We're now witnessing the embarrassing implosion of the über-hawks in the conservative movement: John Bolton is apparently considering a presidential run on a "Bomb Iran" platform:  

Not shy about his position on a wide range of issues, would this critic-in-chief consider a run for commander-in-chief in 2012? Bolton didn’t reject the idea out of hand.

“[I]t is a very great honor that anybody would even think of asking. I’m obviously not a politician. I’ve never run for any federal elective office at all and, you know, it is something that would obviously require a great deal of effort,” he said. “What I do think, though, and what concerns me, is the lack of focus generally in the national debate about national security issues. Now, I understand the economy is in a ditch and people are concerned about it, but our adversaries overseas are not going to wait for us to get our economic house in order.”

When pressed as to whether that means he would consider a run, Bolton seemed to suggest that he might do it, at the very least to help put national security issues at the top of the debate agenda.

“In the sense that I want to make sure that not only in the Republican Party, but in the body politic as a whole, people are aware of threats that remain to the United States. You know, as somebody who writes op-eds and appears on the television, I appreciate as well as anybody that…there is a limit to what that accomplishes,” he said. “Whereas, some governor from some state in the middle of the country announces for president they get enormous coverage even if their views are utterly uninformed on major issues.”

When pressed a third time about running, he said that while “he is not going to do anything foolish,” he added, “you know, I see how the media works…you have to take that into account.”

Again, not a no.

ht: TAC 

Up until September 15, 2008, when the American political scene was thrust into a new dimension by the financial crisis, if someone had told me that George W. Bush’s successor would go on national television and unequivocally announce, “American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over,” I would have said that this would be nothing less than a political shock -- granting relief to many (including me), while enraging neocons and conservative die-hards, who’d be acrimoniously debating the matter for at least the next year.

Not too long ago, Left-liberal pranksters created a parody edition of the New York Times with the headline “IRAQ WAR ENDS,” making it clear that this policy was the Progressives’ ultimate project. In turn, it’s hard to underestimate the degree to which the development of the “conservative” blogosphere was informed and motivated by war-agitation -- many of its most prominent sites are all but unthinkable without updates from Baghdad, “Remember Munich!” polemics, and various accusations of “treason” directed at prominent liberal commentators. My old employer The American Conservative was founded, in 2002, at the point that the neocons had Iraq in their sights, and most of its energies were (and are) dedicated to opposing Republican foreign policy. For good reason.

Richard Spencer and Robert Burnham’s Facebook conversation is pretty frightening, but I must say that it pales in comparison to a recent Free Republic thread about Julian Assange.  A commentator recommends the government go after the man’s family and when someone objects he’s shouted down as a liberal commie.

Some other representative suggestions.

His head would look good on a pike.

He truly needs to be carbombed

Surely someone in our DOD can take this pipsqueak out. We have killed better men for less in the past.

I support a CIA covert operation to coat his butt-plug with arsenic. ARSEnic...get it? (too strong? sorry.)

This truly has become deadly serious. He needs to be taken out. No internet bravado here, our government or allies need to act and end this. I don’t know if our various agencies can act on their own, but if they can, I hope they do soon. 

$200 for a bullet between that mother effer's eyes.

All this hatred, and for what?  Ten years ago a couple fanatics killed three thousand Americans.  Every death is a tragedy, but the US has sinned against the Muslim world much more than it’s been sinned against.  Half a million Iraqis died due to US sanctions and then another half million thanks to the war.  Yet if any Muslim in the world talks like these so-called patriotic citizens do it’s proof of the inherent depravity of the religion.

What’s really scary is speculating on what Republicans would advocate if there actually was a terrorist problem-this is, if the murder rate for Muslims ever reached 50% of what it is for Americans blacks or people of the Islamic faith ever managed to kill 1/10th as many people as the US murders overseas.  They already defend the right of the president to murder anyone whom he deems a “terrorist” and hold “enemy combatants” indefinitely.  Thankfully the “war on terror” is a government fabrication, for if it wasn’t and people actually were dying in any large numbers the US would by now make North Korea look like Hong Kong.

