28 comments

  1. It is difficult to maintain the moral high ground if your attorney general lies at the bottom of the ethical slimepool.

  2. As I understand it, the various news reports say the vast majority of Iraqis are waiting for someone to bring stability and security to the country. I think they have a long wait ahead of them. No one can give it to them. They must be encouraged to take it for themselves.

    I suggest the USA hand out 9mm revolvers to any Iraqi with a stake in security and stability; professionals, skilled tradesmen, shopkeepers, and all women who hold still long enough. A revolver is simple and reliable, 9mm pistol ammo is readily available without making the purchaser stand out particularly. A pistol is much easier to carry than an AK47. It can be kept under the counter next to the cash box.

    People would be encouraged to use their new pistols on the “insurgents”. They would be warned that American troops will resent being targets, with probable fatal consequences.

    “God made all men. Sam Colt made them equal.”

  3. The important part for me, an American, was that I knew damn well that Bush was lying about the WMD. Even a scrub involved in the study of “stockpiles” of chemical and biological weapons would have known that, had they ever existed in the first place, the alleged stockpiles were worthless sludge long before America invaded. And yet the Bush administration repeated and repeated things I knew to be lies, to scare the Americans into war.

    Ms Hasan imputes that the peace activists are happy about insurgents and terrorists. Perhaps you should read this, from the far more reliable London Economist, on exactly how the Americans are slaughtering thousands of innocent Iraqis. Perhaps that would open a few eyes for you. As a former Marine myself, I was not at all surprised by this

    In what was billed as Bush’s major speech to the American people on the upcoming war with Iraq, Bush used the term threat eighteen times. It was scaremongering. Saddam was not a threat, and, compared to the real crisis in Congo, Saddam was not even much of an active threat against his own people.

    Front Page Mag is a joke. Horowitz beleives the US lost Vietnam because of the leftist media. I suppose he would also argue that the liberal/open press in Nazi Germany led to their defeat?

    What happened in Fallujah? Before the invasion, the 200,000 or so residents were told by PM Allawi that if they handed over Zarqawi there would be no invasion. After not finding him, our Generals said we were never really looking for him. Did you hear how all men between 15 and 50 were not allowed to leave the city, and that many US units were told to open fire on all men in that age range, regardless of provocation?

    Hasan, not having had access to outside news since 1978 (when it became a capital crime to read foreign news), really doesn’t know much. Doesn’t know that the world faces bigger problems than a disarmed, tinhorn dictator. And that this war didn’t even solve Iraq’s problems.

  4. Short, sweet, devestating (in some parallel dimension) and false. Quoting from Juan Cole ( http://www.juancole.com/2004/10/us-has-killed-100000-in-iraq-lancet.html), Saddam has been accused of as many as 300,000 civilian deaths, however, only 5000 bodies have been found in mass graves, whereas your linked article states that it was millions. Compare this to the tens of thousands of _confirmed_ deaths by the US, which is violating the geneva convention by not counting them.

    Reguarding the internet restrictions, no doubt you will recall the Iraqi bloggers who were documenting things as they were happening before and during the war and were often more correct than the news media.

    I used to hold you in high reguard for your writing Eric, but your attitude towards the innocents of the world after 9/11 is no more logical than that of the deafest of the right wing.

  5. Whats so glaring about the responses form the leftist tinfoil hat moonbats here is that all of them steer completly clear of addressing any of the content authored by that iraqi.

    No surprize, other lefty moonbatus-paranoidus went on how the brothers posting on the Iraq the model blog are CIA operatives.

  6. Well, in actual fact, two of the three paragraphs in my comment are devoted to criticising fundamental assertions made in the content authored by “that iraqi”. This does of course show that you are guilty of your own accusation.

    It occurs to me that every time a former lefty now I’d-nuke-the-world-but-then-there-would-be-nobody-capable-of-cleaning-my-toilet-because-I’m-only-good-at-yelling-and-managing neocon accuses me of not addressing maters of detail, I feel compelled to actually read the content again needlessly.

