Trojanov is an acclaimed author of 20 books, including Along the Ganges, Collector of Worlds, and Mumbai to Mecca. He is the co-author of Angriff auf die Freiheit (Attack on Freedom), with Juli Zeh, a 2009 jeremiad against State surveillance. Trojanov was on his way to the Denver conference of the German Studies Association, and had been issued an invitation to appear at the Goethe-Institut’s “New Literature From Europe” Festival in November.

He had earlier been denied a visa to enter the United States, but with the help of an American university he was finally granted his travel papers: thus the “security alert” came as a surprise.

So why all the trouble over traveling to the US?

In response to media queries, the US embassy in Berlin had “no comment” to make. That’s because no comment was necessary: Trojanov was among the prominent signers of an open letter addressed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel protesting NSA surveillance on German soil as an “historic attack on our democratic, constitutional state.” That is clearly the reason for this Soviet-style harassment by the Obama administration.

This latest outrage is part of a disturbing pattern of repression that all points to one ineluctable conclusion: the United States is the Soviet Union of the new millennium – an ideological state with global ambitions that holds itself up as the epitome of “freedom” and yet is the single most powerful enemy of liberty worldwide.

Trojanov’s history makes this Soviet-style persecution all the more ironic: he and his family fled Bulgaria when he was very young, seeking refuge in the former Yugoslavia and finally being granted political asylum in Germany. During the regional uprising against Soviet domination and the revolts against the dictatorship of the Communist parties of the Warsaw Pact, the peoples of Eastern Europe looked to the United States as the torchbearer of freedom and the symbol of all their hopes for a better future: that one of those hopefuls is now being barred from entering “the land of the free and the home of the brave” on account of his political views is utterly sickening.

The American PEN Center, representing thousands of American writers, has issued a formal protest to our clueless Secretary of State, who’s too busy arguing for funding Al Qaeda jihadists in Syria to be bothered with answering for travel restrictions on ideological grounds: the German government is also making “inquiries.” Washington’s response continues to be “no comment.”

Okay, so it’s only this one guy, and maybe it’s a mistake, and why am I making such a big deal about this?

Because it isn’t only just one guy: as the Pen Center points out, “Mr. Trojanov is at least the third member of one of our international affiliates who has been barred from entering the United States since September 2001″ on ideological grounds, and it doesn’t stop there. While the Bush administration was no friend of the freedom to travel, the Obamaites have escalated the government’s attack on visitors it deems politically incorrect.

When writers and journalists are targets of government repression, you know you have a problem – a big problem – on your hands. And that is precisely the case here in the US. Why else would the Committee to Protect Journalists be doing a study – for the first time – of the mounting difficulties put in the way of reporters in America? Facing prosecution for “espionage” on account of their probing into Washington’s spying on its own citizens, as well as others worldwide, US journalists find themselves increasingly in the crosshairs of Justice Department prosecutors, who are taking some lessons from their Soviet forebears:

“For three decades, the Committee to Protect Journalists has reported on assaults on press freedoms in China, Iran, Syria and other countries with government regimes traditionally hostile to a free and robust news media.

“This year, for the first time, the Committee is conducting a major investigation of attacks on press freedoms by the U.S. government, led by an Arizona State University professor.

“’Journalists working in the United States have told us that their work has become more difficult as aggressive leak investigations and prosecutions have chilled certain kinds of reporting,’ said Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.”

What in the name of all that’s holy is going on?

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Government officials have been quick to deny any “misuse” of this huge data bank – beyond the to-be-expected eavesdropping on spouses, and other anomalous pranks by errant ex-employees – and critics have so far focused on potential misuse. Well, now we know it’s much more than just potential: it’s real, it’s happening, and it’s downright scary.

The rationale for the Surveillance State has always been “the foreign connection.” There are these Bad Guys outside the US, you see, who are trying to infiltrate our society and cause violent havoc, so we have to create this huge “haystack” of data and sift through it with a fine-toothed comb – but Americans, we’re told, aren’t the primary targets. It’s them furriners we have to worry about.

This turned out to be a lie. We always knew it was a lie, but now James Risen and Laura Poitras have confirmed it in a recent New York Times article that blows the lid off this rationalization:

“Since 2010, the National Security Agency has been exploiting its huge collections of data to create sophisticated graphs of some Americans’ social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with officials.”

The “foreign connection” was only ever a fig leaf, utilized to get around existing laws forbidding mass surveillance of Americans: this had to be true because, after all, Al Qaeda and its affiliates were and are a foreign group trying to gain entry to our shores and implant its operatives on our soil. Ipso facto, it was deemed necessary to gain access to the entire “haystack” in order to map their success in doing so. The focus isn’t on overseas operatives but on their allies inside the United States who might conceivably be utilized in terrorist attacks. Pushing the legal limits of this mass surveillance, US government officials finally breached the walls of the Constitution in November 2010, when, as Risen and Poitras report, they began to “examine American’s networks of associations.”

In an empire such as ours, the distinction between a “foreigner” and an American is increasingly hazy: every empire is a multi-cultural polyglot, by definition, and the American imperium more so than any other, surpassing even the British. For are we not a country of immigrants, an idea more than a nation in the European sense? Americans are connected through a thousand threads to foreign nationals, and once it was deemed “legal” to collect “meta-data” – i.e. records of our phone calls – the rest followed logically and inevitably.

Risen and Poitras report that a January 2011 memo, uncovered by Snowden, authorized the NSA to run “’large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness’ of every e-mail address, phone number or other identifier, the document said.”

And that’s not all:

“The agency can augment the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data, according to the documents. They do not indicate any restrictions on the use of such ‘enrichment’ data, and several former senior Obama administration officials said the agency drew on it for both Americans and foreigners.”

Here is a perfect illustration of how the advancement of government power works: give them an inch or three – access to “meta-data” – and they take a mile. What we wind up with is a perfect framework for a police state. Although we still don’t know how many innocent Americans have been caught up in this dragnet, the old “six degrees of separation” principle certainly applies in this case: anybody can be “linked” to anybody, given the sheer amount of information at the government’s disposal.

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Rothbard eagerly reclaimed the concept of class analysis from the Marxists, who expropriated it from the French theorists of laissez-faire. Marx authored a plagiarized, distorted, and vulgarized version of the theory based on the Ricardian labor theory of value. Given this premise, he came up with a class analysis pitting workers against owners.

One of Rothbard’s many great contributions to the cause of liberty was to restore the original theory, which pitted the people against the State. In the Rothbardian theory of class struggle, the government, including its clients and enforcers, exploits and enslaves the productive classes through taxation, regulation, and perpetual war. Government is an incubus, a parasite, incapable of producing anything in its own right, and instead feeds off the vital energies and productive ability of the producers.

This is the first step of a fully-developed libertarian class analysis. Unfortunately, this is where the thought processes of all too many alleged libertarians come to a grinding halt. It is enough, for them, to know the State is the Enemy, as if it were an irreducible primary.

As William Pitt put it in 1770, “There is something behind the throne greater than the king himself.”

This explains the strange historical fact, recounted at length and in detail by Rothbard, that the biggest capitalists have been the deadliest enemies of true capitalism. For virtually all of the alleged social “reforms” of the past fifty years were pushed not only by “idealistic” Leftists, but by the very corporate combines caricatured as the top-hatted, pot-bellied “economic royalists” of Wall Street.

The neoconservative Right depicts the battle against Big Government as a two-sided Manichean struggle between the forces of light (that is, of capitalism) and the remnants of largely discredited Leftist elites. But Rothbard’s historical analysis reveals a much richer, more complex pattern: instead of being two-sided, the struggle for liberty pits at least three sides against each other.

For the capitalists, as John T. Flynn, Albert Jay Nock, and Frank Chodorov all pointed out, were never for capitalism. As Nock put it:

It is one of the few amusing things in our rather stodgy world that those who today are behaving most tremendously about collectivism and the Red menace are the very ones who have cajoled, bribed, flattered and bedeviled the State into taking each and every one of the successive steps that lead straight to collectivism. [“Impostor Terms,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1936]

The New Deal economic policy was, as Rothbard demonstrated, prefigured by Herbert Hoover, champion of big business, and foreshadowed in the reforms of the Progressive era. As the revisionist economic historians, such as Gabriel Kolko, have shown, those who regulated the great industries in the name of progressive “reform” were recruited from the very cartels and trusts they were created to tame.

And of course the monopolists didn’t mind being tamed, so long as their competitors were tamed (if not eliminated). Every giant leap forward of economic planning and centralization — central banking, the welfare state, “civil rights,” and affirmative action — was supported if not initiated by the biggest and most politically powerful business interests in the country.

Giant multinational corporations, and their economic satellites, in alliance with governments and the big banks, are in the process of extending their influence on a global scale: they dream of a world central bank, global planning, and an international welfare state, with American troops policing the world to guarantee their profit margins.

After the long battle to create a central bank in the U.S., the high priests of high finance finally seized and consolidated control of domestic economic policy. It only remained for them to extend their dominance internationally, and for this purpose they created the Council on Foreign Relations, and, later, the Trilateral Commission. These two groups have been seized upon by the new populist Right as the virtual embodiments of the Power Elite, and rightly so. It is only by reading Rothbard, however, that this insight is placed in its proper historical perspective. For the fact of the matter is that, as Rothbard shows, the CFR/Trilateralist network is merely the latest incarnation of a trend deeply rooted in modern American history. Long before the founding of the CFR or the Trilateral Commission, there was a power elite in this country; that elite will likely endure long after those organizations are gone or transmuted into something else.

Rothbard’s unmasking of the historical and economic roots of this trend is vital in understanding that this is not a “conspiracy” centered in the CFR and the Trilateralist groups, as such, but an ideological trend traditionally centered in the Northeast, among the upper classes, and deeply rooted in American history.

“That war was no tie. Korea was a victory. When 50 million South Koreans live in freedom, a vibrant democracy…a stark contrast to the repression and poverty of the North, that is a victory and that is your legacy.”

This is a fairytale: it wasn’t a victory, or even a tie: the US public was disenchanted with the war long before the armistice, and Truman was under considerable pressure at home to conclude an increasingly unpopular conflict. As for this guff about “democracy”: whatever the US was fighting for, from 1950, when the war broke out, to 1953, when it ground to a halt, democracy hardly described the American cause.

We were fighting on behalf of Syngman Rhee, the US-educated-and-sponsored dictator of South Korea, whose vibrancy was demonstrated by the large-scale slaughter of his leftist political opponents. For 22 years, Rhee’s word was law, and many thousands of his political opponents were murdered: tens of thousands were jailed or driven into exile. Whatever measure of liberality has reigned on the Korean peninsula was in spite of Washington’s efforts and ongoing military presence. When the country finally rebelled against Rhee, and threw him out in the so-called April Revolution of 1960, he was ferried to safety in a CIA helicopter as crowds converged on the presidential palace.

The mythology that has coagulated around the Korean war is epitomized by Obama’s recent peroration, a compendium of uplifting phrases largely bereft of any real history. When history intrudes, it is seen only in very soft focus. The phrase “Korea reminds us” recurs throughout, like the refrain of a pop song, but nowhere does this anonymous presidential speechwriter remind us of the origins of this war. How did it come about?

The standard neocon-cold war liberal line is that the North Koreans, in league with Moscow and Beijing, launched a war of aggression on June 25, 1950, when North Korean troops poured across the disputed border. What this truncated history leaves out is that, in doing so, they preempted Rhee’s own plans to launch an invasion northward. As historian Mark E. Caprio, professor of history at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, points out:

“On February 8, 1949, the South Korean president met with Ambassador John Muccio and Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall in Seoul. Here the Korean president listed the following as justifications for initiating a war with the North: the South Korean military could easily be increased by 100,000 if it drew from the 150,000 to 200,000 Koreans who had recently fought with the Japanese or the Nationalist Chinese. Moreover, the morale of the South Korean military was greater than that of the North Koreans. If war broke out he expected mass defections from the enemy. Finally, the United Nations’ recognition of South Korea legitimized its rule over the entire peninsula (as stipulated in its constitution). Thus, he concluded, there was “nothing [to be] gained by waiting.”

