EXITING IRAQ

Posted by Geoff Beck on May 07, 2005, 10:24 AM | #

I thought that photo was from Los Angeles, after another Hispanic / Black riot.

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 07, 2005, 11:07 AM | #

Interesting! It seems that the US imports “democracy” as well as exports it!

Posted by Geoff Beck on May 07, 2005, 11:43 AM | #

Oh yes. But we like to keep our domestic policies to ourselves.

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 07, 2005, 11:48 AM | #

A quote from the War Nerd that is amazingly accurate:

Compare what we did in Afghanistan vs. what we’re doing in Iraq and you can start to see what went right against the Talibs and what’s wrong with our Iraq adventure. First thing, we took Afghanistan seriously. We were scared of going in there, and that saved us. Too bad we weren’t scared of Iraq. Nobody said taking Kabul was going to be a “cakewalk,” like that idiot Adelman said Baghdad was going to be. Everybody knew the Afghans were crazy medieval-ass bastards, and we treated them that way. We were flexible, trying lots of different methods till we saw what worked and leaning to our strengths, cash and air power. We went in quick and got out quick, and left it to the Europeans to stick around policing Kabul before anybody could decide to start picking our guys off at streetcorners.

Iraq was a fantasy story for Bush’s people right from the start. The NeoCon commissars like Perle and Wolfowitz went around saying we’d be “welcomed with open arms” in Baghdad because we were bringing “freedom and democracy,” two things that sell worse than women’s soccer in the Middle East. I don’t know where they got this insane idea. It’s got something to do with Israel wanting Iraq out of the way; Perle and Wolfowitz are Israeli/Likud policy wonks from way back.

They’re also the kind of NeoCons who really and truly believe that everybody in the world is actually an Ohio Republican, or would be if they got the chance to be. And this fantasy that Iraqis are Ohioans under the skin (or the mustaches) kept us from seeing Iraq for what it is…one big dusty gang fight just like Afghanistan.

Worst thing is, “democracy” means we can’t do the obvious imperial move: playing tribe against tribe like the Brits used to. We should be playing the Kurds against the Sunnis and letting the Shiites run their own patch of ground for once. The Shia are our natural allies, and they happen to be the majority in Iran and the oil-producing areas of Saudi Arabia. “Shia Arabia”—now there’s a catchy name. Instead we’re doing this lame Peace Corps daydream, singing “Kumbayah” in the middle of a gangfight.

Posted by Geoff Beck on May 07, 2005, 12:15 PM | #

I read Buckley’s comments. They will be ignored, as well as he is.

Buckley is used toilet paper. The neocons outsmarted him, and now they’ve got his magazine. A magazine that is nothing more than a 2nd rate propaganda sheet; and the political class knows this.

(There is some question if Buckley was always a phoney - a question I’m willing to entertain).

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 07, 2005, 12:23 PM | #

Buckley was solid in the fifties and sixties.

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 07, 2005, 12:24 PM | #

Buckley is used toilet paper.

Yup he is now. That’s what he got for his loyalty to the ultra-Zionists.

Posted by Geoff Beck on May 07, 2005, 12:34 PM | #

> Buckley was solid in the fifties and sixties.

I believe Effra has argued otherwise.

Posted by Effra on May 08, 2005, 11:15 AM | #

There is reason to think that right from his Yalie days, and certainly from when he launched National Review, Buckley was subisidised by the CIA as part of the same operation that channelled funds to magazines such as Encounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. However, until the 1970s NR at least allowed a plurality of conservative viewpoints and flirted with race realism and opposition to the con of ‘civil rights’. But it seems to have taken fright in the Vietnam era and decided that it could only retain any credibility with the ‘cool’ set of academics, meejah types and other bloviators by conceding tracts of ground on the social-conservatism and multiracialism fronts in exchange for going on being a belligerent Cold Warrior.

This selling of the pass was perhaps inevitable, given that screaming for escalation of the arms race and the space race always leads to statist, high-tax, welfare-doling postures: you cannot keep the poor bloody cannon fodder happy enough to fight wars for you unless you stuff their mouths with bread and their loins with the circuses of sexual licence.

Specifically, the influx of purportedly repentant ex-leftist Jews and others into what passes for American conservatism (starting with Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz in the late 1960s) warped the values of NR conservatives. It became less and less like the Saturday Evening Post and more and more like Commentary.

Meanwhile the last of the US isolationists, such as Taft and Garrett, were dying and those who might have picked up the baton, such as Russell Kirk, preferred to retire into a querulous internal exile, holding their noses as the Republican Party was swamped by warmongering neocons (cf Oakeshott and Cowling in Britain). A further distraction was the leaching of conservatism by libertarianism. Hebraic siren songswere sung by such as Murray Rothbard and David Friedman.