    Perhaps they think they can fool the left into actually reading it the first time because they never do. Maybe there’s enough material here to construct another lefty moonbatus-paranoidus conspiracy theory. :-)

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  8. “What about the crimes of the regime? It killed millions of Iraqis. Do you know that if the regime was still in power, the conversation we’re having now would result in our torture or death?”

    Yes, who would support such a regime? Oh yaa, I remember. Who was it that betrayed Iraq again?

  9. The important part for me, an American, was that I knew damn well that Bush was lying about the WMD.

    Well, good for you. So what? The president emphasized one reason that resonated with the general populace, but obviously can’t make the real arguments because of the crazies in the US. As to whether he lied or not I’ll leave to the historians.

    Why did we go to Iraq? Maybe because we need that region to be stable, and putting a democracy there can be a shining example for the region so the oil will continue to flow? Oops, I said the “o” word, and it’s good for western civilization to boot. I guess if we said we needed to go there for the “o” word it wouldn’t matter if we were saving the entire human race, it would be bad and wrong.

    We are *taking* oil from a sadistic megalomaniac dictator! What could be worse? I guess the only thing would be taking the oil from the dictator and giving back to the oppressed people who live there and who then get to benefit from it instead of the French.

  10. As usual the left stresses items that are untrue or exagerrated. For example, claims of mass murder can’t be true because we only found 5,000 bodies. Hmmmm, we didn’t find the 6 million bodies of the Jews Hitler killed because about 75% of them were cremated. Do you believe that Hitler’s crimes were exagerrated? No WMD were found. The war cry of the left since the war in Iraq started has been no WMD’s. Of course they have ignored the Sarin (a nerve agent) that was found in Fallujah, the BM-21 rockets found with appropriate fittings for chemical warheads, and the mortar and artillery shells that contained mustard gas. They have also ignored the convoys of trucks that crossed the border into Syria while the UN was playing silly games with Iraq. They have ignored the fact that evidence exists linking Saddam’s regime to terrorism and insurgency in Somalia (directed at the US military), Saudi Arabia (the barracks bombing in Khobar) and the attempted assassination of GHW Bush in 1993 in Kuwait. These are all acts of war and a cassus belli, as was continuing to maintain prohibited weapons (detailed in the Duelfer Report you guys like to quote).

    When Orwell wrote “1984” and “Animal Farm” he was talking about pacifists and the left and you folks have been living up to his expectations for generations now.

  11. My only issue with this post is the potential over-generalization of the title. The “left” as in the sense of the referenced article are the Pollyannish misfits that refuse to modify their outlook based on observables, but rather look for things that reinforce their biased view of reality. The same can be said for “right” misfits as well. Such people are best defined as extremists and lie at the outer fringes of the bell curve, either right or left as appropriate. The utility of the belief systems of these people, again “right” or “left”, is to see how not to do things.

  12. I think it’s hilarious in a macabre sort of way that the “left” is being accused of downplaying the atrocities of the Baathist regime. I don’t doubt the Iraqi author’s sense of liberation, but she would do well to keep in mind who propped up the Baathis regime in the 1980s, while most of the human rights violations were occurring (I think including the so-oft-repeated gassing of the Kurds–thanks Dick Cheney and the Reagan Administration!) Check out the picture of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein if you ever get a chance. And let’s not forget whose father led the Shiites in the south to believe that if they rebelled they would get international support and then let them get slaughtered. These are your human rights crusaders.

    If there were a real left government in the U.S., it would have supported continuation of the containment policy, support for civil society groups within the three zones, figured out if sanctions really were the only way to keep Hussein honest, and focused on democracy, not the narrow interests of American foreign policy in the Middle East (secure oil sources and a strong Israel).

  13. “When Orwell wrote “1984″ and “Animal Farm” he was talking about pacifists and the left and you folks have been living up to his expectations for generations now.”