The only reason Rhee didn’t launch an attack was due to American reluctance to supply him with the arms and aid he would need: war, when it came, would be on America’s terms, and our leaders had good reason to think it would come sooner rather than later. Washington’s policy was to keep Rhee supplied with just enough arms to control the South. There is also evidence for Congressman Howard Buffett’s contention that the secret testimony before Congress of CIA director Admiral Hillenkoeter proved US responsibility for the war.

Buffett, Republican anti-interventionist from Iowa, went to his grave demanding the declassification of that crucial testimony: alas, to no avail. And yet what we do know is this: the US government had ample warnings of the pending North Korean invasion, via intelligence reports sent to top cabinet officials well before the June 25 commencement of large-scale hostilities. Yet Washington took no action, either diplomatic or otherwise, to deter the North Koreans.

On the other side of the equation, the Communist world was divided on the Korea question, with Stalin skeptical of Kim il Sung’s assurances that his forces would achieve victory in three days. Russian policy was: military aid, yes – Soviet intervention, no. China’s Mao, on the other hand, offered his support – which wasn’t actually forthcoming, however, until the US entered the war and advanced into North Korea itself.

Neither Stalin nor President Harry Truman were particularly eager to see the conflict erupt, although both may have considered it inevitable. In which case it was convenient, for propaganda purposes, to be able to portray the enemy as having fired the first shot.

As to who did in reality fire that shot, Bruce Cumings, head of the history department at the University of Chicago, gave us the definitive answer in his two-volume The Origins of the Korean War, and The Korean War: A History: the Korean war started during the American occupation of the South, and it was Rhee, with help from his American sponsors, who initiated a series of attacks that well preceded the North Korean offensive of 1950. From 1945-1948, American forces aided Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens of thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in Kwangju, and on the island of Cheju-do – where as many as 60,000 people were murdered by Rhee’s US-backed forces.

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The NSA spying scandal, he went on to tell his audience, is subverting democracy around the world: he warned that one consequence of the Snowden revelations will be increasing suspicion of American online platforms, such as Facebook and Google, both of which he characterized as major factors energizing pro-democracy movements abroad.

Carter’s previous statements about the Snowden affair were mildly supportive: he toldCNN he thought “the secrecy that has been surrounding this invasion of privacy has been excessive,” and that Snowden’s bringing the secret surveillance of Americans “to the public notice has probably been, in the long term, beneficial.” Yet this new statement goes way beyond that: it is a sweeping condemnation of the current regime. That a former US President would say such a thing has got to be the scariest public pronouncement I’ve heard since the Watergate era. What’s even scarier: Carter is right.

America is no longer a democracy in the sense we have traditionally meant it. This is really the essence of what Snowden has revealed. The various surveillance programs he’s exposed – PRISM, “Boundless Informant,” Tempora, the telephony “meta-data” dragnet, etc. – are all tools necessary for the construction of what can only be called a police state.

An authoritarian regime has no way to measure public discontent except in this manner: since there is no free media, no political pushback to the regime’s depredations, and no way to discover what people really think, the only way to track – and crush – dissent is by spying on the population. The Soviets and their allies did this– and now it is the turn of their American successors.

Oh, but how can you say that? – I can hear the objections before they’re even vocalized. After all, America has free elections, a free (unregulated) media, and all the accouterments of a Western liberal democracy.

Except all of the above is mostly untrue.

Sure, America has elections, but how democratic are they, really? There are only two political parties in this country, and both of them are privileged by the state over all other political entities and parties: they get automatic ballot status, while other parties must jump over the most onerous hurdles to be listed on the ballot. “Third” parties are effectively outlawed. Hardly what one might expect of a nation so zealous to export “democracy” to the rest of the world, but then lack of nerve was never an American shortcoming.

Given this electoral duopoly, it is quite easy for the political Establishment to manage the system and make sure it doesn’t go “out of bounds” in nominating – or, worse, electing – a candidate dubbed too “extreme” by the Powers That Be, and so duly labeled by our compliant media. Which brings me to the “free” media question….

There is no censorship of the media in the US – because it isn’t necessary. The media censors itself quite willingly. More than that: as the Snowden affair has shown, the “mainstream” media is even more fanatical than US government officials about shutting down dissent. It was David Gregory, you’ll note, and not the Attorney General, who demanded Glenn Greenwald give a reason why he shouldn’t be arrested along with Snowden. None other than longtime respected reported Walter Pincus, of the Washington Post, echoed Gregory’s remarks. And of course there’s the minor league pundits, like MSNBC’s Joy Reid – on the “left” side of the spectrum – alongside neocons like Bill Kristol and some of the more unhinged among the Fox News crowd, who have been calling for Snowden’s head from Day One.

This is not to say there aren’t voices of dissent in America – there are. But there are similar voices in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and I don’t hear anybody hailing that country as a bastion of liberal democracy. Russia, too, has an uncensored media, and for precisely the same reason we do – because official censorship is redundant. The media self-censors without even being asked.

Okay, there’s an imprecise formulation up there: “for precisely the same reason” isn’t very … precise. The reason we stand virtually alone in the world in having a media uncensored by government is this document we call the Constitution, specifically the First Amendment, which guarantees citizens the right to speak freely. However, this right has been abridged over the years to the point that it can be violated by government officials almost at will: the WikiLeaks case proves that beyond any doubt.

The Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers is an important part of that generalized assault on the Constitution because tyranny requires one big ingredient in order to take root and metastasize: secrecy.

There are two views of the process by which the US government created a vast surveillance apparatus that scoops up virtually all data transmitted over fiber optic cables in the US and abroad. There’s the naïve liberal view, which says it was a gradual and largely undirected process that eventually got out of hand and created the infrastructure of an American police state by accident. It was all a big mistake!

This view makes zero sense, and should be dismissed out of hand. The reason: the dirty deed was done in the dark. Not even members of Congress knew about it, and those who did were forbidden from telling their constituents the truth. They could only drop hints, here and there, ambiguous warnings that Big Brother is bigger than anyone imagined. It took Snowden to unveil the face of the Leviathan for all to see.

The other view of this is mine: that the whole procedure was (and is) part of a deliberate plan, a long term project by our wise rulers to ready themselves for the day when their power confronts a serious challenge. No, I’m not talking about the American state defending itself against a terrorist attack, or any kind of external threat – I mean a homegrown threat, one perhaps provoked into action by an economic crisis or some other cathartic event.

Anybody who thinks PRISM, “Boundless Informant,” Tempora, or any similar outrages against liberty still be to exposed have anything but a tangential relation to our government’s “war on terrorism” is living in a fool’s paradise. Sure, we want to spy on foreigners, as our European allies have discovered to their chagrin, but don’t kid yourself: the real purpose of the Panopticon is spying on the American people.

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One should never assume their bark is worse than their bite, but clearly this display of anger is born of sheer frustration. Snowden, after all, has thrown our rulers and their court jesters in the media on the defensive. Not since David bopped Goliath on the noggin has a single individual landed such a decisive blow on a giant, unwieldy bully. Washington is reeling from the impact of the Snowden revelations, not just on the international plane but on the home front as well. In spite of battalions of politicians of both parties dutifully denouncing the NSA leaker as a modern day Benedict Arnold, and weeks of media hysteria over the alleged “damage” he has done to our national security, the American people aren’t buying the Official Narrative: a recent Quinnipiac poll reports:

“American voters say 55 – 34 percent that Edward Snowden is a whistle-blower, rather than a traitor, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. In a massive shift in attitudes, voters say 45 – 40 percent the government’s anti-terrorism efforts go too far restricting civil liberties, a reversal from a January 14, 2010, survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University when voters said 63 – 25 percent that such activities didn’t go far enough to adequately protect the country. Almost every party, gender, income, education, age and income group regards Snowden as a whistle-blower rather than a traitor.”

This poll tracks several interesting trends, the most arresting of which is the utter unanimity with which the American people are rejecting the Official Narrative on Snowden – that Snowden is a traitor who committed espionage and deserves to be punished for his “crime.” Weeks and weeks of relentless smearing, accusing him of collusion with America’s enemies, and worse, have simply had no effect – other than, perhaps, to increase his approval ratings!

As was the case in the former Soviet Union, where people took the truth to be the opposite of whatever appeared in the newspapers, the American people are simply tuning out the “mainstream” media. In the upside down Bizarro World they find themselves living in, Americans have resorted to the only reliable method of determining truth from falsehood: by simply inverting whatever the Establishment media is “reporting.” They’re telling us Snowden’s a “traitor”: ergo, he’s a heroic whistle-blower. A crude but very effective methodology, one that – if applied consistently – can have some pretty interesting implications down the road.

The great shift in voter attitudes toward civil liberties is worth going into specifics: the partisan breakdown is particularly interesting. While 49 percent of Republicans support the NSA’s phone dragnet program, the number rises to 58 percent when we’re talking about Democrats. Opposition is centered in Independents, Republicans, and males. 56 percent of Republicans say the dragnet is too much of an intrusion into privacy, while only 40 percent of Democrats agree.

The evolution of American liberalism from a pro-civil liberties stance to one that effectively disappears the Fourth Amendment because Government Is Our Friend is here charted and measured. Yes, you’re right that they might not be telling the pollsters this if a Republican was in the White House, but I would argue this shift was bound to happen anyway. After all, haven’t “progressives” been telling us for years that conservative-libertarian fears of Big Government are just paranoid alarmism? Aren’t Democrats the “Mommy” party, which sees government as the Great Protector– and doesn’t the demographic breakdown, which shows women much more conducive to the Surveillance State than men, tell us where Democratic strategists are placing their bets? Indeed, one is hard put to come up with a reason for liberals to stand with Snowden in an age when “We’re from the government, and we’re here to help” is the leitmotif and motto of American “progressivism.”

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Whenever anyone challenges yet another power grab by government bureaucrats to spy, harass, and otherwise push their noses where it doesn’t belong, the post-9/11 “explanation” is always the same: It’s all the fault of the terrorists, because, don’tcha know, we’ve got to keep our Eye on them all the time. So shut up, whiner, it’s for your own good!

The Snowden revelations prove this is all so much BS.

The scooping up of phone “metadata” and online content, so it can be stored away for a rainy day, is just the tip of the iceberg. Now it turns out that much of what Snowden exposed is all about the US ginning up a cyberwar offensive by sniffing out “targets” overseas. Please don’t tell me the NSA is snooping around the European Union’s government computers because they’re out hunting “terrorists.” And what about Japan – are we really supposed to believe the US is all that concerned about Al-Qaeda-in-Nippon, or is something else going on here? The Japanese, for their part, are just a little taken aback:

“Tokyo has also insisted that Japan will ‘strongly demand’ a clarification over the alleged spying. Tokyo said complaints will be lodged through diplomatic channels over the matter.

“We are aware of the report, but it’s not clear (whether) what was reported was true. First we will demand the truth through diplomatic channels,” said Tokyo’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, adding that the country has ‘concerns’ over the situation.”

Snowden is generally described in the media as an “IT specialist,” a “computer whiz,” etc., but his actual job title was “infrastructure analyst,” according to the New York Times:

“It is a title that officials have carefully avoided mentioning, perhaps for fear of inviting questions about the agency’s aggressive tactics: an infrastructure analyst at the N.S.A., like a burglar casing an apartment building, looks for new ways to break into Internet and telephone traffic around the world.”