What indicates that conservatives are particularly dull is that they seem to understand that everybody in power is against them, but at the same time desire the state to have the prerogative to decide whether they live or die.  It reminds me of when William F. Buckley said he was fine with totalitarianism in America in order to defeat international communism while he rallied against the Godless and degenerate elite, who naturally ended up running the system he advocated. But at least Buckley was facing an enemy that had taken over half the planet and had the potential to destroy it all, not a few isolated anti-social failed engineering students and low IQ Nigerians with firecrackers in their pants.  

I don't know if I quite agree with Richard and Robert who believe that these sentiments represent something healthy that simply should be channeled into another direction.  The way one terrorist attack carried out with box cutters threw the entire nation into the arms of big brother shows how effeminate and cowardly we've become.  The branding of anybody who tried to link US policy to the terrorist attacks as "blaming America first" represents not only a general stupidity, but hostility to intellectual inquiry.  The wars that resulted out of the attacks managed to somehow combine the worst aspects of White Man's Burden imperialism and Wilsonian idealism.  And of course hostilities in the Middle East have facilitated the complete Zionist take over of the Republican Party.   Sure, there's a decent bit of implicit whiteness and anti-ethnomasochism in there, but it's in a very thick neo-con shell which will be very difficult to crack.  

This week Croatian police netted an impressive haul at a customs post on the border with Serbia. A Norwegian man driving into the country was arrested with 88.6 kilograms of heroin stored away in his vehicle, along with over a thousand boxes of cigarettes. The value of the narcotics amounts to 3.7 million Euros, about 4.75 million dollars. The suspect was looking to bring the drugs into the European Union with his family in tow. Apparently having the wife and three kids along for the trip was supposed to draw attention away from the 200-pound payload of heroin stuffed into his car. This may well have been a reasonable calculation on the Norwegian’s part, since the great majority of narcotics flowing from east to west do indeed reach their intended destination in Europe’s cities.

It is still undisclosed where the courier received the drugs, but we can make some reasonable conclusions about the shipment’s journey westward and who facilitated it. The logistics comprise the infamous Balkan Route.

Gerald Celente was on fire in this interview with Alex Jones. 

Part 3, part 4 (ht: LRC)

Yes, anarcho-capitalists like Doug Casey frequently claim that "The State" is just about to send its hapless population marching off into World War III ... but there's good reason to beleive that Caesy is right this time. It's difficult to gainsay most of his points. In my estimation, the odds are around 25 percent that Israel and/or the U.S. will attack Iran before the new year; if the economy suffers a major downturn, I'd up the odds to 70 percent.    

Doug: [I think] there is a very significant chance that we are headed for something that might vaguely resemble WWIII.

Louis James: That's going to be a pretty shocking statement to a lot of people – too much cognitive dissonance for most to let themselves think about it. Many readers might say that folks in the Middle East have been squabbling for years without the world going up in flames. Did you have a guru moment while there? Why now?

Doug: Well, people, especially Americans, forget that war, far from being an alien experience only read about in books, is actually a commonplace occurrence. Major powers have had major wars periodically throughout history. There's no reason to imagine mankind has kicked the habit. It may not be the conflagration people once expected from a conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, but it could still happen, and I suspect that the Middle East, Israel in particular, will be the epicenter.

One thing that drew my attention to this possibility again at this time is not what's going on in Gaza but a friend of mine who had just been to a conference with an ex-director of the CIA, some high FBI officials, a whole bunch of defense department wonks, and similar types from Israel. He reports that all those spooks and military types really think Israel is going to attack Iran. The situation looks very serious to them. And one of Obama's top military advisors has just said the U.S. itself has plans formulated, and they would be put into effect should the Iranians be proved to have nukes.

You add that to all you see in the news, including Iran's new reactor plans and so forth, and we could be pretty close to the edge.