    Sure, he was writing against the left. That’s why he was a socialist…

    In any case, ESR, you’re going to have to explain what the redeeming qualities of this article are some time, because I couldn’t find any. It fails to realize that there is more than “pro war” and “anti war”. The leftists wouldn’t be screaming nearly as loud if Bush was actually good at kicking ass and taking names. Given the death tolls and the fact that there’s really no clear path to peace for the region, let alone our withdrawal, it’s safe to say the man isn’t exactly a genius strategist.

    The article even misrepresents the all out antiwar left. Ok, yes, Sadam did some really bad stuff, killing thousands and whatnot. Lo and behold, there are many other nations on Earth that do that, and we aren’t doing anything about them. Some of them even have a more obvious nuclear threat (North Korea). Yet we’re not invading them. Stretching the military isn’t a solution to a missing Osama. Again, the left complains in many ways that Bush has the strategic sense of a four year old.

    In your next blog post you talk about your faith in empiricism. If the hawks shared your view they’d want to know the facts and count civilian casualties. But they don’t. The woman in the article is right — the US is turning out to be worse. We’ve killed untold numbers of civilians and tortured prisoners by raping them.

  14. > Whats so glaring about the responses form the leftist tinfoil hat moonbats here

    Well, it’s nice to see you’re keeping an open mind.

    > is that all of them steer completly clear of addressing any of the content
    > authored by that iraqi.

    Okay, I read the article. Why am I supposed to care again?

    I’ll read it again. Decades cut off from the outside world, ok… Democracy and human rights are so important to us that our main ally in the arab world is Saudi Arabia and we’ve suspended the geneva convention with regard to guantanamo bay. Check.

    His first clue that we tend to be enthnocentric and self serving came _after_ the fall of baghdad? Did he forget about Bush Sr. telling the kurds to rise up after the first gulf war, and be slaughtered when they were dumb enough to listen without us ever lifting a finger? Anybody who trusts us after that must REALLY be desperate…

    What have the french and dutch got to do with anything? I thought the US acted unilaterally, over the official objections of the united nations and european union…

    I wonder if “the crimes of the regime” wound up killing more people than the civil war between hutus and tutsis a couple years back?

    Nah, the Iraqui governing council isn’t traitors. They’re pointless figureheads wearing red shirts, but you’ve got to both admire and pity somebody who knows that they’re probably going to die soon and know their actions are highly unlikely to really accomplish anything even if they aren’t, but does it anyway because it’s their best available option. And the band played on…

    American crimes? I’m disappointed that we’re NOT treating the whole terrorism thing as a crime. Step 1 of solving any crime is to investigate, perhaps even find out who did it. The military is simply not an effective tool for forensic analysis. We did not deploy the army into 1930’s chicago to take out Al Capone, and we didn’t send the marines into New Jersey to bomb the mafia, and there’s a REASON we didn’t do this. We DID send the military into vietnam in the 1960’s to try to stop the spread of communism, and found out it’s darn hard to go through the civilian population and reliably shoot only the the people who don’t like you. It’s MUCH easier when they all wear the same shirt and line up in neat rows. (Yes we _called_ it a “police action”, but your average platoon of grunts really isn’t that good at detective work.

    We’re up against organized crime, not an opposing army. “War on terror.” War on poverty. War on gravity. This country had “murder inc.” for many years, and we didn’t call in air strikes on our own cities. There are instances of terrorism in the old testament. A war is something you win, and then it’s over. Crime is something you suppress on an ongoing basis, it’s never “over”. It helps to know the _difference_.

    My problem with the war in Iraq has nothing to do with whether or not it’s just, whether or not not Sadam was hording Carbs, or whether or not there were Mome Raths in Abu Ghraib. My problem with it is that it’s STUPID. Whee, we’ve got a “flypaper strategy” of pouring sugar on an anthill out to make sure all the ants stay out of the house. Brilliant long-term strategy, that.