Of course they carefully avoid mentioning it, because it gives away their game. The NSA isn’t breaking into French, German, Turkish, Japanese, Italian, etc., computers because they’re gunning for “terrorists,” on that you can bet the farm. They’re doing it because they can – and because there’s nobody to stop them, since it’s all done in the dark. What the Snowden revelations underscore is an under-appreciated fact that is now staring us all in the face: the US is at war with the world. As the Times put it:

“A secret presidential directive on cyberactivities unveiled by Mr. Snowden – discussing the primary new task of the N.S.A. and its military counterpart, Cyber Command – makes clear that when the agency’s technicians probe for vulnerabilities to collect intelligence, they also study foreign communications and computer systems to identify potential targets for a future cyberwar.

“Infrastructure analysts like Mr. Snowden, in other words, are not just looking for electronic back doors into Chinese computers or Iranian mobile networks to steal secrets. They have a new double purpose: building a target list in case American leaders in a future conflict want to wipe out the computers’ hard drives or shut down the phone system.”

They claim it’s all in the interest of protecting us from our enemies – but who is the real “enemy” here when the NSA is busy setting up our allies for cyber-attack, as well as spying on millions of innocent Americans? Which brings us to my so far favorite part of Datagate: how the Brits in cooperation with the NSA spied on diplomats and government officials attending London gatherings of the “Group of 20,” which negotiates key trade agreements. They did this “partly by luring delegates to fake Internet cafes,” as the Times reports. What did this “luring” consist of? Free double-mocha fat-free lattes and a blueberry scone? Discount hookers? The mind boggles.

According to secret NSA documents detailed by the Guardian, these fake Internet cafés were customized to be “able to extract key logging info, providing creds (credentials) for delegates, meaning we have sustained intelligence options against them even after conference has finished.”

Come on down to the Malware Café, folks, where your laptop will be infected with software that records your keystrokes, plunders your passwords, and alerts NSA/GCHQ whenever you log on to your favorite porn site. Yes, “we have sustained intelligence options against them,” indeed.

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The Best of Justin Raimondo

The widely noted poll showing Democrats are now the biggest cheerleaders for the Surveillance State has conservatives delightedly calling out the left for “hypocrisy,” noting with glee the leftie pundits who denounced George W. Bush’s administration for trampling on our civil liberties and are now defending the Regime against the Snowden-Greenwald revelations. Their liberal targets come out swinging, however, rightly pointing out that that PRISM and the phone collection program originated under George W. Bush’s watch, back when all these born-again civil libertarians of the right were either silent or supportive of these measures.

Indeed, the left has gone on the offensive, crowing that what Edward Snowden calls the “architecture of oppression” is all perfectly legal, pointing out that the NSA went through the FISA court – a secret “court” whose orders are classified top, and that, out of thousands of such requests, has only denied the government a grand total of 11 times. This left-right dynamic dramatizes the symbiotic relationship between authoritarians on both sides of the political spectrum – and, perhaps, explains how the Panopticon unveiled by Snowden came to be built and legitimized.

Now it is the liberals’ turn to justify the demolition of the Constitution, and especially to give the final push to take down that once-mighty and now greatly eroded bulwark against tyranny, the Bill of Rights. Anyone who is surprised by the alacrity with which they have taken up this task is unfamiliar with the history of American liberalism and the left in general.

Being a liberal, or any number of degrees to the left, didn’t always mean hating J. Edgar Hoover and the “architecture of oppression” – a superstructure that emerged in all its wartime glory in the 1930s and 40s, in the heyday of what is known as the “Red Decade.” It was American leftists who cheered FDR’s wartime dictatorship the loudest, and called for ever more repressive methods to deal with recalcitrant elements. It was the “liberals” who whooped it up for the farcical Great Sedition Trial of 1944, in which the brilliant African-American anti-interventionist Lawrence Dennis and 29 other defendants were accused of treason for their “isolationist” views and jailed. These memorable (yet now mysteriously forgotten) anti-Japanese cartoons by Theodor Seuss Geisel, left-wing author of the “Dr. Seuss” books, hailed the internment camps in which thousands of Japanese-Americans were held.

A listening device was planted in the office of Col. Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the fiercely antiwar, anti-New DealChicago Tribune. The push to jail the leaders of the anti-war movement was spearheaded by the Communist Party, which was then selling the line that “Communism is 20^th century Americanism”: the Communists urged their many allies in the Roosevelt administration to widen the Justice Department’s net to include prominent leaders of the America First Committee and members of Congress who opposed getting into the war. The President, for his part, made a point of asking his reluctant Attorney General, Francis Biddle, at every Cabinet meeting: “When are you going to indict the seditionists?” (The Trotskyists got the same treatment, and a “sedition” trial of their own, while the Stalinists and the “liberals” at The Nation stood and cheered.)

Far from opposing government surveillance of Americans in America, the left in those days was busy helping the FBI with their own “private” intelligence-gathering operations, such as the “Friends of Democracy,” and other groups, most of them Communist front organizations. These folks saw themselves as adjuncts of law enforcement, playing much the same role as the Southern Poverty Law Center does today: fingering “fifth columnists” and other “seditionists” and “extremists” who posed a threat to the Roosevelt regime.

Journalists, intellectuals, and publicists played a key role in the left’s war on civil liberties: it was a Washington Post reporter, Dillard Stokes, who posed as a serviceman and asked the defendants in the 1944 trial to send him literature. These letters turned up at the trial as “evidence” that the defendants were trying to undermine the morale of US servicemen: thus the charge of sedition. The left-wing anti-subversion movement had an entire New York City daily newspaper, PM, devoted to publishing its endless exposes of the anti-interventionist movement as a Nazi fifth column.

During the cold war era, however, suddenly the left became the champion of civil liberties and the Constitution, with particular attention to the Bill of Rights – as so many of them had to take the Fifth at numerous congressional hearings investigating suspected Communist activities in the US. Throughthe 1960s, and right up on through the Bush era, American liberals – who began calling themselves “progressives” sometime around the Clinton years – continued to fight for basic civil liberties, which were under attack from the right and the insensible “center.” All that changed, however, when Barack Obama became the first Democratic president of the post-9/11 era.

The post-Obama left in America is rapidly regressing to a former incarnation: the police state “progressivism” of the 1930s and 40s. Some of the more old-fashioned liberals may be baffled by this, but fortunately Joshua Marshall, of the decidedly “progressive” Talking Points Memo blog – who approves of the spying and thinks Snowden is a criminal – has been good enough to provide an ideological rationale for what seems on the surface to be mere partisan loyalty to the Obama administration.

In response to the shock and anger of the more old-fashioned liberals who inhabit TPM’s comment threads, Marshall says he’s “trying to think through what is the difference between the prisms we’re looking through that makes us see [Snowden's actions] so differently.”

“Here is I think the essential difference and where it comes back to what I referred to before – a basic difference in one’s idea about the state and the larger political community. If you see the state as essentially malevolent or a bad actor then really anything you can do to put a stick in its spokes is a good thing. Same if you think the conduct of US foreign policy is fundamentally a bad thing. Then opening up its books for the world to see is a good thing simply because it exposes it or damages it. It forces change on any number of levels.

“From that perspective, there’s no really no balancing to be done. All disclosure is good. Either from the perspective of transparency in principle or upending something you believe must be radically changed.

“On the other hand, if you basically identify with the country and the state, then indiscriminate leaks like this are purely destructive. They’re attacks on something you fundamentally believe in, identify with, think is working on your behalf.”

Let’s put aside, for the moment, the clear implication that Snowden’s defenders are anti-American fanatics intent on defending what amounts to treason: that’s none too interesting, in any case, because it is merely a page torn from the neocons’ manual. It captures our interest only because Marshall takes it one step farther than even the Bush brigade did, deriving a defense of the all-seeing all-knowing NSA from a radically revised liberal theory of the state, and linking conservative fear of overweening government power to “attacks on something you fundamentally believe in,” i.e. on America itself, or, at least, Marshall’s idea of America. Because in Marshall’s world “the country” and “the state” are interchangeable concepts, which is one of the ways “modern” liberalism differs from the old-fashioned variety.

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When whistleblowers expose government wrongdoing and abuses, the procedure is always the same: the regime’s defenders focus on the whistleblower’s alleged personality defects and smear him within an inch of his life. They did it with Dan Ellsberg, they did it with Julian Assange, they did it with Bradley Manning, and that all too familiar modus operandi is unfolding pretty quickly in the case of Edward Snowden, the heroic libertarian who exposed Washington’s massive and unconstitutional spying operation against American citizens. The pundits who take seriously their job as the power elite’s Praetorian Guard are going after Snowden hammer and tongs, and in these dark times their polemics provide a rich source of humor.

The funniest one – although this is admittedly a hard choice to make – has got to be this piece by one William Foxton, a rather pathetic Tory “moderate” who claims to care about “civil liberties, Internet freedom, that sort of thing.” So you see he’s one of us – but he’s “never liked Glenn Greenwald,” the journalist who broke the story. Well, why not? Greenwald, after all, has been one of the staunchest advocates of those very causes, almost single-handedly responsible for calling foul on the foulest attack on civil liberties since the era of J. Edgar Hoover.

Foxton is coy on this point: he says maybe it’s because Greenwald’s pieces are “enormous,” not to mention “turgid” – although this doesn’t appear to deter Glenn’s numerous readers. Oh, but you see, they’re a “cult” – although he doesn’t let us in on the secret ceremonies, complete with Satanic altars and Druidic incantations, that no doubt figure prominently in the activities of the Greenwaldian sect. So then how do Greenwald’s many admirers – myself among them – qualify as cult members? Well, you see:

“The last time I criticized him I got a barrage of online abuse – including memorably a 24-slide PowerPoint presentation explaining how the American security services had ‘got’ to me, and how Greenwald was their number-one target. Maybe, as his adoring public have suggested, I’m either a homophobe or in the pay of the CIA. Perhaps both.”

The poor baby: his feelings were hurt! But really he should be flattered that anyone is reading him at all, never mind taking the trouble to create an entire Power Point presentation proving him wrong. Of course, being a homophobe is a crime in Britain: you can be jailed for calling somebody a faggot and so discretion is mandatory. It’s enough to simply mention somebody’s sexuality in a seemingly casual aside. The dogs can hear the whistle: he’s a poofter. Wink, wink.

Or “maybe I’m jealous of the success he’s had, of the stories he’s broken,” an admission that makes Foxton seem like a jolly good bloke, really an honest and essentially nice guy – an impression easily dispelled in the next sentence, where he takes the opportunity to repeat the haughty disdain of theNew York Times profile of Greenwald describing him as a “blogger” for “a British web site.”

So, you see, Greenwald is just a gay blogger, not really a journalist – that’s the core of the message we’re supposed to be getting. He’s just a blogger – oh, and did I mention’s he’s gay – he’s not legitimate, he’s a deviant. No, it’s not jealousy, says Foxton, not really:

“What I think is more likely is I dislike him because he has built a huge platform with opinion writing, and now he’s blurring the line between opinion pieces and straight reporting. That huge platform he’s built means sources come forward to him from his vast base of followers, with real hard news stories, and then he insists on reporting them.”

The link Foxton thinks somehow proves his point takes us to a tweet in which Greenwald admits to having opinions. What’s difficult for Foxton and his fellow Praetorians to finesse, however, is that the bare facts reported by Greenwald and ablyarticulated by Snowden condemn the regime in and of themselves. That the whole spying operation was done in secret, and on such a grand scale – with DNI James Clapper all the while denying it to Sen. Ron Wyden’s face – is all we need to know. Whatever opinions Greenwald has on the matter don’t enter into it.

The only way to get over this enormous disadvantage is to focus on the messengers – Greenwald and Snowden – in hopes everyone will forget about the revelations and their import. So we are told Glenn Greenwald is gay, he’s just a blogger for crissakes, and – worse! – he has opinions, and so can’t really qualify as a bona fide journalist in Foxton’s league. He’s a gay blogger with opinions who insists on reporting “real hard news stories.” Imagine! Well well, my good friend,

“That could be a serious problem in my opinion, because his own self-described status as an ‘activist’ and an ‘advocate’could cast doubt on the accuracy of that reporting.”