L: So, if Israel attacks Iran, presumably to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, I can see the region going up in flames, but how does that become WWIII? I don't think the U.S., Russia, and China are bound by treaty to enter the fray…

Doug: It may not. But the logic goes like this: Israel is just a tiny sliver of a country, about the size of New Jersey. It's the kind of place that would be totally wiped out with just two or three nukes. And due to the nature of the place, those weapons could be delivered by yacht, or a cargo ship, or an airliner, or even a truck, for that matter. So Israel is very concerned about any hostile countries gaining nuclear capability – any of them that could produce just two or three such weapons could completely obliterate all of Israel. The spooks at the conference my friend went to all thought Israel would simply not allow any of its hostile neighbors to achieve that capability.

L: Okay, but isn't "military intelligence" usually an oxymoron? They got 9/11 completely wrong (unless you believe the conspiracy theories).

Doug: It usually is. With failures like Pearl Harbor, the Chinese invasion of Korea, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Tet offensive to its credit… I've long held the president of the U.S. would do just as well reading the New York Times for intelligence. And the fact that the U.S. now has a literal army of people in intelligence – about 854,000 with Top Secret clearances, according to a recent Washington Post series – doesn't mean the situation is going to get better. It means it's going to get worse, because none of these people know who's on first, and they all have competing agendas.

The U.S. government is far more out of control and byzantine than the Byzantines themselves could even have imagined.

Of course some of those guys are very good at what they do. But people rise in bureaucracies because of political infighting skills, not competence. What's needed for sound decisions is a wise man in command, not hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats. And we don't have a wise man in command, we have a glib ward healer from Chicago. If anything, he may be worse than Bush, which I didn't think was possible.

But to get back to Iran: It's important to recognize what has happened before. People forget that back in 1981, Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor in central Iraq, just weeks before it was to be loaded with fuel. And in 2007, they did the same with Syria's secret al-Kibar reactor.

But Iran is much further away, and they are building their reactors in hardened facilities – the jets that bombed Osirak barely had enough fuel to make it back to Israel – so Israel will probably need some help if it's going to pull it off this time. And since Israel is practically the 51st U.S. state, the feeling is that the U.S. would get sucked into helping them. Or, even if the U.S. doesn't help, it would still be blamed for not having kept its dog on a leash.

This is all compounded by the fact that the U.S. has been engaged in an unspoken War on Islam for close to three decades now, although it's styled the War on Terror.

L: And if the U.S. gets dragged into it, it becomes WWIII. I get it. It's interesting that Iran actually attacked the Iraqi reactor first, for much the same reason Israel did. Even more striking to me is that the UN boldly responded to Israel's actions with… strong words. And those words included the assertion that self-defense did not justify preemptive strikes – but that's exactly the excuse the U.S. used when its turn came to bomb Iraq.

Doug: I know – you can't make this stuff up. Although Iran attacked the Osirak during the nasty war between Saddam and the Ayatollah, shortly after the Shah fell in 1981. But these things do happen. They can be hard to predict. Still, the evidence is building – the latest press reports have a new carrier group joining the U.S. Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf. It's the type of thing that's considered provocative by a neutral observer.

But the fact is that nuclear weapons have been around now for over 60 years. The technology for making them is well known and getting cheaper, easier, and better all the time. North Korea can make them; even a rich individual can. But why not buy them from a Pakistani general or even a Russian supply sergeant? Rogue regimes now recognize, based on Saddam's experience, that having some nukes is the best way to prevent an invasion by the U.S., or someone else. Therefore, they will proliferate.

L: I wonder how the peace activists who voted for Obama feel about that… Pretty scary stuff.

Doug: It is. You know, historically, the U.S. typically picks entirely too many fights with little nothing nowhere countries – rabbit- and squirrel-size game in Central America or the Caribbean. All it's ever done is foster the next generation of rebels; at best it puts in a right-wing strong man who's recognized as a stooge and who makes the U.S. a lot of new enemies.

Anyway, Iraq was a country with only 20 million people, and even Viet Nam was not a large country at the time – and desperately poor. But Iran is genuine big game.

L: I just looked it up in the CIA World Factbook, and they say it has 67 million people as of an estimate last month, and is the 19th largest country in the world.