    Yes, I think W. is an idiot. In general, I believe that if you can’t pronounce “Nuclear” you shouldn’t have your finger on the button. But that’s beside the point. My mother’s brother died in vietnam, and all the current administration seems to have learned from it is to keep the journalists from being able to broadcast live from the front lines.

    Feel free to make comments about my tinfoil hat. Obviously, since I disagree with you, I must be crazy. By definition.

  15. Great, frontpagemag.. Troll posting in magazine form.. This time, let’s review our straw man arguments.

    Some French reporter dissed the US so ‘the left’ is wrong.

    How disappointing, yet utterly predictable, that a glibertarian would see things in such a simplistic way.

  16. I’m aware that this kind of perspective exists…however what I’m even more certain of is that it’s a minority opinion, especially after Abu Ghraib.
    Although I never believed the whole WMD thing, I was also never opposed for a moment to the idea of Sadaam being removed. That the world is a better place without such people is probably the only statement George W Bush has ever made that I have agreed with.

    As I said, I wasn’t opposed to the removal of Sadaam…what I’ve had problems with is a number of the things that have happened in Iraq since. I also think anyone who tries to deny that Iraq’s oil is a factor (not the only factor, but *a* factor) in why the invasion took place is wearing blinders, as well.

    Also, although it is undeniable that Sadaam was a monster, Bush himself definitely would not be considered by the majority to be the world’s most virtuous or generally desirable human being either, I don’t think. A lot of people on both sides have died in Iraq…a lot of mistakes have been made…and the policies regarding the use of torture and the detainment of individuals at Guantanamo Bay have a lot of alarming things to say about the Bush administration’s level of xenophobia and disregard for the rule of law, IMHO.

    In short, yes, Sadaam was an unspeakable individual who murdered his own countrymen and wanted to do the same to people outside his borders as well, and so yes, the world is better off without him. There are those of us however who have grave doubts as to whether or not Bush can really claim a huge amount of genuine moral superiority. At the time when the occupation of Iraq initially began, that claim could not have been logically made, I agree…but after Abu Ghraib and Falluja, and as deeply disturbing information continues to bubble up out of Gitmo, I think some members of the Left can hopefully be forgiven for asking questions about comparitive ethics.

  17. Joe wrote: “Sure, he was writing against the left. That’s why he was a socialist…”

    You do realize that, although Orwell was a democratic socialist, “Animal Farm” is a very thinly disguised exploration of the failed marxist revolution in Russia? And that “Nineteen Eighty-Four” dealt with, to quote from Wikipedia:

    Oh, I forgot, since he was a democratic socialist he couldn’t possibly have been against Communism, Stalinism, Fascism or any other elements of the extreme Left. I’ll have to bear that in mind.

  18. Grumble, that quote should have said:

    The world described in Nineteen Eighty-Four contains striking and deliberate parallels with the Stalinist Soviet Union, notably the themes of a betrayed revolution

  19. Every mass buthers of not has called himself a socialist

    Even facism is socialist, Benito had socialist parents, was a socialist radical, wrote for 2 socialist newspapers one of then his own, and came to power thru the Italian socialist party

    Facism is named after the ohh so italian Roman facis, a bundle of sticks around an axe, His logo for his own flavor of “third way” socialism

    The left seem to claim that anyone to the right of a pure bolshivik or Red Kihmer isnt a socialist, but that is .. well any honest man knows that that is.

    174 Million Million murdered by the left, the most evil idology of all time.

    The Baath Socialist Saddam is nothing new about the left

    People serving up armed over leftism is the same thing as serving up warmed over nazi-ism, even as Hitler was one of them

    “We are socialists because we see in socialism
    the only chance to maintain our racial inheritance
    and to regain our political freedom and renew our
    German state.”

    “We are a workers’ party because we are on the side
    of labor and against finance.”