Why, the bloke doesn’t know fact from opinion: “He’s an unabashed polemicist.” Which is why, Foxton says,

“I often feel when reading a Greenwald article there are valid explanations for some of the things he’s reporting on, but that’s often hidden behind his apparent loathing of the West in general, and the US in particular. For him, no state surveillance can ever be justified – and almost anything he gets hold of can be turned to make America look like a vicious Police state.”

A gay blogger with opinions who loathes the West, and especially the US, is clearly someone not to be trusted: there’s got to be something he’s not telling us. He isn’t reporting all the perfectly good reasons why the US government should have access to the details of every phone call ever made, and the contents of my email, all of it done in the dark without public knowledge or debate. Clearly Greenwald loathes the West and its traditions ofthe rule of law, democratic discourse, and individual rights: why else would he be so opinionated about the efforts of Senor Foxton and his co-thinkers in the US government to traduce them?

You can’t really blame Foxton – who has apparently been assigned to run interference with Greenwald – for the paucity of his “arguments.” Our wise rulers have been caught with their pants down, this time, on both sides of the Atlantic. Character assassination is their only option: anything to change the subject.

The psychoanalytical school of character assassination is well represented in the barrage unleashed against the Snowden revelations: e.g. such amateurs as columnist Megan McArdle, who implies that Certain Well-Placed Friends in Washington assure her Snowden is toast:

“Last night I saw a few tweets from people I respect noting that in coming days, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden may not look as noble as we now think him.”

Yes, comrade, my friends in the KGB assure me this Snowden is a wife-beater, a child-molester, a fink and a fool – it’ll all come out in Pravda, you’ll see.

Like Foxton, McArdle confesses she finds Snowden “unlikable.” The title of her piece is “Whistleblowers Are Weird,” and the word weird is strewn throughout, like spice in an otherwise unpalatable stew. How can she say this about a person she has presumably never met? Well, because whistleblowers are weird by definition: we’re all “hard-wired for loyalty,” because “trust” is the glue that holds our society together. After all, what’s to prevent that guy down the hall from coming in to work and hacking poor Megan to death? Well, it’s “fear of the consequences,” but also due to a basic human tribal solidarity that is part of our psycho-biological makeup. “That’s why psychopaths are so dangerous,” she avers – and you can see where this is going. Snowden is clearly a psychopath, or, at the very least, a borderline case, according to Doctor McArdle. It goes downhill from there.

In Megan’s World, only a mentally deranged person would defy groupthink and do the right thing, or, at least, what they consider to be the right thing – with the clear implication that such people are not only unlikable, they are downright dangerous and belong in prison.

Enough with the amateurs – surely a word that defines McArdle’s oeuvre – and on to the professional smearers, of which New York Times columnistDavid Brooks is an exemplar. His theme is not unlike McArdle’s: Snowden’s sin is to have departed from the Hive, and fatally separated himself from the Hive Mind:

“From what we know so far, Edward Snowden appears to be the ultimate unmediated man. Though obviously terrifically bright, he could not successfully work his way through the institution of high school. Then he failed to navigate his way through community college.

“According to The Washington Post, he has not been a regular presence around his mother’s house for years. When a neighbor in Hawaii tried to introduce himself, Snowden cut him off and made it clear he wanted no neighborly relationships. He went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton and the C.I.A., but he has separated himself from them, too.”

Before I go any further, I have to say that this “high school dropout” meme has been the leitmotif of much of the coverage of Snowden: forget what he revealed, forget the high-paying career he forged, the man’s a high school dropout. And he went to one of those chintzy vocational community colleges, and couldn’t even get through that. Why, the guy’s a loser, a loner, a half-crazy “product of one of the more unfortunate trends of the age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.”

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Amidst all the justified outrage over the apparent targeting of Tea Party and conservative groups by the IRS, not to mention the Associated Press phone tapping brouhaha, an important point is being lost: this is nothing new. The Tea Partiers may be shocked – shocked! – that the Big Government they have spent the last few years complaining about really is a threat to our liberties, but the government targeting certain political groups wholly on account of their views is hardly breaking news. Just ask the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), which had set up an “Antiwar Committee” whose members have been spied on, indicted, and arrested for engaging in legal, constitutionally protected activities.

The FBI had sent a pair of infiltrators into the Antiwar Committee, and, on September 24, 2010, a veritable army of FBI agents launched simultaneous raids on antiwar activists in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Grand Rapids (Michigan). They seized computers, cell phones, passports, documents, family photos and even children’s artwork. Agents issued 14 subpoenas ordering the recipients to testify before a Chicago federal grand jury, and showed warrants indicating that the feds were searching for evidence related to “material support for terrorism.” A total of 23 people have since been handed subpoenas commanding them to appear before the grand jury in Chicago: all have refused. The FBI “investigation” – i.e. fishing expedition – is continuing.

At the time of these raids, we heard not a single protest from the “Tea Party” groups that are now loudly protesting their own victimization at the hands of the government: the leftists targeted by the FBI were just another group of “terrorists,” left to fight against their targeting and prosecution largely alone. Now that conservatives have been put in the crosshairs in a similar manner, however – singled out by a government agency for “special treatment” on account of their politics – their sympathizers in Congress are making a big stink about it and the headlines are alight with their outrage.

The Tea Partiers’ problem is that their protests come far too late – because the legal and political precedents targeting dissident groups were established long ago, with the full complicity and even enthusiastic support of most of those who call themselves “conservatives” these days. The “Patriot” Act – passed with conservative support – gives the government the “right” to not only spy on such groups, it also gives them the means to spy on anyone, for any reason, as well as the prosecutorial “tools” to put them away forever. Law enforcement agencies have set up “fusion centers” in order to collect information on American citizens who might be considered a “threat.” A recent report on “right-wing extremism” issued by the Department of Homeland Security” listed groups local law enforcement should keep tabs on, including members of the Libertarian and Constitution parties, as well as Ron Paul supporters. Efforts by the FBI and local police to infiltrate and set up members of the “Occupy” movement have been widespread.

Perhaps the Tea Partiers are unfamiliar with the long history of government repression of marginalized ideological groupings: during the 1960s, the FBI’s “Cointelpro” program targeted left-wing and black nationalist groups, sending in infiltrators, organizing disruption, and setting up prominent activists for “legal” repression.

As long as the subjects of official repression were almost exclusively confined to the left side of the political spectrum – theBlack Panthers, the Communists, etc. – the Tea Party types could not have cared less. After all, these are “anti-American” extremists and the Tea Partiers were happy to join in with the general cry of “Off with their heads!” Now that the shoe is on the other foot, however, they are screaming bloody murder.

The same sort of hypocrisy occurs on what passes for the “left” these days. The response of liberal pundits to the revelation that the IRS has been targeting conservative groups for “special” treatment has brought out their authoritarian streak: these groupsshould be subject to special scrutiny, says Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzick, because they’re engaged in “chicanery.” Go and read the comments to this article in the Huffington Post about the IRS scandal: they’re all cheering on the IRS! Imagine if this had happened during the Bush II era, and the IRS was caught targeting liberal groups – we’d never hear the end of it from the Huffpo types and the liberal media.

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When John McCain slipped into Syria the other day to meet with Islamist rebels, Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted “best wishes” to his fellow warmonger and claimed “dibs on his office if he doesn’t come back.” Leave it to Sen. Graham, who has been agitating along with McCain for the US to send weapons to the rebels, to joke about the untrustworthiness of the very people he wants to arm. But the rebels’ savagery is no joke: we are, after all, talking about people who eat the lungs of their enemies.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) had it kind of right when he admonished the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after it voted for a bill that would arm Syria’s Islamist insurgents:

“This is an important moment. You will be funding, today, the allies of al Qaeda. It’s an irony you cannot overcome.”

And yet irony doesn’t quite cover it: insanity is more like it. Here is a man who is the Republican party’s voice when it comes to foreign policy, a role he has appropriated due to his intimacy with those who book the Sunday talk shows, and yet when it comes to America’s relationship with the rest of the world his utter and complete ignorance is appalling.

He told us the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be “fairly easy.” He pontificated that the anthrax attacks were delivered by the Iraqis. His preferred policy for Afghanistan: we should “muddle through,” rather than withdraw. When the North Koreans started acting out, he averred we ought to threaten them with “extinction.” And when Russia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia got into an armed conflict over the breakaway province of South Ossetia, McCain announced “Today, We Are All Georgians” and demanded we go to war with Moscow. He thinks Iran is training Al Qaeda: he also thinks Iraq shares a border with Pakistan.

In short, McCain doesn’t know s%^*t about foreign policy: he has been wrong, wrong, wrong about absolutely everything. So it isn’t merely ironic that he is leading the charge in demanding we intervene in Syria – it’s downright crazy.

What’s puzzling is why anyone is listening to him. And his fellow Senators are certainly paying attention: an overwhelmingbipartisan vote of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved the McCain-Menendez bill authorizing aid to the rebels (there were only three dissents).

Most of the other Senators weren’t that impressed with Sen. Paul’s argument: “I don’t think any member of this committee would vote for anything we thought was going to arm al Qaeda,” said Republican rising star Marco Rubio.

Isn’t that what they were saying in the days before our Libyan “allies” murdered the American ambassador to Libya?

“Al Qaeda, unfortunately, is well-armed,” added Menendez. “That is the present reality in Syria.”

Translation: What difference will a few more anti-tank guns make? Which ought to tell us why the New Jersey Democratic Senator isn’t exactly a candidate for a MacArthur “genius” grant.

So what did McCain do in Syria? The military backbone of the opposition is the al-Nusra Front, which has recently pledgedallegiance to al-Qaeda. Did McCain meet with their commanders – in spite of the fact that they have recently been added to the State Department’s list of officially-designated terrorist organizations? He didn’t say. What we do know about his trip is that he went and listened to their demands that we set up a no fly zone, send them guns and cash, and attack Hezbollah in Lebanon –yes, Lebanon. They want us to widen the war, and naturally Sen. McCain is for that, too. Has there ever been a war he didn’t want to escalate?

His trip was facilitated by the “Syrian Emergency Task Force,” a mysterious group set up by a former Senate staffer, Moustafa Mouaz, which sprang into existence fully-funded and which naturally doesn’t have to register as an agent of a foreign power – since the Foreign Agents Registration Act is only selectively enforced. Mouaz is a former aide to Senator Blanche Lincoln and Rep. Vic Synder, both liberal to centrist Democrats. Here he is cheering on al-Nusra – the official al-Qaeda franchise in Syria – on Twitter. (See also here and here.) The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the “educational” branch of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, lists him on their web site as one of their trusted “experts”: he recentlyaddressed a WINEP conference.

The Israel lobby’s involvement in all this is somewhat obscure, but WINEP has been on the scene providing quotes and rationales for US intervention, and now with the Israeli air strikes and all this talk of Hezbollah propping up a supposedly faltering Assad, it’s clear why: the Israelis want to use this opportunity to take out another of their enemies. They lured us into attacking Iraq, and now they are insisting we go after Iran – but as an appetizer, so to speak, they’re inviting us to first gobble up Syria before partaking of the main course.

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It’s seems counterintuitive, to say the least. Indeed, it seems quite mad. And yet we now have all the evidence we need to point to a de facto Israeli alliance with Al Qaeda. The bombing of Damascus suburbs by Israeli jets – purportedly in order to prevent the Syrians from supplying Hezbollah with long range missiles – at precisely the moment when the Syrian “rebels” aredemanding Western intervention on their behalf highlights one of the most bizarre alliances in history.