Doug: Yes. It's a theocratic police state, with a highly regulated, state-managed economy. Everything is either subsidized or price controlled. The government gets 80% of its income from oil, but the fields are so badly run that production is going into decline. The fact is, if the U.S. just waits, economic collapse or revolt from the kids, or both, will bring the regime down. Instead, the U.S. may act as a catalyst to unify the people behind their goofy government. It's completely perverse.

If this spins out of control, it could do some very, very serious damage. It's not like the Iranian army isn't expecting something. They're an old civilization, they're not stupid, and I'm sure they have contingency plans if they're attacked.

L: I see. But even if the U.S. is drawn in, that makes the conflict one of global scope, but it doesn't really plunge most of the world into war. I doubt China or Russia would attack the U.S. in retaliation. But I could see Muslim countries around the world deciding to go to war. This could become an open War on Islam – is that what you mean by WWIII?

Doug: Well, let's just suppose that Israel, or Israel and the U.S., attack Iran before Iran can become a nuclear power. Now, what would the Iranians do? They could do nothing, which is what the Iraqis and the Syrians did when Israel bombed them…

L: Somehow, that doesn't seem likely. They are a proud people. And their military had to have learned some lessons from the Iraqi experience with the U.S.…

Doug: I agree. A likely response would be to close the Strait of Hormuz, by way of punishing America through a denial of a large part of its oil supply. About 40% of all seaborne oil shipments pass through that strait – 20% of all the global oil supply. Its closure would be a major disruption to the whole world.

Of course, Obama would thump on his chest and say that Iran can't be allowed to close international waters. Iran would likely say, "We just did. What do you expect after launching an unprovoked attack?"

It's well known that sea-skimming missiles go 2,000 miles per hour. They have hundreds of them, maybe thousands, and they can be launched from small, fast boats. Even in the U.S.' own war games conducted a few years ago, the U.S. Navy lost against these things. If the U.S. tries to open the Strait of Hormuz by force against Iran, I think it's likely that most of the fleet will soon be turned into an artificial reef that divers in future decades will explore with morbid fascination. Militaries always fight the last war, and that's precisely what the U.S. is doing with its carriers and B-2s.

L: Here's a map. And then what?

Doug: Remember that WWI started with the assassination of one archduke. These things are chaotic and unpredictable, but one thing leads to another, drawing all sorts of parties into the fight as it spins out of control. The trouble is that the ante has gone up considerably since those days. The only way to win a game with nuclear weapons is not to play.

L: What if everyone who could help Israel attack Iran realizes this and refuses to help? Does peace have a chance?

Doug: Anything's possible, but this is not the only flashpoint. The war in Iraq could heat up in all sorts of ways. Pakistan could boil over. There are probably 50 other combinations that could be as serious as the U.S. and Israel picking a fight with Iran. The global stage is a powder keg with many fuses. The situation with Israel is just one of them.

L: But that's long been the case, what makes it more likely to blow now?

Doug: The economic crisis is just getting going. It's important to remember that the whole world has been in a long boom, punctuated by relatively minor recessions, since 1946. What's happening now is not just another cyclical recession. As it gets worse, and I'm quite confident it will, people will look for others to blame, and politicians will look for distractions to appease the masses. These factors are actively fanning the flames.

L: Nothing like a good war to distract people from their own misery – and their own responsibility for their individual circumstances.

Doug: That's right, at least until their house gets blown up or their son gets killed. Nothing like a good foreign war against an invariably evil and subhuman enemy to distract people from local problems. And, of course, there are actually fools out there that believe war stimulates economies.

L: Yes… Can't tell you how many times I've heard that WWII ended the Great Depression – they told me so in school, so it must be so. Alas, the dumb masses.

Doug: Indeed. If that were true, the best prescription for prosperity would be to make every city look like Berlin in 1945, so the economy would be restimulated as the starving masses rebuilt them with their bare hands. But I do think the conflict between Israel and Iran has high odds of happening. Whatever they say about peaceful uses – and, actually, Iran should have a massive nuclear program since it beats burning valuable oil for electricity – Iran is going to develop nuclear weapons. North Korea has shown that it's the best thing they can do to protect themselves from the bigger kids on the block. And of course Israel can't let them do that. These countries are on a clear collision course.

L: Grim.