    “As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because
    we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism,
    of the misuse of the nation’s goods.”
    Joseph Goebbels

    Im seeing the leftist Jew hate come back in style too.
    they glorified Arafat because he killed innocent Jews.

    To the left deliberatly targeting a bus full of 9 year old
    kids is just fine as long as they are Jews.

    To the left, its all a poltical calcualtion, if they pretend
    to care about the death of innocents, its only when it advances
    the leftist cause.

    Mass graves of children in Iraq ? Found still clutching their toys ?
    they can see no poltical gain, so those dead kids dont exist.

  20. >Im seeing the leftist Jew hate come back in style too.
    >they glorified Arafat because he killed innocent Jews.
    >To the left deliberatly targeting a bus full of 9 year old
    >kids is just fine as long as they are Jews.

    The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has seen a lot of crimes commited on *both* sides, Eric…It’s wrong IMHO to think of either side as completely innocent and the other completely guilty. Yes, Hamas and the PLO are/were the proverbial terrorists, but there are also people in Israel who are themselves guilty of exactly the kind of racism you mention here, as well.

    I do understand your anger…the fractiousness of a lot of these groups mean that one way or the other, the Western world ends up getting involved, and people a lot of us care about end up dying…again often enough on both sides. One thing that is interesting about what you say here is that it echoes what I was reading the other day on http://www.lewrockwell.com/, namely that Libertarians need to start completely divorcing themselves from either right or left, and move forward with a new school of thought entirely. It’s a good idea, I think.

  21. I knew that WMD’s were never the true reason for the war. The administration outlined like 20 reasons for doing it, but WMD’s are what the media latched onto and would prove to sell the war to the people. The UN resolutions, abuse of the oil-for-food program, etc., were pivotal reasons. But really, Bush et al think they can play chess with the world, and by overthrowing a dictator at the center of the powder keg, they can diffuse many of the world’s problems. And because I partly agree with this assessment, I was originally pro-war back in 2000. However, I’ve since grown much more libertarian (after 9/11 especially), and I can’t see that it’s really our place to solve the world’s problems. We have many problems of our own right here at home. An insolvent government for one. Spending trillion of dollars to galavant around the world playing police is not good for America, even if it is good for Iraqis. And terrorism against us just highlights the problems we rain upon ourselves by continuing a policy
    of interventionism and nation building (which Bush specifically promised not to do). We need to heed George Washington’s advice in his farewell address and concentrate on solving our own problems at home while treating the rest of the world equally, without favoring one nation over another in any way. It’s nice to see some Iraqis appreciating what America has done over there, but many people were stolen from (taxed involuntarily) in order to achieve it, and it has not made America more stable or more free. Our electoral system remains horrific; full of fraud. We have rampant religious and sexual-orientation discrimination within our government. And our government continues to operate well beyond its constitutional constraints. Therefore, I cannot celebrate this war in Iraq, whether there’s good that comes from it or not.

  22. Tom Anderson wrote: “And our government continues to operate well beyond its constitutional constraints.” The funny thing is that the war in Iraq is well within the constitutional authority of the President. It is interesting how you don’t focus on the things that are significant problems in terms of Constitutional powers. For example:

    1. Congress has given the executive branch authority to promulgate regulations that have the force of law, without debate, advice or consent. I think our modern generation needs to rally around “No Regulation without Representation“.
    2. The biggest single issue. The constitution specifically says that those powers not granted to the federal government are restricted to the states or the people. The feds have gotten around this by claiming certain fairly tricky loopholes in the powers enumerated for the legislative branch, entirely disregarding the language of the 9th and 10th amendments, which were intended to prevent the government specifically from doing that.
    3. Welfare spending. This is not an enumerated power of the federal government. If the feds need to do this it requires an amendment.
    4. Social Security. Ditto my comments on #3. See #2 for why this is unconstitutional.
    5. The Judicial branch has far too much power, which is being used by both the “left” and the “right”, however much each of them cry about the other doing it. Why do you suppose democrats are so eager to block Bush’s court nominations when they realize that they are opening the door for the GOP to do the same to them? Because they understand that the judicial branch has too much power and they don’t want the GOP to take advantage of that. By the way, the GOP does the same thing, so this is not a slam fest towards one party. We seriously need to amend the constitution to limit judicial powers. Although it is noteworthy that the judicial branch should not have taken on powers that were not enumerated in the first place, see point #2.
    6. Continuous erosion of the Bill of Rights, including unconstitutional regulation of ownership of firearms, erosion of search and seizure protections and erosion of free speech protections in the name of tolerance and multi-culturalism or in the name of “national security”.

