Category: Networks

Right Wing News has a nice collection of quotes on Saddam’s WMD program from prominent critics of the Bush Administration. Some great stuff there.

Via Reynolds.

This article in the National Post lays bare the conspiracy between Neo Cons and the Fourth International to stifle Stalinism wherever it’s found. The twin brotherhoods are woven together through Max Shachtman and Scoop Jackson:

To understand how some Trotskyists ended up as advocates of U.S. expansionism, it is important to know something about Max Shachtman, Trotsky’s controversial American disciple. Shachtman’s career provides the definitive template of the trajectory that carries people from the Left Opposition to support for the Pentagon.

Throughout the 1930s, Shachtman loyally hewed to the Trotsky line that the Soviet Union as a state deserved to be defended even though Stalin’s leadership had to be overthrown. However, when the Soviet Union forged an alliance with Hitler and invaded Finland, Shachtman moved to a politics of total opposition, eventually known as the “third camp” position. Shachtman argued in the 1940s and 1950s that socialists should oppose both capitalism and Soviet communism, both Washington and Moscow.

Yet as the Cold War wore on, Shachtman became increasingly convinced Soviet Communism was “the greater and more dangerous” enemy. “There was a way on the third camp left that anti-Stalinism was so deeply ingrained that it obscured everything else,” says Christopher Phelps, whose introduction to the new book Race and Revolution details the Trotskyist debate on racial politics. Phelps is an eloquent advocate for the position that the best portion of Shachtman’s legacy still belongs to the left.

By the early 1970s, Shachtman was a supporter of the Vietnam War and the strongly anti-Communist Democrats such as Senator Henry Jackson. Shachtman had a legion of young followers (known as Shachtmanites) active in labour unions and had an umbrella group known as the Social Democrats. When the Shachtmanites started working for Senator Jackson, they forged close ties with hard-nosed Cold War liberals who also advised Jackson, including Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz; these two had another tie to the Trotskyism; their mentor was Albert Wohlstetter, a defence intellectual who had been a Schachtmanite in the late 1940s.

The Left never has been all namby-pamby pacifist, you know.

Via Hit and Run.

Financial Times reports on a lit fest in Wales attended by Mr. Hitchens:

At the debate a few hours earlier, he lost his temper when someone asked about country band the Dixie Chicks and the flak they copped for criticising George W. Bush’s Iraq policy.

“Each day they dig up dead bodies in personal death camps run by a Caligula dictator,” Hitchens shouted, “and I’m being asked to worry about these fucking fat slags – do me a favour!” The debate broke up soon after.

So I guess we know what he thinks about the Dixie Chicks and the lying-about-WMD-fanatics.

Via Mr. Layne

You’ve heard all about the looting of Iraq’s precious cultural artifacts, of course, and what a great tragedy it was and all that. Thing is, all that you read is propaganda put out by the Baathist Party to make America look bad:

So, there’s the picture: 100,000-plus priceless items looted either under the very noses of the Yanks, or by the Yanks themselves. And the only problem with it is that it’s nonsense. It isn’t true. It’s made up. It’s bollocks.

So why were the media so quick to believe the spin? Here are two reasons why:

The first is the credulousness of many western academics and others who cannot conceive that a plausible and intelligent fellow-professional might have been an apparatchiks of a fascist regime and a propagandist for his own past. The second is that – these days – you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed.

Next time we hear a story like this, let’s require some proof.

Via Instapundit.

This is day nine without a cigarette. Don’t mess with me if you know what’s good for you.

Check this study on the roots of terrorism at The Chronicle of Higher Education:

With such a strong and broad coalition in agreement, we asked, what evidence links poverty and poor education to terrorism? Perhaps surprisingly, the relevant literature and the new evidence that we assembled challenge the consensus. In a study we recently circulated as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, we considered support for, and participation in, terrorism at both individual and national levels. Although the available data at the national level are weaker, both types of evidence point in the same direction and lead us to conclude that any connection between poverty, education, and terrorism is, at best, indirect, complicated, and probably quite weak.

Terrorists are well-educated people who come from authoritaran countries, as many of us have long believed.

Great stuff, link via Jarvis.

UPDATE: the Guardian newspaper has issued a correction on this story, no doubt in response to reader complaints:

A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading “Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil” misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, according to the Department of Defence website, “The … difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq.” The sense was clearly that the US had no economic options by means of which to achieve its objectives, not that the economic value of the oil motivated the war. The report appeared only on the website and has now been removed.