Bizarre, yes, but inexplicable? Not at all.

The Syrian government is claiming the Israelis “coordinated” their attack with the rebels, but this seems problematic – and is largely irrelevant. Yes, a rebel spokesman “blessed” the Israeli strike, but I rather doubt there’s ongoing communication between the rebel leadership and Tel Aviv. It’s simply not necessary: after all, their goals in the region are complementary, if not identical. TheSunni extremists who comprise Al Qaeda have been in the front lines in the battle against Bashar al-Assad, and are also bitterly hostile to the mullahs of Tehran, whom they consider heretics: Israel, for its part, has launched its own holy war against Iran for quite different reasons, and is eager to take out Assad: regardless of motives their goals do coincide. Both want chaos in Syria – the Israelis, in order to eliminate a longstanding thorn in their side, and the jihadists because they thrive in failed states, like Lebanon.

Why would the Israelis aid a “rebel” army made up almost exclusively of hardened jihadists who supposedly hate Israel and want to see its non-Arab inhabitants driven into the sea? For the same reason they initially nurtured Hamas – because they believe it serves their long range purposes. The reason the Israelis granted official legal status to the group that eventually morphed into one of the Jewish state’s most implacable enemies was simple: to divide the Palestinian resistance, and therefore weaken it. At the time, Fatah, the largest component of the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization, was the most effective opposition to the Israeli occupation. The Israelis thought aiding an Islamist competitor would achieve certain desired ends: the decline of the PLO’s influence, the alienation of Arab governments from the Palestinian cause, and the marginalization of that cause in Western eyes. All three goals have since been achieved.

The Israelis are assisting the Syrian jihadists for similar reasons: because it fits in rather neatly with their long-range goals. For a look at those goals, all you have to do is peruse a 1996 document prepared for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by leading neoconservatives, proposing a radical new Israeli “defense” strategy. Reading “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” is like reading a timeline of events in the Middle East for the past ten years. As I wrote in October of 2003, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War – a day when Israel bombed alleged “terrorist camps” in Syria:

“The paper, co-authored by Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg,David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser, portrayed Syria as the main enemy of Israel, but maintained the road to Damascus had to first pass through Baghdad:

“‘Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right – as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria’s regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq.’”

Well, we didn’t get the Hashemites – but Maliki will do. Or, rather, near complete chaos will suffice, as the religious civil war wracking the Muslim world takes another potential enemy out of contention. Now that Iraq lies bleeding by the wayside, King Bibi is speeding down that “Clean Break” highway, eager to turn two more regional rivals into roadkill.

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The queen of the Anglosphere is dead. In death, as in life, there is no middle ground where Maggie Thatcher is concerned: leftists dance in the streets, celebrating her demise, while conservatives mourn the passing of the “Iron Lady.” The irony is that she was never guilty of the alleged crimes attributed to her by the former, just as she never really earned the approbations of the latter.

British leftists are dancing a jig because they believe Thatcher introduced the politics of “austerity,” victimized the poor, and was a relentless reactionary to the end: the truth is that her timid and gradualistic approach to dismantling the British welfare state failed, and failed spectacularly, as Murray Rothbard pointed out at the time here, here, and here. The “Thatcher revolution” had the same success rate as the “Reagan revolution,” i.e. it never succeeded in rolling back the advancing role of the State in British society, only in slowing its galloping onset to a brisk trot. As British libertarian Sean Gabb points out, as Prime Minister she was a corporatist, rather than an advocate of free enterprise. Worse, from a libertarian point of view, she was a dedicated enemy of civil liberties whose depredations against traditional British respect for individual rights paved the way for the current Orwellian control freaks who have turned Merrie Olde England into Airstrip One.

My own take on the Thatcher Era, as they’re calling it now, comes at the Iron Lady from a somewhat different angle: her role as cheerleader for and hectoring advocate of America’s post-cold war bid for global hegemony. When George Herbert Walker Bush told her he was allowing a single Iraqi ship to violate the embargo in the run up to Gulf War I, she told him: “Remember, George, this is no time to go wobbly.”

When Bush II invaded Afghanistan and prepared the nation and the world for the conquest of Iraq, Lady Thatcher came out with some “Advice to a Superpower,” as her New York Times op ed piece was entitled. Citing Milton’s Areopagitica – “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her invincible locks” – she likened Islamism to the threat of “Bolshevism” and issued a call to arms: after 9/11, she averred, “America will never be the same again,” and “consequently, the world outside America should never be the same again.”

A bizarre statement, to be sure, because what it means is that America must be the measure of all things: if any harm comes to America, it must mean the world – the whole world outside our borders, presumably including Britain – must suffer. While this attitude of unmitigated narcissism was well nigh universal in the States, it was rarely said so explicitly: what’s odd is that it was given voice by a British Prime Minister. Yet not really all that odd, come to think of it: that’s been the role played by the British government ever since the end of World War II – actively lobbying for a more interventionist American foreign policy, and berating its former colony whenever Washington threatened to “go wobbly.” From Winston Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech to Maggie’s op ed exhortations, the Brits have taken it upon themselves to goad a “noble and puissant nation” to greater feats of world-saving. The British empire may be long dead and buried, but the Anglosphere, through its American extension, still carries the White Man’s Burden on its back.

As Britain sank into the quagmire of socialism, exhausted by war and socio-political anomie, Kipling’s heirs deposited the burden of empire onto the backs of their American cousins. Noting this passing of the torch, the libertarian polemicist Frank Chodorov, writing in 1947, characterized America as a “Byzantine Empire of the West“:

“Even now, while the British Empire is hardly laid away, the outlines of a new imperialistic picture are clearly discernible. In the West a lusty heir apparent is flexing his muscles, while the ponderous bear in the East is bellowing his ferocious lust. It looks like another Armageddon is coming down the line.”

However, as Chodorov pointed out, the Byzantines, issued from the loins of Rome, did not fare as well as their Western predecessors, either in terms of longevity or global expanse. As America walks the road taken by our British forebears, we are moving at an accelerated pace, burning fuel – resources, both economic and human – faster than Cecil Rhodes ever did. The British captured their empire over the course of centuries, while ours was bequeathed to us in one large windfall. This fatal legacy will be our undoing.

In the days before 9/11, it looked as if that “noble and puissant nation” might avoid the fate of all empires and start attending to its own business, but it was not to be: the terrorist attacks were a clarion call to those who pined for American “global leadership.” It was the perfect cover for reconstructing the cold war atmosphere of constant crisis and perpetual war, and conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic jumped at the chance. Thatcher explicitly likened the new enemy to the old one: Islamism, like “Bolshevism,” is an “armed doctrine,” the province of “fanatics” bent on destroying the Western Way of Life. Nothing less than “an extensive military commitment” will do as a response. And it wasn’t just Osama bin Laden and his boys who were to be targeted, according to Thatcher: the “rogue states” of Iran, Syria, and Libya may have been critical of Al-Qaeda, denouncing the 9/11 attacks when they occurred, but they still constituted a “menace” because they opposed “Western values” and “backed terrorism.” They, too, must feel American wrath. Oh, and don’t forget North Korea – “as mad as ever.”

As mad as the North Koreans may be, are they any crazier than our very own neocons, whose world-conquering agenda Thatcher applauded? Welaugh at Kim Jong Un, who unconvincingly threatens to bomb Austin, Texas, in response to provocative military exercises a few miles from the Demilitarized Zone: yet no one laughed when the neocons (and Maggie) told us we had to go after Saddam Hussein in response to 9/11.

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Recently by Justin Raimondo: The Militarization of American Life

The queen of the Anglosphere is dead. In death, as in life, there is no middle ground where Maggie Thatcher is concerned: leftists dance in the streets, celebrating her demise, while conservatives mourn the passing of the “Iron Lady.” The irony is that she was never guilty of the alleged crimes attributed to her by the former, just as she never really earned the approbations of the latter.

British leftists are dancing a jig because they believe Thatcher introduced the politics of “austerity,” victimized the poor, and was a relentless reactionary to the end: the truth is that her timid and gradualistic approach to dismantling the British welfare state failed, and failed spectacularly, as Murray Rothbard pointed out at the time here, here, and here. The “Thatcher revolution” had the same success rate as the “Reagan revolution,” i.e. it never succeeded in rolling back the advancing role of the State in British society, only in slowing its galloping onset to a brisk trot. As British libertarian Sean Gabb points out, as Prime Minister she was a corporatist, rather than an advocate of free enterprise. Worse, from a libertarian point of view, she was a dedicated enemy of civil liberties whose depredations against traditional British respect for individual rights paved the way for the current Orwellian control freaks who have turned Merrie Olde England into Airstrip One.

My own take on the Thatcher Era, as they’re calling it now, comes at the Iron Lady from a somewhat different angle: her role as cheerleader for and hectoring advocate of America’s post-cold war bid for global hegemony. When George Herbert Walker Bush told her he was allowing a single Iraqi ship to violate the embargo in the run up to Gulf War I, she told him: “Remember, George, this is no time to go wobbly.”

When Bush II invaded Afghanistan and prepared the nation and the world for the conquest of Iraq, Lady Thatcher came out with some “Advice to a Superpower,” as her New York Times op ed piece was entitled. Citing Milton’s Areopagitica — “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep and shaking her invincible locks” — she likened Islamism to the threat of “Bolshevism” and issued a call to arms: after 9/11, she averred, “America will never be the same again,” and “consequently, the world outside America should never be the same again.”

A bizarre statement, to be sure, because what it means is that America must be the measure of all things: if any harm comes to America, it must mean the world — the whole world outside our borders, presumably including Britain — must suffer. While this attitude of unmitigated narcissism was well nigh universal in the States, it was rarely said so explicitly: what’s odd is that it was given voice by a British Prime Minister. Yet not really all that odd, come to think of it: that’s been the role played by the British government ever since the end of World War II — actively lobbying for a more interventionist American foreign policy, and berating its former colony whenever Washington threatened to “go wobbly.” From Winston Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech to Maggie’s op ed exhortations, the Brits have taken it upon themselves to goad a “noble and puissant nation” to greater feats of world-saving. The British empire may be long dead and buried, but the Anglosphere, through its American extension, still carries the White Man’s Burden on its back.

As Britain sank into the quagmire of socialism, exhausted by war and socio-political anomie, Kipling’s heirs deposited the burden of empire onto the backs of their American cousins. Noting this passing of the torch, the libertarian polemicist Frank Chodorov, writing in 1947, characterized America as a “Byzantine Empire of the West“:

“Even now, while the British Empire is hardly laid away, the outlines of a new imperialistic picture are clearly discernible. In the West a lusty heir apparent is flexing his muscles, while the ponderous bear in the East is bellowing his ferocious lust. It looks like another Armageddon is coming down the line.”

However, as Chodorov pointed out, the Byzantines, issued from the loins of Rome, did not fare as well as their Western predecessors, either in terms of longevity or global expanse. As America walks the road taken by our British forebears, we are moving at an accelerated pace, burning fuel — resources, both economic and human — faster than Cecil Rhodes ever did. The British captured their empire over the course of centuries, while ours was bequeathed to us in one large windfall. This fatal legacy will be our undoing.

In the days before 9/11, it looked as if that “noble and puissant nation” might avoid the fate of all empires and start attending to its own business, but it was not to be: the terrorist attacks were a clarion call to those who pined for American “global leadership.” It was the perfect cover for reconstructing the cold war atmosphere of constant crisis and perpetual war, and conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic jumped at the chance. Thatcher explicitly likened the new enemy to the old one: Islamism, like “Bolshevism,” is an “armed doctrine,” the province of “fanatics” bent on destroying the Western Way of Life. Nothing less than “an extensive military commitment” will do as a response. And it wasn’t just Osama bin Laden and his boys who were to be targeted, according to Thatcher: the “rogue states” of Iran, Syria, and Libya may have been critical of Al-Qaeda, denouncing the 9/11 attacks when they occurred, but they still constituted a “menace” because they opposed “Western values” and “backed terrorism.” They, too, must feel American wrath. Oh, and don’t forget North Korea — “as mad as ever.”