    As far as some things you brought up.

    – Our electoral system. I’m an engineer by trade. It is impossible to design a perfect system. Instead, you build a system with feedback controls. That is the point of free speech and protection of the press. They are the control to detect and correct electoral fraud. You cannot build a system that will eliminate fraud.

    – Rampant religious and sexual-orientation discrimination. I guess you should explain this, in a constitutional context. sexual orientation is not protected by the constitution, thus those powers are reserved to the people and the states. Show me where religious discrimination is happening. I’m pretty sure you can’t and what you object to is conservative christians in office. I don’t like them either, but that isn’t religious discrimination.

    – taxed involuntarily. I sympathize that you don’t want to pay taxes for a war in Iraq. I don’t want to pay taxes for you to be paid unemployment, social security, have government paid health insurance, etc. However, I am eligible to participate in the political process and therefore I am not being taxed involuntarily. See the American Revolution for examples of involuntary (i.e. without representation) taxation. I agree that my taxes are being used unconstitutionally for domestic social spending. Whether you like it or don’t like it (this will depend on your political perspective) you are not being involuntarily taxed nor are your taxes being used unconstitutionally for the war in Iraq. This happens to be one area where the federal government does a relatively good job of adhering to the constitution.

    You are disguising “loony left” and pacifist arguments inside Libertarian/Liberal argumements, sadly.

  23. How sad … a great mind given to service of war propaganda. I’m seeing the same exact comments on this blog that I see on Freerepublic and LGF, just here it’s couched in more pseudo-intellectual trappings. Go ahead and put your weight behind power. See where it gets you. Well, it’s been nice knowin’ ya, Eric Raymond, but if I wanted to read this garbage I could have gone somewhere else. See ya.

  24. George Bush and his Foreign-Policy-Team-from-Hell stumble along ineptly as the world watches in dismay.
    By Gerald Rellick


    If the American public had known in March 2003 what they know now, that George Bush’s war in Iraq would still be ongoing, would kill 1,500 American servicemen and women, seriously wound another 10,000, kill somewhere from 20,000 to 100,000 Iraqis, cost the United States $300 billion when the annual budget deficit is already $450 billion, begin to divide the country as did Vietnam–and as a Devil’s bonus, Osama bin laden, with a $25 million bounty on his head, would be still be a free man more than three years after his Al-Qaida organization brought down the Twin Towers in Manhattan-if knowing all this, is there any chance Bush would have had public or congressional support for his war?

    Yes, I know, shit happens, you say. But for the Bush Foreign-Policy-Team-from-Hell, led by the hapless Dubya, “mad dog” Dick Cheney and “lie-when-you-can” Condi Rice, everything they touch goes that route, as the old expression has it. And with the help of a compliant media, we’ve come to the point where we accept this as business as usual.

    During her recent trip to visit European leaders, Condoleezza Rice was even applauded by some in the media for her “absence of pique”. How quickly our standards change. Since when is it praiseworthy for a U.S. secretary of state to be nice? Did anyone ever think to say this about the polished and urbane James Baker? And how quickly we forget lying and incompetence at the highest levels of government. Bill Moyers reminds us that it was none other than our new secretary of state who “dreadfully misjudged the terrorist threat leading up to 9/11 and then misled America and the world about the case for invading Iraq.”