Hat tip: LRC.

I’m still not sure whether the recent Wikileaks scandal has proven the power of the Internet to bring the dark dealings of the Pentagon into the light and challenge government authority, or whether it has actually proven the impotence of “Web 2.0” vis-à-vis the state and political inertia. (Justin Raimondo has a wrap-up here; the Guardian has created an interactive map connected with the leaked documents, which can be explored here.)

I certainly didn’t need help from Wikileaks to conclude that Washington’s war aims are incoherent, that its soldiers are confused and demoralized, and that the national interest is not being served in the land of the Afghans. All of these things have been abundantly clear for years. Moreover, most of the people fascinated with the Wikileak revelations are antiwar anyway, and it’s not certain whether the conservative push-back against Afghanistan, launched by Ann Coulter and (shockingly) World Net Daily super-hawk and Christian Zionist Joseph Farah, will be much affected by the revelations, which are easy to classify as “anti-military.” (The leaked documents could even conceivably be spun as a call to expand the war into Pakistan...)

The reality is, the American public doesn’t care about the Afghan War enough for it to be an election issue. Most everyone outside deluded Weekly Standard subscribers feel in their guts that Afghanistan and Iraq aren’t going well, and that we’re taking far too long to be done with them. But with job loss and the sustained recession, Americans would rather let these concerns be muffled by the calm reassurance of “the Surge is working!” The only way Afghanistan could become a political issue would be if Obama ended both wars and the neocons and conservative movement reacted by howling about national pride and Democrat surrender monkeys. As Austin Bramwell put it recently,

Obama doesn’t really care about Afghanistan and probably sees the occupation as pointless. Still, he supports it because it keeps Afghanistan boring and therefore off the front page. Rather than order of withdrawal, in other words, Obama prefers to buy an option at $70+ billion a year that lets him pursue his domestic agenda without distraction. … [N]o President would have the courage to make Afghanistan policy based on what’s actually best for America. The paramount concern is public relations.

Obama seems incapable of confronting, 1) the bureaucratic inertia of the Pentagon, whereby Afghanistan will be fought much like Washington’s other endless wars on drugs and poverty, 2) the ideological inertia of his conservative critics, who will attack anything mildly antiwar as an insult to the troops, and 3) the largely invisible Power Elite, which is interested in Afghanistan’s mineral wealth as well as having American military bases stationed around the world.

The Imperial Presidency ain’t what it used to be. 

On October 2, 2001, less than a month after the collapse of the Twin Towers, the Ayn Rand Center took out a full page ad in the New York Times with the title “End States Who Sponsor Terrorism.” Written by the organization’s director Leonard Peikoff, the page referred to “the notion that a terrorist is alone responsible for his actions” as a “guarantee of American impotence” in dealing with radical Muslims. The author seconds Paul Wolfowitz’s view that the American government must overthrow regimes that support terrorism making sure that such battles are “fought in a manner that secures victory as quickly as possible and with the fewest U.S. casualties, regardless of the countless innocents caught in the line of fire.” The death of civilians can be laid at the feet of their terror loving governments, for “[t]here is no way for our bullets to be aimed only at evil men.”

Peikoff suggests that while taking out the Taliban would be a good start, Afghanistan is, in the big picture, insignificant.  The Iranian government is the most fanatical in the Middle East and must be dealt with. Even though in the long run this is a battle of ideas against an implacable foe, as of now the American military must use everything in its arsenal to destroy the nation’s enemies.

Unsurprisingly, the face that the ARC presents to those visiting its website makes what it published in the Times appear pacific. A page entitled “In Moral Defense of Israel” informs the reader that although the Jewish state isn’t perfect, it, like the US, “retains a significant respect for individual rights. Its citizens, whatever their race or religion, enjoy many freedoms, including freedom of thought and speech, and the right to own property.” Therefore, “Israel has a moral right to exist” in contrast to the absolute collectivists which oppose her.