A few have doughtily fought for the old cause, notably Catholics such as Patrick Buchanan and Tom Fleming; but Reagan’s period was a false dawn of renewed hope for them. Ironically, Buckley in his dotage now seems closer to the great America First tradition than ever before in his dubious 50-year pilgrimage.

Posted by dlg on May 08, 2005, 01:15 PM | #

Short version of Effra’s comment: The Jews ruined conservatism.

Underlying subtext: The Jews ruin everything.

Posted by Geoff Beck on May 08, 2005, 01:22 PM | #

Short version of dlg’s comment: criticize a Jew or neoconservatism and you are an anti-semite*.

Underlying subtext: The Old-Right ruins everything.

*Whatever that means.

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 08, 2005, 05:24 PM | #

Short version of Effra’s comment: The Jews ruined conservatism. - dlg

If you read carefully, Effra wrote:

Specifically, the influx of purportedly repentant ex-leftist Jews and others into what passes for American conservatism (starting with Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz in the late 1960s) warped the values of NR conservatives. It became less and less like the Saturday Evening Post and more and more like Commentary.

Here is the “Godfather” of Neoconservatism, Irving Kristol in his own words:

the political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics

Short text of Phil’s comment: you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Posted by Phil Peterson on May 08, 2005, 05:53 PM | #

This article by the War Nerd is right on the money on Iraq (like all his articles are right on the money on Iraq):

I just read the new polls. Americans are losing their war hard-ons faster than a fag in a whorehouse. At the start of May 2003, 61% said the war was going “very well.” Now only 19% say that. Back in May, only 4% said the war was going “not well.” Now 35% think so.

You make me sick.

What the Hell did you think was gonna happen? The Iraqis were gonna fall in love with an occupying army? “Oh thank you for blowing up our power plants and water supply! Allah be praised, now we have democracy!”........

Mao said guerrillas swim in the civilian population like fish in water. So you drain the lake.

Maybe you think that’s too mean or something. Well, you shoulda thought of that before you let a half-dozen talkradio morons and a draftdodger-in-chief talk you into taking over every city in Iraq…..

What the Brits would be doing about now is arming the Kurds and sending them to police the Sunni Triangle. The Kurds have already asked us to let them do it. They’re begging for the chance to get a little payback. They said, “We guarantee we’ll have the place pacified in a week. We can read these people! You can’t! We can tell who’s a guerrilla and who isn’t! All we need is a few fingernail-pulling pliers and a portable generator hooked up to a cattle prod or two!”

Of course we won’t let them, because it’d be messy, like Sabra-Shattila times ten. There’d be dead Sunnis thicker than sagebrush. But the Brits’d do it, and it’d work. Then, when the Kurds had bled the Sunnis out, they’d recruit a new police force, all Sunni and all-volunteer, to go police Kurdistan, bleed the Kurds for a while so they don’t get too strong.

That’s the sort of thing you have to do if you want to run an empire. But you guys, you’re just brave enough to get us into trouble and not brave enough to see it through. You want to kick ass, plant the flag on somebody else’s land and blow stuff up, and then have everybody on the ground love you for it.

That’s not an empire. That’s a bedtime story for pussies.

Posted by Effra on May 09, 2005, 03:12 PM | #

dlg: “Short version of Effra’s comment: The Jews ruined conservatism.

“Underlying subtext: The Jews ruin everything.”

I don’t know if you genuinely believe this is what I said, or whether you are making a feeble attempt at provocation, like that silly lad we slapped down the other day. Anyhow, you have misunderstood and misrepresented me.

Jews were a necessary but insufficient condition for the transformation of American conservative thinking. As I have previously argued here in other contexts, the ‘progressive’ Judaic mindset has been the schwerpunkt for the injection of socially virulent notions into the bloodstream of the body politic. The high verbal-ability IQ of deracinated and secularised Jewish intelligentsia (*not* ‘the Jews’ tout court) leads them to flirt with such notions and to present them persuasively—until their bad side effects become too obvious to ignore. But to summarise this as ‘the Jews ruin everything’ assigns too much importance to them.

I have also argued that the strategy, however it may be intended as self-protective in evolutionary terms, is in practice apt to do Jews themselves more harm than good. Indeed it is contributing to their assimilation and loss of an identity which ultimately must be founded on the positive pillars of religion, not on the reflex of ‘critique’ and ‘don’t do as I do, do as I say’.

If on further reflection you wish to make amends here for your over-simplification, don’t hesitate.

BTW, the conjuring of a tendentious ‘subtext’ out of the plain meaning of words honestly meant and carefully chosen is itself a verbal ploy characteristic of Jews: one which the rest of the world is increasingly alert to and weary of.