As mad as the North Koreans may be, are they any crazier than our very own neocons, whose world-conquering agenda Thatcher applauded? We laugh at Kim Jong Un, who unconvincingly threatens to bomb Austin, Texas, in response to provocative military exercises a few miles from the Demilitarized Zone: yet no one laughed when the neocons (and Maggie) told us we had to go after Saddam Hussein in response to 9/11.

Read the rest of the article

Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

The Best of Justin Raimondo

As the American Empire transforms itself from a constitutional republic into a social democratic monstrosity – where everyone is “equal,” and no one is free – egalitarianism is the fuel that runs the engine of imperialism. A perfect example is the recent announcement that the US military is getting with the times and allowing women in combat. What’s pretty disheartening is that not even the woman’s-place-is-in-the-home Neanderthals of the “traditionalist” camp even bothered to oppose this: for them, a more efficient war machine is much more important than any attachment to such “archaic” ideas as the men do the fighting while the women wait at home.

This innovation was followed up pretty quickly by a new proposal: that as long as we allow gays in the military we ought to allow transsexuals in, too. After all, the usual objections to women in combat don’t apply to them: they have the genetic makeup of men, and the sexual equipment of women (or as close as surgical science can conjure) – so why not?

In America, everyone has the “equal right” to kill, torture, maim, and otherwise abuse those who dare defy the wishes of our wise and benevolent rulers. This is what happens when egalitarianism displaces liberty at the core of the American psyche.

Women, gays, transsexuals, and presumably dwarves afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome – all have an “equal right” to commitmass murder. Did the leftists who brought this Political Correctness down on our heads ever dream of the uses to which it would be put? And now that they’ve “grown up” and made their peace with the Empire, do they even care? Of course they don’t. All they care about is the great god Equality, on whose altar every value they every pretended to hold is being slaughtered.

It isn’t just them, however: militarism is a disease that spreads without effort, once it’s implanted in the body politic. It quite naturally infects the sciences, what with the diversion of scientific and technical talent that might have gone into productive civilian projects, and I’m not just talking about the hard sciences. Witness the co-opting of the “soft” science of anthropology by the same people who brought us the war in Afghanistan and the “COIN” strategy that was supposed to give us victory. These folks have created the so-called Human Terrain System, which seeks to utilize anthropology as a weapon in counterinsurgency warfare. Billions are being poured into “scientific research” on how best to subdue recalcitrant natives out in the colonies: when you’re talking about the military-industrial complex, it isn’t just Lockheed-Martin and Boeing.

The marriage of science and militarism is nothing new, but there are some resistors. As Inside Higher Education reports:

“The eminent University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences on Friday, citing his objections to its military partnerships and to its electing as a member Napoleon Chagnon, a long-controversial anthropologist who is back in the news thanks to the publication of his new book, Noble Savages.” [Hat tip: Jordan Bloom atThe American Conservative]

You don’t have to be an anthropologist to get in on the action: yes, you too can access via live webcast the April 3 Pentagon/NAS “workshop,” “New Directions in Assessing Individuals and Groups,”and hear the keynote address by Frederick Vollrath, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Readiness and Force Management. I’ll bet those anthropologists are making out like bandits!

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Recently by Justin Raimondo: The American Empire, RIP

As the American Empire transforms itself from a constitutional republic into a social democratic monstrosity — where everyone is "equal," and no one is free — egalitarianism is the fuel that runs the engine of imperialism. A perfect example is the recent announcement that the US military is getting with the times and allowing women in combat. What’s pretty disheartening is that not even the woman’s-place-is-in-the-home Neanderthals of the "traditionalist" camp even bothered to oppose this: for them, a more efficient war machine is much more important than any attachment to such "archaic" ideas as the men do the fighting while the women wait at home.

This innovation was followed up pretty quickly by a new proposal: that as long as we allow gays in the military we ought to allow transsexuals in, too. After all, the usual objections to women in combat don’t apply to them: they have the genetic makeup of men, and the sexual equipment of women (or as close as surgical science can conjure) — so why not?

In America, everyone has the "equal right" to kill, torture, maim, and otherwise abuse those who dare defy the wishes of our wise and benevolent rulers. This is what happens when egalitarianism displaces liberty at the core of the American psyche.

Women, gays, transsexuals, and presumably dwarves afflicted with Tourette’s Syndrome — all have an "equal right" to commit mass murder. Did the leftists who brought this Political Correctness down on our heads ever dream of the uses to which it would be put? And now that they’ve "grown up" and made their peace with the Empire, do they even care? Of course they don’t. All they care about is the great god Equality, on whose altar every value they every pretended to hold is being slaughtered.

It isn’t just them, however: militarism is a disease that spreads without effort, once it’s implanted in the body politic. It quite naturally infects the sciences, what with the diversion of scientific and technical talent that might have gone into productive civilian projects, and I’m not just talking about the hard sciences. Witness the co-opting of the "soft" science of anthropology by the same people who brought us the war in Afghanistan and the "COIN" strategy that was supposed to give us victory. These folks have created the so-called Human Terrain System, which seeks to utilize anthropology as a weapon in counterinsurgency warfare. Billions are being poured into "scientific research" on how best to subdue recalcitrant natives out in the colonies: when you’re talking about the military-industrial complex, it isn’t just Lockheed-Martin and Boeing.

The marriage of science and militarism is nothing new, but there are some resistors. As Inside Higher Education reports:

"The eminent University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins resigned from the National Academy of Sciences on Friday, citing his objections to its military partnerships and to its electing as a member Napoleon Chagnon, a long-controversial anthropologist who is back in the news thanks to the publication of his new book, Noble Savages." [Hat tip: Jordan Bloom at The American Conservative]

You don’t have to be an anthropologist to get in on the action: yes, you too can access via live webcast the April 3 Pentagon/NAS "workshop," "New Directions in Assessing Individuals and Groups,"and hear the keynote address by Frederick Vollrath, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Readiness and Force Management. I’ll bet those anthropologists are making out like bandits!

Read the rest of the article

Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

The Best of Justin Raimondo

Recently by Justin Raimondo: Oliver Stone's Untold History: A Twice-Told Tale

When will historians of the future date the beginning of the decline and fall of the American empire?

The question may seem presumptuous. The idea that the American Century is a relic of the past, and we are entering a "new world order" of divided rather than hegemonic power, is relatively new, and still controversial. There are those who insist it ain’t necessarily so, primarily neocons of the second mobilization such as Robert Kagan, who are quick to reassure all right-thinking patriotic Americans that we’re still Number One and warn against the fatal lure of committing "superpower suicide."

To the rest of us, however — that is, to everyone outside the neocons’ cultic universe — the signs of the Great American Contraction are everywhere, most noticeably in the incomes, productivity, and general economic well-being of ordinary Americans. Our own CIA — never a friend to the neocons, but that’s another story — avers this condition is the single greatest threat to our national security: not Iran, not terrorism, but the very real threat of national bankruptcy. Our national debt is over 100 percent of GDP.

I would make the case, however, that the seeds of American decline were planted much earlier, during the cold war era. And if I had to pick a specific date that marked the beginning of the end, I would settle on January 31, 1968 — the day the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces began the Tet offensive, which was militarily a setback for them, but politically disastrous for the administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Tet was costly for the Viet-Cong and North Vietnamese forces, but their decision to launch an all-sided assault on South Vietnam’s cities wasn’t entirely calculated for its military effect. As General Giap put it years later: "For us, you know, there is no such thing as a single strategy. Ours is always a synthesis, simultaneously military, political and diplomatic — which is why quite clearly, the Tet offensive had multiple objectives."

Militarily, their success was uneven and hardly decisive: they did not take any major cities, and those villages they took they couldn’t hold on to. On the diplomatic and political front, however, they came out the clear victors: their goals were to drive a wedge between the South Vietnamese government and Washington, on the one hand, and between Washington and the American people on the other. Their bold attacks on Saigon itself, which underscored the weakness of our South Vietnamese sock puppets, achieved the former, while television footage of American soldiers rushing to stop an enemy that seemed to be everywhere achieved the latter. Public support for the war plummeted. Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of US forces in Vietnam, demanded more troops: his request was denied when the White House concluded the war was unwinnable. A few months later, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.

But of course the war wasn’t unwinnable, as conservatives at the time protested: we could have sent the 200,000 troops Westmoreland requested, and initiated a Vietnamese "surge" which might have pushed the Viet Cong back. Indeed, we could have sent a million men into that carnage, and the reason we didn’t was because it was no longer politically possible. The country had turned against the war and not even a stream of scare-mongering red-baiting invective coming from the neoconservatives of the day could turn the tide.

Today, the neocons bitterly denounce what they call the "Vietnam Syndrome," bemoaning its deleterious effect on their various schemes for world conquest, and — from their perspective — they are right to do so. Because if you worship at the altar of the war god, this Syndrome is a dangerous heresy: it means that the default of American foreign policy is caution rather than rollicking recklessness, prudence rather than mindless belligerence, realism rather than utopianism armed.

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Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

The Best of Justin Raimondo

Recently by Justin Raimondo: Obama as Wilson: Playing the Historical Analogy Game

I wanted to like Oliver Stone's new documentary, The Untold History of the United States, really I did. After all, here is the maker of films positing a conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy and exposing the criminal history of the Vietnam war promising to unveil the suppressed truth about America's role in the world. With the Usual Suspects attacking Stone before the first part of this Showtime series was ever released, I was eagerly looking forward to a scathing critique of the American empire's long bloody rampage through the history of modern times.

I should have known better.

Stone, is turns out, has been engaged in some false advertising. For what he has produced, at least so far, might be better entitled u201CA Twice-Told Taleu201D – because the narrative he presents was told first by official Soviet u201Chistoriansu201D and their fellow-travelers in this country, albeit without the hi-tech enhancements and prominent platform available to Stone. And if you think this is just cheap red-baiting, then go on over to Digby's site and watch chapter one.

Our story starts out with the development of the atomic bomb, and what Stone regards as the unlikely engagement of Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant scientist and fellow-traveling leftist, with the high mucka-mucks of the Pentagon. The US government, it seems, paid little attention to the military potential of nuclear research until Albert Einstein wrote a letter to FDR lobbying for a US government crash program to weaponize the atom.

Curiously, the decision to actually drop the bomb is not mentioned – perhaps he's leaving that for the second part – and the narrative soon veers off into the history of the 1930s and the run-up to World War II. It is here that Stone's embarrassing pro-Soviet viewpoint comes across like a very bad smell.

What Stone fails to point out is that Oppenheimer, who belonged – as Stone notes – to u201Cevery Communist front group on the West Coast,u201D had ideological reasons for letting the atomic genie out of its bottle. American Communists opposed US entry into World War II right up until the announcement of the Hitler-Stalin Pact – and then turned on a dime, becoming the most militantly vociferous advocates of entering the war. They led the effort to squelch labor strikes in wartime, and called for jailing the hated u201Cisolationists,u201D anti-war activists who were smeared by the Communists and the fellow-traveling media as Nazi u201Cfifth columnists.u201D

Stone cites Oppenheimer's evocation of the devilish Hindu goddess Kali, deity of destruction and war, as the great scientist contemplates the awesome power he's unleashed on the world: it never occurs to him that Oppenheimer doubtless considered Kali to be, in this instance, on the side of the angels, i.e. the Kremlin, which was at that moment fighting for its life against the German onslaught.