In no sense can one say that the center the bears her name has perverted Ayn Rand’s message. When asked about what the U.S. should do with regards to the 1967 Israeli-Arab war, she called on the Americans to do what they could to help the Jewish side.  Her main reason, she admited, for supporting Israel was that the Arabs are “typically nomads” (unlike the Jews!) and “savages who don't want to use their minds.” Rand wasn’t making a special exception to her philosophy when it came to Israel. She always held that if there was an aggressive country which made war on another, the people who live under the belligerent state are responsible for their passivity if nothing else.  In the Cold War context she once pontificated,

If we go to war with Russia, I hope the "innocent" are destroyed along with the guilty. There aren't many innocent people there -- those who do exist are not in the big cities, but mainly in concentration camps.

Under Discussion: WAR, by Sebastian Junger

In WAR, Sebastian Junger notes that while pure objectivity is hard enough to maintain while covering a city council meeting -- let alone in the middle of a war -- he committed himself to writing “honestly” about the American soldiers he lived (and very nearly died) with as an embedded journalist in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Junger gives a raw, real, gripping and insightful account of life and death in “The Valley,” but in WAR he never comes across as pretentious, preachy or even particularly political. Instead, Junger aims to get across what it feels like to be a man at war in a place where firefights often happen several times a day.

It is common to see soldiers portrayed as “victims” of war. Even as politicians and the media mechanically display a reverence for combat veterans and speak vaguely about “heroism” and “personal sacrifice,” it is often clear that many are uncomfortable with the idea that there are men who willingly kill for a living. Junger’s take on it is that they kill to keep on living, to stop someone from killing them. But back home many people speak of war as if it is something terrible that happened to soldiers who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Junger refreshingly admits that “war is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them.” Like Sergeant First Class William James in The Hurt Locker (2008), a lot of men apparently end up missing combat when they are sent home.

Well, Obama has gotten rid of that insubordinate general! And he can now rest assured that no prominent military man will ever make fun of him or Biden again. The president’s claim at today’s press conference that McChrystal’s ouster marked a “change in personnel, not policy” was apparently meant to be comforting … but in fact, indicated that the useless Afghan war will probably drag on for another decade.

AltRight reader “Niccolo” left the following astute -- though, I must say, potentially dangerous -- comment regarding my last piece on McChrystal:

Obama should consider himself very, very lucky that civilian rule of the US Armed Forces is sacrosanct. Had this not been the case, he could have been very easily brushed aside by such men.

The president as “Commander-in-Chief” has become one of the most beloved phrases in the American political lexicon -- a trend that culminated in John Kerry’s corny “reporting for duty” salute at the 2004 Democratic convention. Americans aren’t likely to give up on this notion any time soon. (It should be noted that the Constitution authorizes the president to be “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States,” though the language clearly indicates that the Founders never dreamt that a president would be presiding over an unending state of war in multiple parts of the globe.)

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal likely has abiding disgust for civilians like Obama, Biden, and Holbrooke, who have been designated his superiors; however, I don’t think for a moment, he ever contemplated suspending Constitutional dictates, declaring a State of Emergency, and for the good of the nation, dismissing Obama and installing himself as a temporary dictator, as the Romans understood it. And the fact that he lacks a popular following in the country is only a secondary reason why he would never do such a thing.

Personal ambition is always a factor in matters of state; however, it’s certain that Francisco Franco recognized that accepting the legality of the general elections of 1936 would lead to the further subversion of the state, leftist attacks on the Spanish nation and Church, and eventually, Communist rule in his homeland.

We’re certainly not experiencing anything like the dire exigent in which Franco and the Spanish Right found themselves during the summer of 1936; however, if we were, our military higher-ups seem to lack, entirely, the vision one needs to take wise, decisive action.

McChrystal -- a skilled, efficient, “get ‘er done” operator and, as we’ve witnessed, a brutally honest man -- probably represents the best the armed services have to offer at the moment. (Others who have worked their way up the chain of command include the shrewd “political general,” David Petraeus, and the new breed of military diversicrats like Doug Casey, whose views -- “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength” -- seem to resemble those of the Columbia English department.)

Alas, McChrystal seems to only know how to figure out the best way to develope a counter-insurgency strategy -- which tells one nothing about why one’s fighting or what one’s fighting for.