed that it was payback time for the Beirut bombing. One hijacker kept yelling “New Jersey! New Jersey!” as terrified passengers cowered in their seats. He was talking about the battleship New Jersey, which had rained down death and, yes, terror in the form of 2000-pound shells on Beirut the previous year.

Doesn’t such an amazing and appalling statement—that the United States government set off a terrorist bomb in Beirut killing 80 civilians—need some factual corroboration in order to be believed? Yet Raimondo simply asserts it. It shows the American government as having caused through its own evil actions the terrorist attack on America; and that, apparently, is enough for him (and for the editors of TAC who published it).

The major complaint of Ashcroft and his defenders is that, prior to 9/11, the intelligence and domestic law-enforcement agencies couldn’t pool their knowledge in tracking down terrorists. Bovard effectively exposes this lie and points out that the secret FISA courts, whose judges deliberate in a sealed chamber, have approved over 12,000 wiretap applications since 1978: not a single one has been rejected. After 9/11, Ashcroft went to Congress and demanded the right to treat all American citizens as potential foreign agents—without having to show any evidence of wrongdoing.
Congress caved, and, in so doing, surrendered practically all the historic gains won by our forefathers. “Give us the tools” to fight terrorism, pleaded the attorney general. The irony is that the FBI had failed to use the legal means at their disposal to go after Zacarias Moussaoui, the suspected “twentieth hijacker,” as the Senate Judiciary Committee pointed out, because “key FBI personnel responsible for protecting our country against terrorism did not understand the law.”

First, Raimondo’s hysterical claim that Congress in passing the Patriot Act “surrendered practically all the historic gains won by our forefathers” should be enough, by itself, to expel him and his editors permanently from any role in the war debate. But beyond that, consider the bald illogic of the passage. First he attacks Ashcroft for demanding “the right to treat all American citizens as potential foreign agents—without having to show any evidence of wrongdoing.” Then he attacks the FBI for failing to go after Moussaoui, because “key FBI personnel responsible for protecting our country against terrorism did not understand the law.” But, of course, the legal obstacles to searching Mousaoui’s computer following his arrest prior to 9/11 were based on the regulation that barred surveillance of persons who only had possible terrorist connections but who had not actually committed a terrorist act. And that, of course, was the very regulation that Ashcroft after 9/11 was seeking to remove. Raimondo thus attacks the government for being too lenient on terrorists, and for being too harsh.

The administration’s assault on the rights of immigrants was soon extended to an all-out attack on the rights of Americans.

Does any rational person believe that the Bush adminstriaton has engaged in an “all-out attack on the rights of Americans”? What does it say about a magazine that it would publish such a charge?

Under the “Patriot” legislation, our e-mails may be read and our homes searched without a warrant and without telling us.

This is not true, as numerous articles on the Patriot Act have explained. Warrants are required in all such cases.

Bovard’s chapter on U.S.-ally Israel’s model for fighting terrorism is a searing indictment of a nation-state that was founded, after all, by a terrorist organization, the Irgun, one that did not distinguish between civilian and military targets.

It is an absurd and total lie, amounting to Blood Libel, that the terrorist organization Irgun founded the state of Israel. Oh, how I wish that the late Eric Breindel, Scott McConnell’s former boss at the New York Post editorial page and an eloquent defender of Israel and Jews, were alive to chastise McConnell for publishing this anti-Israel filth.

War is the engine of expanding state power, and fear is its fuel: the forces that are driving our policy of perpetual war and galloping tyranny are one and the same.

This reveals Raimondo’s ideological core, explaining everything else he says. In Raimondo’s mind, anything that expands the state is evil; war expands the state; therefore any people who promote a war, regardless of how necessary it may be, are evil. And therefore anything, regardless of how untrue or vicious it may be, may be said against them. Such fanaticism and bigotry are now an accepted part of the antiwar right.

Are there any adherents of that movement who will rise up and criticize its excesses, and thus attempt to call it back to sanity and decency? Or will such criticism continue to come only from outsiders such as myself?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 20, 2003 01:40 PM | Send

Comments

Bob Woodward makes the case for the Beirut incident in his book ‘Veil,’ which I have not read.

As for the Irgun point, Raimondo is wrong. Israel was not founded by the Irgun. But I would advise against whitewashing Israel’s history in the process of defending the Israel of today. The Irgun certainly were an important military part of the founding. The terrorist Begin was the sixth prime minister of Israel and founded the Herut party which became the main party of the Likud coalition.

Posted by: Thrasymachus on October 20, 2003 4:03 PM

Thrasymachus balances the truth with falsehood, and it won’t sell in Peoria. It won’t even sell in New York. First, no one denies the role the Irgun played in Israel’s independence (even as Irgun was opposed and ostracized by the mainstream Zionist organizations). But The American Conservative did not say that Irgun played a _role_ in Israel’s independence. It said Israel was _founded_ by Irgun. In uttering that lie, TAC was seeking to deny Israel of its legitimacy as a state, and of its moral right to oppose genocidal terrorism today. So let’s be clear on that point, shall we?

Second, by the time Begin became Prime Minister, in 1977, he had been a law-abiding participant in Israeli electoral politics for 30 years. Thirty years. It’s not as though Israel took a terrorist and made him prime minister.

Third, there is absolutely no equivalence between the acts of Irgun and the things today’s Palestinian terrorists are doing every week, with the ecstatic support of most of the Palesistinian community. Irgun’s most famous act was an attack on a military headquarters (which, moreover, they gave warnings of beforehand), not a random attack on civilians going about their daily lives.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on October 20, 2003 4:25 PM

Thrasy wrote,

” … I would advise against whitewashing Israel’s history in the process of defending the Israel of today.”

No country’s founding history would pass the sort of “niceness inspection” Thrasy implies here. No, not the U.S.’s either. Let’s be fair, guys.

Posted by: Unadorned on October 20, 2003 4:30 PM

I second Unadorned’s comment. I worked for 3 years as a full-time volunteer for the American Indian Movement. During that time, and in reading historical accounts of our westward expansion, the wholesale violation of treaties, (which persists to this day,) and the outright massacres, including of women and children, that took place during this period, it became very clear that we have little room to talk about a country like Israel.

I realize that AIM, to its discredit, takes the Palestinian side of this, a point I did not spare to dispute on appropriate occassions. But the differences are stark. The Jews have very strong, ancient, and documented ties to that land. European man had no such claims to North America, (Kennewick Man notwithstanding.)

We don’t like to talk about these things anymore; we prefer always to point the finger at others. But the differences between the context and circumstances concerning the conquest of Indian lands and the manner in which the Jews reestablished their country could not be more stark. It is hypocritical to impugn the success of Zionism, when the legitimacy of our claims to the full territoriality of the U.S. proper — if we assume other than that might makes right — are open to much greater criticism.

If we accept the legitimacy of the United States, we should accept the legitimacy of Israel.

Posted by: Joel LeFevre on October 20, 2003 4:58 PM

I once made an argument similar to Mr. LeFevre’s to a fellow immigration restrictionist who was becoming increasingly pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. I said to him, if American Indians demanded back all the land they once had, and started blowing us up to get it, would you give it to them? His answer was no, but, he continued, this did not contradict his views on Israel, because he was not a universalist. In other words, he had the right to go on villifying Israel for its supposed theft of the Arabs’ land, and taking the side of terrorists against Israel, while defending America’s taking of the Indians’ land.

His comment exemplifies the moral depths into which the paleoconservative emphasis on particularity—when stripped of any connection with universal truth—has drawn all too many people.

Posted by: Lawrence Auster on October 20, 2003 5:08 PM