It being Veteran’s/Remembrance Day, I thought it would be a good time to write a bit about foreign policy that has been kicking around my head for a few months too long. Of course today, we are to spend the day thinking about the courageous and heroic actions of our respective service man and women, both those who have returned from various excursions in maintaining our security and freedom, as well as those who have lost their lives doing so. We are to remind ourselves to value the lives of those brave souls like our greatest national treasure and treat their contribution with the utmost of respect and care.

The sad fact of the matter, though, is that I think we fail utterly and completely in that charge, day-by-day.

Like many of my fellow Canadians, I have become increasingly pessimistic about our country’s role in Afghanistan. That we get to such recorded levels of pessimism is sometimes cited as evidence of a public that is waking up to the realities of what their government is committing significant blood and treasure. And, I suppose there is a degree to which that is true. But the other, and I would offer far more prevalent, reason for that snapshot of pessimism — notable as it is because it represents a drop from previous levels of support — is that we harbor utterly unrealistic expectations for what we might be able to achieve with military interventionism, humanitarian or otherwise. [Read more →]

Few bloggers have had quite as controversial a career as Little Green Football’s Charles Johnson.  Johnson began blogging in earnest back in 2001 after the attacks on the twin towers, and continues putting out content at a furious pace nearly a decade later.

He is perhaps best known for playing a key role in the resignation of CBS’s Dan Rather following the forged Killian document scandal.  He also played a role in bringing attention to altered photographs in the Adnan Hajj photographs controversy. In July 2008, LGF identified that photographs of Iran’s nuclear missile test had been altered.

More recently, Johnson has locked spears with many on the right over issues such as Obama’s birth certificate, creationism in schools, and “Obama Derangement Syndrome.”

He helped found the popular new media site, Pajamas Media, though he has since fallen out with the publishers and, as of September, has removed all links from Little Green Footballs to Pajamas Media.

I had a chance to exchange emails with Charles Johnson about his experience as a blogger and the current state of affairs on the war on terror and the conservative blogosphere. [Read more →]

“I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs, Frodo son of Drogo.”  ~ Faramir (The Lord of the Rings)

via Kyle

Let’s start with “isn’t” first:

________________________________________

• It’s not a war just about spreading democracy.
• It’s not a war just about oil.
• It’s not a war just about stopping a brutal dictator who supposedly had weapons of mass destruction.
• It’s not a war of humanitarian intervention.
• It’s not a plot cooked up by some secret cabal of Israeli Zionists and American neocons.

***

• It is a war partially about oil, partially about spreading democracy, and partially about ousting a brutal dictator.
• It is a war that reflects poorly on the cultural shift toward perpetual growth and expansion of American economic and military interests.
• It is a war fueled by skewed notions of national security and humanitarian intervention.
• It is a war about American military dominance in a region that has American economic interests – in oil, trade and so forth, at its heart.
• It is a war pushed very strongly by the brand of politics known as neoconservatism, which most blatantly embraces such military and economic expansion, but which is certainly not unique in this – only, perhaps, more unabashed.

Look, I opposed the Iraq War in the beginning.  I thought it was ludicrous, and the government’s case seemed paper thin.  Later, I opposed artificial time tables for withdrawal of American troops, because it struck me as cruel and imprudent and even cowardly to leave a nation in a state of civil war that we essentially instigated.  I still oppose withdrawing too quickly, lest the country be sucked into an ever more brutal cycle of civil war and chaos.

But I become more and more dubious that our continued presence is anything more than prolonging the inevitable; that no matter how long we stay, in the end we’ll have to exit, and when we do, the Iraqis will simply have to figure things out on their own.  And it will be bloody, and awful, and the violence will last a long, long time.  Likely enough, the “democratic government of Iraq” will become ever more despotic, and the country will become even more divided along sectarian lines.  No length of stay on the part of the American military can avoid that.  Even if we do achieve stability that lasts beyond our own occupation, the only way that stability will be achieved for long will be through the suppression of the Sunnis by the Shiite majority.

[Read more →]

So it looks as though Spain is opening formal criminal inquiries into alleged war crimes surrounding the use of torture by the Bush administration.  Judge Baltasar Garzón is involved in the investigation, the same guy who prosecuted Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator propped up for years by the CIA.  So perhaps there’s something “full-circle” about this.  It’s not as though the Bush Administration is alone amongst the past dozen or so Presidents who abused their authority in order to spread American power across the globe.  From Kennedy to Nixon to Bill Clinton these sorts of soft-crimes, coups, and shadowy military support of tyrants and rebels alike has been the modus operandi for the Executive Branch.  George W. Bush just took it one step further, and it’s hard to know how other Presidents would have reacted post-9/11, but there is no question in my mind that few would have taken it so far as Bush did, and the main reason I believe that is because of the insidious influence of Cheney on White House policy over the past eight years.

[Read more →]

That the Obama administration has chosen to drop the term “enemy combatant” from it’s Justice Department lexicon is, frankly, some of the best news I’ve read in a while. It might be true that I recently derided Ron Paul for claiming that America was swiftly making its way towards a state of fascism — I still take that comment to be generally unsubstantiated, hyperbolic and unhelpful both to a meaningful discussion about the direction of the country and some of the larger goals that Paul champions — but the ability to carry people off to Gitmo and hold them indefinitely without anything even remotely resembling due process was, to my mind, perhaps the most terrifying and draconian element of Bush-Cheney’s influence on the country over the past eight years.

As both Freddie and I argued over at John Schwenkler’s old digs at Culture 11 about this and the use of torture, you just can’t with any intellectual honesty — nor frankly much moral authority, either — propose to wage a war based on the maintenance of a way of life that prizes above all the liberty and freedom of its citizens, when at home you enact policies that are anathema to the notions of civil liberties. To suggest that you can do one while you do the other is just the height of cognitively and morally delusional dissonance.

Quoting myself (does that officially make me pretentious? chalk it up to the cold I’ve recently contracted and laziness…),

Isn’t that the larger point here? That we lose something in our striving for security, safety, and freedom when doing so sacrifices the dignity of other humans who have done nothing to provoke such treatment. Such activity seems to rot our freedoms from the inside and while thongs on heads and nasty words about our loved one’s don’t seem like that big a deal, those are only the tip of the iceberg. And in and of themselves, they are intentionally degrading to another human being, which, at least in the case of innocents who have been incarcerated without any process whatsoever, and ought to be the kind of behaviour we rail against both in society and in the actions of our government/military.

The kind of mistrust and fear mongering that was draped over America immediately following 9-11 and the subsequent horrific policies that were allowed to be unleashed from your primordial insecurities, fears, and aggressions, if left unaddressed, make saving America as a beacon of freedom in this fashion like immortalizing your love for another by choking them before they can leave. Hence my happiness to see the Obama administration choose to take this issue on in what seems like a pretty straightforward manner. The kind of redemption it represents is vital to the country moving forward in any meaningful sense.

One step further, though, I think this repudiation actually promises to leave America more safe, contra the neoconservative lamentations that are likely to follow. [Read more →]