According to Stone, the problem with US entry into World War II is that it didn't happen soon enough. We should have gone to war with Germany and Italy in defense of the Spanish u201CRepublic,u201D when the Communists toppled the Spanish monarchy and established a nascent Soviet satellite on the Iberian peninsula. The Spanish commies, we are told, had incurred the wrath of Corporate America by their u201Cprogressive policiesu201D and u201Ctight regulation of businessu201D – a vapid euphemism for the forced collectivization of all business, the wholesale murder of Catholic priests and nuns, and a reign of Red Terror that rivaled that being carried out in Stone's beloved Soviet Union.

The myth of Munich and Western u201Cappeasementu201D of Hitler is uncritically reiterated: Stone bewails the fact that the Western powers, particularly France, did nothing when Hitler's army marched into the Rhineland. It never occurs to him to ask: why was the Rhineland, overwhelmingly German, subjected to a de facto occupation in the first place? The Treaty of Versailles, which laid the groundwork for German revanchism, does not get even a single mention. Stone, the supposed iconoclast, isn't about to take on the myth of German war guilt. In its revision of the conventional historical wisdom, the left-wing of the War Party draws the line when it comes to the two world wars.

The two heroes of this chapter in Stone's epic are, in hagiographic order, Josef Stalin and FDR: the latter earns high praise not only for the New Deal but also because he waged a clandestine war well before Pearl Harbor, and the former is hailed as the indomitable leader of a heroic people's war against fascism, who may have had some flaws – such as a bloodthirsty ruthlessness – although, to be sure, they were flaws that ultimately enabled him to lead his nation to victory.

As Stone would have it, the Soviet Union defeated the Nazis and won World War II for the Allies almost single-handedly: he blandly describes the u201Crelocationu201D of tens of millions of Soviet citizens as a necessary measure to preserve Russian industry, and his paean to the Kremlin's forced industrialization program, which enslaved the entire population of the USSR still under the Red Army's boot, sounds like something out of the Daily Worker, circa 1935. He does mention the Lend-Lease program, which, he notes with some rancor, was passed by a u201Creluctantu201D Congress: it was this – America's industrial might, untouched by the war – and not the Stakhanovite fantasies of Soviet propagandists, that enabled the Russians to hold out against the German onslaught.

While Stone shows footage of Americans saying they didn't want to get dragged into another European war, this viewpoint is implicitly attributed to nothing more substantial than a stubborn u201Cisolationismu201D – and, rather more explicitly, vicious hostility to the Soviet Union. Stone cites, with clear disapproval, none other than Harry Truman wishing aloud that the Nazis and Soviets would kill each other off. I didn't know Truman ever said that, but such sentiment was even more clearly expressed by such conservative opponents of FDR as Col. Robert R. McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, and other conservative anti-interventionists. They are left out of this phony Untold History, along with the story of the biggest and most militant antiwar movement in American history, the America First Committee, which opposed FDR's drive to war right up until Pearl Harbor. This history remains largely untold and unknown (although I've made a modest effort to tell it) – and, if the historical reality is ever uncovered and popularized, it likely won't be due to the efforts of Stone and similar pro-Soviet u201Crevisionists.u201D

Stone chose to begin his narrative with the run-up to World War II, and this allows him to side-step the real genesis of that horrific conflict: World War I, the Versailles Treaty, and the ruinous Allied and American role in ensuring the rise of a revanchist Germany. For the Great Anti-Fascist Struggle of Stone's sectarian imagination was really the second act of Woodrow Wilson's war to u201Cmake the world safe for democracy.u201D An examination of that seminal tragedy would have required a good look at Wilson, one of the plaster saints of American u201Cprogressivism,u201D and that would have meant a great deal more evasion of unpleasant historical facts than even Stone is capable of.

Yet he doesn't do a bad job of evasion in the present work: in Oliver Stone's vision of America during World War II, tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans and others were never rounded up and thrown into concentration camps. Of this historic crime, there is nary a word. However, he does mention, surprisingly, that the Americans knew a Japanese attack was coming, although, according to him, they expected it in the Philippines rather than Hawaii. I guess the work of Robert Stinnett, and others, who have shown the Americans had deciphered the Japanese secret code and successfully intercepted their war plans, isn't available at the Hollywood public library.

Stone's Untold History is emblematic of the problem with much of the ostensibly anti-interventionist left in America and around the world: the second world war is their big blind spot. Because they are burdened with upholding the mythology of the u201Cgood war,u201D they break ranks and run whenever the War Party holds up another reincarnation of Hitler and demands his righteous destruction. The neocons, for whom it is always 1939, know how to appeal to the left: just conjure the ghost of Munich, and with it the screaming lunacy of the failed painter from Vienna, and you will have the liberals, as well as the reflexively militarist conservatives, in the palm of your hand.

This is why limousine liberals of Stone's sort have deserted the antiwar movement in droves: just as Roosevelt's war was the u201Cgood war,u201D so Obama's wars are considered equally righteous. Obama was elected, with their enthusiastic support, on a promise to fight the Afghan war – the u201Cgood waru201D – and be done with Bush's half-measures. The Libyan intervention was treated by the liberal media as yet another u201Cgood war,u201D the 21st century equivalent of the Spanish Civil War recalled by Stone with such partisan passion. And the same crowd is even now agitating for direct US military support to the Syrian u201Crevolutionaries,u201D whose terrorist allies and leaders are apparently today's version of the heroic Spanish Republicans. Gadhafi and Assad are the new Hitlers, albeit of the tinpot variety, whose overthrow is to be followed by yet another u201Cgoodu201D war against the Iranian Hitler.

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Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

The Best of Justin Raimondo

Recently by Justin Raimondo: A Covert Affair: Petraeus Caught in the Honeypot?

A drone war that takes out old ladies in the name of “fighting terrorism” – a “regime change” campaign that plays with the fate of millions – a President supposedly committed to “transparency” who has topped the unprecedented secrecy and authoritarianism of his predecessor – a foreign policy that subsidizes and blindly supports a racist apartheid-style ally who brazenly spies on us, periodically invades its neighbors, and then demands more subsidies – and a brain-dead “left” that cheers it all as “progressive.”

This is America in the year 2012, Anno Domini. Sickening, isn’t it?

A more pertinent question, however, is how did we come to this pass? In as few words as possible: the Obama cult.

With the President’s near-landslide victory, and the triumphalist mood of the progressive elements of his coalition, the old-fashioned liberal attachment to a foreign policy of peace has been thrown overboard, while liberal Democrats exult in projecting American military power abroad.

Such is the power of the Obama cult, which mystifies its Maximum Leader as some kind of “transformational” figure in American politics, the grandiosity of which has no precedent except in the old-style Stalinist regimes of the former USSR and Eastern Europe. Indeed, the paeans of the President’s most fervent supporters bear an uncanny – and unseemly – resemblance to the rhetorical style of North Korean regime propagandists, who regularly infuse their praise of the ruler with historical and even mystical allusions.

Ignore the media hype likening Barack Obama to Abraham Lincoln, a propaganda campaign that includes a major motion picture and countless Lincolnian allusions in the “mainstream” media: the only resemblance is height, fealty to big corporate interests, and a certain saturnine look. In our facile society, where politics and celebrity are virtually indistinguishable, this is enough to conjure a typically vapid historical analogy.

Of course, the Lincoln meme was preceded, you’ll recall, by a similarly ridiculous identification with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is useless to remind these people that Lincoln and Roosevelt had to deal, respectively, with a civil war and a great depression coupled with a world war: fawning pundits rarely deal in facts.

When will progressives wake up and smell the Wilsonian coffee?

If President Obama goes down in history as the incarnation of one of his distinguished predecessors, it will likely turn out to be the 28th president of these United States, whose name has become a byword for preening self-righteous interventionism on a global scale. I refer, of course, to Thomas Woodrow Wilson, a towering icon of “progressive” liberalism who dragged us into a war that was the downfall of European civilization.

There is already a suspicion of this in some progressive circles. Stephen Walt, writing on his Foreign Policy blog, complains the ascension of Susan Rice to lord it over Foggy Bottom will lead to a lack of “diversity” within our foreign policy councils. To the average progressive, who thinks almost exclusively in terms of identity politics, this seems like a strangely inverted way of looking at things. That Walt means intellectual diversity is beyond their comprehension.

Walt is nervous because most of the “realists” have left: he fears the Obama administration is “narrowing” its policy horizons in its second term. He also makes what I consider an ancillary argument: that, unlike Hillary Clinton, Rice lacks an “independent power base,” which is supposedly the main reason this “narrowing” is likely to occur. The problem, avers Walt, is Rice will tell the President what he wants to hear – but what is that, exactly? Walt never tells us, perhaps because he is unclear on the matter.

In any case, Walt misconstrues Rice as a mere campaign apparatchik, ignores her ties to the Clinton administration, and never mentions her history as a protg of Madeleine Albright. Furthermore, he is silent on her prominent role in the Libyan intervention as one of the Three Horsewomen of the Humanitarian Apocalypse: it was Rice, along with Clinton and Samantha Power, who nagged the President to let loose the dogs of war. None of this is particularly surprising: after all, Rice rose up through the ranks of the foreign policy establishment as a star student of what Walter Russell Meade characterizes as the Wilsonian school of American foreign policy, and it is Meade who, in noting Walt’s discomfort, actually names what Walt spends an entire blog post evading:

“As the President and his staff gear up for a second term, American foreign policy seems to be making a shift. The Obama administration is moving from a realist, in some ways Jeffersonian approach to foreign policy – limiting commitments, looking for compromise solutions with opponents regardless of ideology – to something more Wilsonian: giving democracy promotion and human rights a higher profile in the national security portfolio.”

Whatever “Jeffersonian” tendencies once existed in this administration have long since been expunged or driven underground. While the President had some use for them when extricating himself from his predecessor’s follies, in Iraq and Afghanistan, that usefulness has since expired. By the way, the Afghan issue is by no means settled, especially with the news that the occupation will continue well after 2014.

Libya was the turning point, and from here on in the liberal internationalists are in charge. Their “multicultural” approach will broaden the scope of US military and political intervention, extending the Empire into Africa and escalating the drive to achieve American hegemony in the Gulf. The “Pacific pivot” is a key component of this hegemonic military and diplomatic strategy, a risky and provocative course that requires the reinvention of Japanese militarism and – shades of the Vietnam era! – a revived Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) as an anti-Chinese bulwark in the South Pacific.

This time, however, the focus has moved north – and the stakes are much higher. Nuclear-armed and dangerously unstable North Korea is the powder-keg of East Asia, just as the Balkans played that fateful role in the run up to World War I.

The Chinese leadership no doubt is looking on with growing nervousness as the US executes its “Pacific pivot” and American politicians in both parties take turns bashing China as the all-purpose international villain and number one cause of American decline. Riven by internal tensions and an increasingly restive population, China is surrounded on all sides by claimants to its historic borders. The Japanese in the north, the Philippines to the west, and the Vietnamese in the South, all with conflicting claims to the South China Sea, threatening Beijing with encirclement. The flashpoint of these seething regional tensions is North Korea, the wild card in Washington’s emerging cold war with Beijing.