Now will all the anti-war blogs that quoted the Guardian article also issue corrections? People of good character admit it when they’re wrong.
—
The Belgravia Dispatch has the goods on the Guardian’s Dowdification of Wolfowitz’ remarks in Singapore. The anti-American paper claims Wolfowitz said: “Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.”

But what he really said on the subject of tactical differences in dealing with Iraq and North Korea was: “The primary difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options in Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil.”

What difference two words can make in the hands of a skilled prevaricator. We had to invade Iraq, in other words, because the option of economic pressure wasn’t viable (and had in fact been shown by experience not to work), but against Korea it’s still an option.

Reasonable, and all that. What this discussion misses, and I think Wolfowitz and other Administration officials miss out of fear of feeding the “no blood for oil” frenzy is that oil can be a weapon of mass destruction. The logic is pretty straightforward, and we saw it at work in 1990. The world economy is heavily dependent on a few major oil producers; taking two or even one of them offline disrupts the whole system, leading to price increases and shortages in the poorer countries with limited hard currency. When India can’t import oil because its current account is tapped out, electricity isn’t generated in some areas and food and medicine aren’t delivered to others. So people die.

That’s a weapon of mass destruction, just as much as anthrax or mustard gas. So yes, we invaded Iraq at least in part to stabilize the oil supplies that undergird much of the world economy, and it’s worth it.

But we also did it to teach a lesson, as Tom Friedman pointed out, so it was a twofer, and a bargain at the price we’re going to pay for it.

Link via Instapundit.

UPDATE: The Dowdian (AKA “Guardian”) based their story on a German translation of Wolfie’s remarks, not on the remarks themselves. Their corrections address is [email protected].

See Tim Blair’s column in The Australian on bias in down under media:

Ironically, the best comment on the war came from a talkback caller rather than an ABC presenter. The caller’s name was Jill and she told Sydney ABC drivetime host Richard Glover that she’d migrated to Australia after World War II. “I wish we’d had politicians in the 1930s with the guts of Tony Blair and John Howard,” she said, her voice catching slightly. “Why?” Glover asked, gently. Jill answered through a rush of tears. “Because then I’d have a lot more relatives.”

It’s hard to have family values if your family’s all dead, isn’t it?

You know the story: the sanctions against Iraq (now lifted, praise Allah) caused the deaths of millions of innocent Iraqi babies. Only it’s not true, as the Iraqi doctors are now free to say:

Under the sanctions regime, “We had the ability to get all the drugs we needed,” said Ibn Al-Baladi’s chief resident, Dr. Hussein Shihab. “Instead of that, Saddam Hussein spent all the money on his military force and put all the fault on the USA. Yes, of course the sanctions hurt – but not too much, because we are a rich country and we have the ability to get everything we can by money. But instead, he spent it on his palaces.”

Saddam ordered dead baby bodies refrigerated so they could be used as propaganda.

A reader on BuzzMachine… by Jeff Jarvis makes the following astute observation on Molly Ivins, Texas’ answer to Bob Scheer:

Until her dying day, Molly will never, never, ever get over the 1994 Texas gubenatorial election, so any comments she makes about U.S. policy, domestic (where at least she’s consistant) or foreign have to be seen in that light. If Bush did it, she’s against it, and one of these days, everyone else will see the light and Ann Richards will be avenged.

(Ironically, thanks to Molly’s connections to some of the key media elites due to her past work with the New York Times and current writings in publications like The Nation, too many media people out of New York and Washington have, since the mid-1980s, gone to Ms. Ivins for the inside stuff on what Texans are really thinking, which given Texas’ political leanings, is about like going to former New York City mayoral candidate William F. Buckley, Jr., to get the hot tips on the inner workings of the New York City Council. But that’s what they did in the late ’90s trying to get a handle on Bush, and its also when Molly coined the term “Shrub” and pretty much helped fix the image in many minds that Bush was an idiot, which helped cause the Gore campaign to “misunderestimate” him in the 2000 election.

Had Molly not had so much animus towards GWB over the ’94 election and had said to her friends outside of Texas, “Watch out for this guy, he’s craftier than he looks and sounds,” there’s a strong possibility the Gore people would have done a better job from the start of the campaign and Al would have been elected president. So Karl Rove ought to slip a few extra bucks in Ms. Ivin’s direction for her contribution to putting Bush over the top, and making the liberation of Iraq possible.)

Posted by John at May 22, 2003 05:44 PM

Word.