    But at least the Europeans weren’t fooled. As Sidney Blumenthal wrote recently in The Guardian:

    “Condoleezza Rice, seeking to impress French intellectuals while in Paris, referred to Iran as totalitarian, as if the authoritarian Shia regime neatly fitted the Soviet Union model. With this rhetorical legerdemain, she extended the overstretched analogy of the ‘war on terrorism’ as the equivalent of the cold war to Persia. Her lack of intellectual adeptness dismayed her interlocutors. One of the French told me Rice was ‘deaf to all argument’, but no one engaged her gaffe ‘because good manners are back’ “.

    If we return for a moment to 9/11 and the fateful days following, it is clear that a smarter and wiser man than George Bush would have responded differently. The response to Al-Qaida would have been more focused and would have engaged an international coalition, much as the senior President Bush managed to do during the first Gulf War in 1991. There would have been no slight-of-hand, trying to replace the hard-to-find Osama bin laden with the readily accessible Saddam Hussein. But George W. is who he is, and with that we are stuck-God help us.

    There is a huge and painful irony in this whole sordid mess that should not go unnoticed. This is the manner and extent to which Osama bin laden has manipulated America. Recall that in the summer of 2004 there were speculations of an “October surprise,” envisioned as a last-minute, and probably underhanded, election ploy by the Bush people to swing opinion their way. One political cartoon had Osama bin Laden anchored by ball and chain in the oval office.

    Well, the election came and went and little was made of it all – that is, until late January when John Kerry appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press. Kerry surprised everyone by stating that Osama bin Laden’s taped message to Americans on October 29th, five days before the election, halted the momentum of his campaign. Said Kerry, “We were rising in the polls up until the last day when the tape appeared. We flat-lined the day the tape appeared and went down on Monday [the day before the election].”

    If John Kerry is correct in his assessment then Osama bin Laden has to be ranked alongside Karl Rove as the other great genius of American politics. Look at part of bin Laden had to say: “[We] bled Russia for ten years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat…We are continuing in the same policy to make America bleed profusely to the point of bankruptcy.”

    Bin Laden was in effect saying that America’s war in Iraq, now approaching $300 billion in cost, is foolish and ill-conceived and is playing into his hands and those of other Islamic militant groups. The message was a rebuke of George Bush and his Iraq war. Can there be any doubt that many Americans said to themselves, we may leave Iraq, but on our own good terms. We won’t allow ourselves to be jerked around by Osama bin Laden. He can’t bankrupt us. George Bush and the Republican-led congress assure us that we can just keep borrowing the money — and let our grandchildren pay off the debt.

    In an article movingly titled, “Why the Children in Iraq Make No Sound When They Fall,” Princeton University professor Bernard Chazelle writes:

    “With Bush’s reelection, America now has the president it deserves. And should you find that Lady Liberty, all dolled up with the latest in fashion from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, looks a bit like a used up hooker, you won’t need to ask who hired her pimp: We did.”

    Americans as a whole have seen fit to reward incompetence. And, as if in thanks, incompetence has rewarded itself. As Kurt Vonnegut might end a story like this: So it goes.

    Gerald S. Rellick, PhD, worked in the defense sector of the aerospace industry. He now teaches in the California Community College system. To send Jerry your comments, send an email to info@interventionmag.com

  25. Eric, I don’t know you so I can’t say for sure, but based on your site and your responses, you seem like yet another example of a someone who espouses right-wing politics hiding under the term “Libertarian”. I’ve seen this many times, where folks are unhappy with the Republicans and decide that they don’t want to be associated with the “right”. Following this behavior, though, do you really think it’s fair to paint all anti-war folks or leftists with the same brush?

    You’ve got some interesting things to say on your site, but I don’t see how you’re going to really learn much more from the world if you write off whole chunks of society with silly little labels. Maybe I just caught you on a (few) bad day(s), but eh.

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