War by Accident? .... Cheney lives, and he wants more war.

[marmar]

from AfterDowningStreet:



War By Accident?
Submitted by davidswanson on Wed, 2008-02-06 22:33. Media
By Karen Kwiatkowski

05/02/08 "Lew Rockwell" -- -- Cheney lives, and he wants more war. According to former CIA officer Phil Giraldi, Cheney remains hard at work fomenting some kind of attack or even war with Iran – and beyond that, he and George W. Bush don’t believe their own CIA’s latest intelligence assessment on Iran, indicating, in short that when it comes to Iran, we have little to fear but fear itself.

It may not matter what George W. Bush believes, or thinks. He defers to Dick on national security matters. But Dick Cheney is apparently determined to make his mark before the election of the next American president, who, if Ron Paul, will immediately work to end our foreign policy fiascos, and if it is one of the remaining Democratic contenders, will slowly and more slowly, hesitantly and more hesitantly, try to begin to withdraw from the Bush wars.

Any new president is bad news for Cheney, who operates without legal, political or moral constraints, and wishes to continue to fight everyone he can in the Middle East and beyond. But the world community and hometown America won’t stomach the selling of yet another unnecessary war in the Middle East so soon. War by accident, to quote a phrase used by Phil Giraldi in his Antiwar.com interview on January 24th, seems to be Cheney’s preferred pathway towards destruction in Iran.

Our government in Washington, D.C. has a serious appetite, and a million dead Iraqis and thousands more dead Afghanis cannot quench it.

This appetite cannot be for democracy, as neither Afghanistan nor Iraq exist in any condition resembling democracy, and Iran already has a working democracy, with multiple constraints on executive power through a complex balance of political and religious governmental systems. It can’t be an appetite for revenge – because as George W. Bush famously said years ago, he isn’t that worried about Bin Laden, and we long ago set up our own Unocal-friendly puppet in Kabul, presumably eliminating any need for revenge against the Taliban for 9/11. As we all know, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11; even the President has admitted this. And we’ve already hanged our errant former ally Saddam Hussein, ostensibly closing that case.

Surely, it is not an appetite for either justice or national security. The reasons given for the ongoing wars – namely that Afghanistan’s government and later Iraq posed a threat to us directly – was always laughable. That superficial reason upon which "everyone could agree" today seems ancient history. Yet still we find echoes of this lifeless rationale in the administration’s public and private statements on Iran, most recently in the latest "state of the union" address, and in recent Bush and Rice harangues to our remaining Middle Eastern allies. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/30810

[musette_sf]

1. i don't disagree with some of the facts

in the article... but (1) Lew Rockwell's site is a libertarian site; (2) it has been posited of late that Lew Rockwell was the ghost author of the Ron Paul racist newsletter screeds; and (3) the article supports Ron Paul's presidential campaign no later than the second paragraph.

kind of reminds me of the LaRouche-ites... you can sure agree with them on the high level about Cheney, but you have to know that they are NOT progressives. just like libertarians are not progressives.

i don't see where Kwiatkowski goes anywhere in the article except to discuss how bad Cheney/Bu$hCo are - no solutions proposed except the election of Ron Paul - and seems to, at the end, even suggest that the Federal Reserve be abolished and the gold standard restored (more Paulian credo).

am i out of line for bringing this up?

on edit: i did check to make sure that the ADS site sourced the article from Lew Rockwell.

[caraher]

2. I'm not sure what you're driving at...

I don't think anyone is trying to say Kwiatkowski or anyone at LewRockwell.com is a progressive. Far from it!

I think it's helpful to be aware of right-wing antiwar perspectives. How much of Paul's support comes from his being the only antiwar voice in the Republican race? That message is certainly much louder from the Paul camp than the inexcusable racist garbage that was in long-forgotten, possibly ghostwritten Libertarian newsletters. And I don't think there are enough white supremacists voting in the primaries to account for an appreciable fraction of Paul's support.

I'm grateful to Karen Kwiatkowski for going public with her insider information on just how dysfunctional and politically-driven the pre-Iraq war intelligence process was. At least this is someone who acts according to her principles. She clearly shares with Paul a certain vision of constitutional government, and this vision does have some admirable elements (for instance, in its call for Congress to take back the power to declare war that it has largely ceded to the executive branch and general opposition to dictatorial behavior by the White House). That they are horribly wrong about many things doesn't automatically invalidate what libertarians have to say against the occupation of Iraq.

[musette_sf]

3. what i am driving at

is that under DU rules, that article could NOT have been posted with Lew Rockwell as the source, but it CAN be posted with ADS as the source. which seems to me to be a kind of circumvention of DU rules and philosophy, to promote a libertarian viewpoint on DU.

and to say that libertarians should be validated for their views on the Iraq occupation, though "they are horribly wrong about many things" - well, like i say about the well-known racist and sexist bloviator Pat Buchanan, a broken clock is right twice a day. and i have reservations about DU providing support and a forum for those who support libertarians' or Buchanan's philosophies, for that matter.

[caraher]

4. Ah. There are subtleties to the rules here I wasn't aware of

I was wondering why it was sourced to ADS rather than Lew Rockwell... thanks for clearing that up!

On edit... I just scanned through the DU rules for discussion forums and it seems to me that there's not really a blanket prohibition on linking to a site like LewRockwell. What I find in the rules are a restriction and an exception. First, there's the following:

Do not quote or link to bigoted websites, or websites that republish content from bigoted websites.

I think this is targeted narrowly at obvious "hate speech" (such as one might find on a white supremacist site). I guess I take this as saying the Fred Phelps web site should not be linked or quoted, but James Dobson's site would be OK despite their anti-gay bigotry.

Then the rules say this:

Members are permitted to link to highly partisan conservative websites, provided that they are doing so in the proper context.

Now this thread doesn't really provide any context, just the article. My take is that it would be unquestionably within the rules had the OP prefaced the piece with some commentary identifying the piece as a libertarian take on the Bush/Cheney efforts to launch yet another war and perhaps pointing out specific aspects of the article that we should either take issue with or consider food for thought. Since there's little context it's arguably a violation of DU rules.

I guess the other thing is that I don't think sourcing it to ADS itself really has much bearing about whether this is within the rules. If the objection is that LewRockwell is a site with content bigoted on the level of violating the rule I quoted first, we'd find ourselves in the predicament that posts based on ADS web material themselves must be banned. That would be absurd!