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Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

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Recently by Justin Raimondo: Romney's Neocons

The outing of Gen. David Petraeus as an adulterer, and his subsequent resignation as CIA Director, was carried out by an unknown FBI u201Cwhistlebloweru201D who leaked the facts of the FBI investigation into the General's private life to Rep. Eric Cantor. The New York Times reports:

u201CEric Cantor, the House majority leader, said Saturday an F.B.I. employee whom his staff described as a whistle-blower told him about Mr. Petraeus's affair and a possible security breach in late October, which was after the investigation had begun.

u201C'I was contacted by an F.B.I. employee concerned that sensitive, classified information may have been compromised and made certain Director Mueller was aware of these serious allegations and the potential risk to our national security,' Mr. Cantor said in a statement.

u201CMr. Cantor talked to the person after being told by Representative Dave Reichert, Republican of Washington, that a whistle-blower wanted to speak to someone in the Congressional leadership about a national security concern. On Oct. 31, his chief of staff, Steve Stombres, called the F.B.I. to tell them about the call.u201D

The FBI probe apparently started in late spring, when several people associated with Petraeus – not just the one woman, as has been reported elsewhere – received harassing emails. The emails were traced to 40-year-old Paula Broadwell, national security analyst, military intelligence veteran, and author of a biography of Petraeus. Authorities believed his email account may have been hacked, and this led to a remarkable irony: the CIA chief's emails were monitored, without his knowledge, whereupon it was discovered Broadwell may have either had access to his account or tried to obtain access. In any case, in the course of their spying, FBI monitors discovered a large volume of emails to and from Broadwell. Looking for evidence of a security breach, all they found was evidence of a u201Chuman drama,u201D as one anonymous FBI official put it: an illicit affair between Petraeus and Broadwell.

Petraeus was only informed of the investigation on October 25 or 26. So here we have the astonishing fact of the CIA's head honcho being spied on for a period of months by our own law enforcement officials.

Or maybe it wasn't a simple case of complaints about u201Charassingu201D or threatening emails. Fox News avers:

u201CThe FBI had been investigating an unrelated and much broader case before stumbling on the affair. Fox News has learned that during the course of this investigation, the name of biographer Paula Broadwell came up. The FBI followed that lead and in doing so, uncovered his affair with her.u201D

What was this u201Cmuch broader caseu201D? Almost certainly it was a counterintelligence investigation, i.e. a pushback against efforts by some foreign entity to penetrate or otherwise compromise US secrets. We can only guess at the specifics, however we do know that in the course of that investigation Broadwell's name u201Ccame up.u201D

On the surface, at least, Broadwell is not the sort of person whose name would come up in a counterintelligence investigation: a West Point graduate, where she earned degrees in political geography and systems engineering, she seems like the veritable embodiment of All-American red-white-and-blue super-patriotism. This biographical account on her high school website says

u201CPaula pursued a military intelligence career abroad, serving in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. During her service, especially after 9-11, Paula’s intensity was directed toward the war against terror; her contributions and efforts to thwart terrorism have been commended by the U.S. Army and by Europe’s Special Operations Forces Commanding General. In this arena, she has planned counter-terrorism initiatives presented to NATO and worked on transnational counter-terrorism issues with foreign and domestic agencies, U.S. Special Forces, and the FBI.u201D

Graduate studies at the University of Denver in Middle East studies enabled her to travel to u201CJordan and Israel,u201D and make a swing through the Persian Gulf and Europe where she spoke at various conferences. This triumphal tour was capped by a Harvard fellowship u201Cfor study in Syria and Iran.u201D

While Broadwell's current academic affiliation is with Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, her previous post was deputy director of the Jebsen Center for Counter-Terrorism Studies at Tufts University's Fletcher School. The Center, according to its self-description, u201Cdistinguishes itself by a philosophy that maintains counter-terrorism should be predictive, preventive and preemptive, with the latter being a last resort.u201D Founded in 2005, the Jebsen Center was made possible by the generous donation of one Jan Henrik Jebsen, heir to the Norwegian shipping fortune, who gave $1.3 million to set it up. Jebsen, a former investment banker with Lazard Freres, is the principal of Gamma Applied Visions Group, an international octopus with tentacles all over the place: part arms dealer and weapons developer, part u201Cgreenu201D energy company. As one might expect from someone who has so much of his multi-billion dollar fortune invested in making and selling armaments, Jebsen is on the board of directors of the distinctly warlike Hudson Institute, where Scooter Libby, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, and practically every neocon you've ever heard of have found refuge.

While, in true neocon fashion, Hudson scholars conjure a wide diversity of imminent u201Cthreatsu201D to the US, including China and Russia, their main focus is the threat of Islamist radicalism, especially as it impacts Israel. Indeed, Hudson operates inside Israel, where it pushes the far-rightist views of the most extreme elements in Israeli society: the settler movement, and the faction of Likud angling for war with Iran. It has also focused its attention on purging universities of academics who don't toe the right-wing ultra-nationalist Likudnik line.

More recently, former Hudson president and u201Ctrustee emeritusu201D Max Singer – who has since moved to Israel, where, as a u201Cpublic policy consultantu201D at Bar Ilan University, he spends his time inciting violence against Palestinians – is on a mission to protect Israel from the alleged threat posed by the President of the United States.

The Jebsen Center has been equally useful to the neocons. Richard H. Schultz, head of Tufts' International Studies program (of which the Center is a part) was a signatory to the Project for a New American Century's u201Copen letteru201D to President Bush urging war with Iraq and a number of other Middle Eastern actors in the wake of 9/11. Here he is recommending the importation of Israeli u201Canti-terroristu201D techniques to pacify the restless natives of Iraq. Here is another Jebsen Center scholar describing alleged terrorist actions engaged in by Iran worldwide. And then there's the testimony of this guy:

u201CThe idea of overthrowing the Iranian government through covert but peaceful means is not original. The project was first brought to my attention in August 2006 when I worked as an intern research assistant at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Diplomacy’s Jebsen Center for Counter-terrorism. I worked for the then director of the center Brigadier General Russell Howard (Ret.) on a project titled Bringing Down Iran Without Firing A Shot. I wasn’t very experienced in the world of covert operations in the field or in the academic realm but I was very interested in becoming involved in it. General Howard, on the other hand, was not only a counter-terrorism strategist but a veteran Special Forces officer, an academic, and a tutor. It was General Howard who introduced me to the idea of targeting factors specific to Iran in order to adapt to the country’s specific needs. He had six factors which he believed were important: The military use of ongoing insurgencies within Iran, political strife, economic strife, declining oil revenues, demographics, and deteriorating infrastructure.u201D

Interestingly, in November of 2006, during her tenure at the Jebsen Center, Broadwell led a group of Fletcher School students on a trip to New York City to meet with then Iranian UN representative Javad Zarif. Both are alumni of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver.

All this establishes a context that goes far beyond the titillating details of the alleged affair between Petraeus and Broadwell – and this is no doubt what set alarm bells ringing in the intelligence community when it was revealed. Is there really any need to point out the uses of the u201Choneypotu201D in intelligence-gathering and other covert activities regularly engaged in by spooks of all nations? From Mata Hari to the Mossad agent who lured Israeli nuclear scientist Mordecahi Vanunu, sex is a time-honored weapon in the war of spy-vs-spy. A secret affair with the CIA Director is the equivalent of the Honeypot Olympics, and we have to ask: was the remarkably fit Ms. Broadwell a lure? If so, she’s won a Gold Medal.

Broadwell's actions – sending emails that were bound to be traced back to her – appear to make little sense on the surface. But if the goal of luring a 60-year-old geezer into an affair with a much younger woman was to expose him, and get him fired, then surely her antics succeeded in accomplishing that goal.

So who would have an interest in getting rid of Petraeus? Here’s where the Cantor connection comes in. The tip by an anonymous u201CFBI employeeu201D that wound up in Cantor's office two weeks ago came through Rep. David Reichert, Republican of Washington state, who has a friend who knows the whistleblower. Cantor then spoke to the whistleblower directly, who put him in touch with FBI Director Mueller.

Cantor is a great friend of Israel, and Petraeus – not so much. The General was attacked, as you'll recall, by partisans of the Lobby, including Abe Foxman, when he delivered testimony before Congress citing Israel as a strategic liability in the Middle East. As the executor of the new Obamaite policy of sidling up to Islamists, not only in Libya but also in Syria and Egypt, Petraeus was no doubt seen by the Israelis as an enemy to be neutralized.

Broadwell's affiliation with the Jebsen Center, and the Center's connection to the neoconservative network, sets the scene: a young, attractive woman with impeccable national security credentials throws herself at Petraeus, and he takes the bait. Whether she's been recruited by a foreign intelligence agency at this point or not is irrelevant: he's already put himself in a vulnerable position, and there are any number of actors on the international stage more than willing to press their advantage.

Will we ever know the full story? At this point, the story is so hot that it may burn the cover story – u201Cit's all about sexu201D – right off the wrapper. Because there's more – a lot more – here than meets the eye. When Cantor pledged to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he and his fellow Republicans u201Cwill serve as a check on the administrationu201D in regard to the President's policy toward Israel, he was clearly aligning himself with a foreign leader against American interests as perceived by the White House. But would he really go this far – deliberately taking down a key figure, one beloved by Republicans, in order to keep his promise to Netanyahu?

Stay tuned to this space, because this story is moving fast….

Update: This morning [11/12/12] the New York Times reports:

u201CF.B.I. agents interviewed Ms. Broadwell for the first time the week of Oct. 21, and she acknowledged the affair, a government official briefed on the matter said. She also voluntarily gave the agency her computer. In a search, the agents discovered several classified documents, which raised the additional question of whether Mr. Petraeus had given them to her. She said that he had not. Agents interviewed Mr. Petraeus the following week. He also admitted to the affair but said he had not given any classified documents to her. The agents then interviewed Ms. Broadwell again on Friday, Nov. 2, the official said.u201D

Bingo!

Reprinted from Antiwar.com with permission.

Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

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Recently by Justin Raimondo: The Fall Guy

Dov Zakheim, Mitt Romney’s top foreign policy advisor, wants us to know the neocons aren’t in charge of RomneyWorld:

“One of the favorite canards that Obama activists and surrogates hurl at Mitt Romney is that he is surrounded by a group of wild-eyed George W. Bush neo-cons who cannot wait to bomb Iran and bring America into yet another Middle Eastern conflict….”

But these canard-disseminators “have it all wrong,” because:

“None of the staunchest ‘architects and advocates’ of the Iraq war, I repeat, none, is advising Governor Romney. Not Donald Rumsfeld. Not Dick Cheney. Not Paul Wolfowitz. Not Doug Feith. And none of their camp followers. None.”

Zakheim modestly leaves out … himself. Yet he has long been a key link in the chain that has bound Republican policymakers to that noxious little sect known as the neoconservatives.

Alongside the very neocons he denies have any influence in RomneyWorld, Zakheim joined the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, a neocon front group organized in 1990 to support the first Gulf war: in 1998, CPSG issued a new clarion call for an invasion of Iraq addressed to President Bill, with the Usual Suspects (including Zakheim) as co-signers. Zakheim’s career as an up-and-comer in neoconservative precincts continued with the formation of the Project for a New American Century — Bill Kristol’s interventionist pressure group — on whose behalf he signed a series of open letters calling for war with Iraq. As recently as February, Zakheim continued his letter-signing spree, demanding — along with dozens of fellow neocon “camp followers” — that the President intervene in a vague-but-more-muscular fashion in Syria. In 2000, he co-authored a PNAC position paper on defense spending which called for a huge increase on the grounds that “the best defense is a good offense.” He shared credit for this proposal with Wolfowitz, Cohen, John Bolton, and Rumsfeld advisors Devon Cross and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. As Undersecretary of State and Pentagon comptroller during the Bush administration — during which time the Pentagon lost track of $1 trillion — he was a key cog in a foreign policy shop dominated by his fellow neocons.

Aside from that, however, there are plenty of neocon “camp followers” — i.e. fellow travelers, as we McCarthyites used to say – serving the Romneyite cause. I won’t bother compiling a comprehensive list, since others have taken up that task. As Ari Berman noted in The Nation way back in May:

“Romney’s team is notable for including Bush aides tarnished by the Iraq fiasco: Robert Joseph, the National Security Council official who inserted the infamous ‘sixteen words’ in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union message claiming that Iraq had tried to buy enriched uranium from Niger; Dan Senor, former spokesman for the hapless Coalition Provisional Authority under Paul Bremer in Iraq; and Eric Edelman, a top official at the Pentagon under Bush.”

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Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

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Recently by Justin Raimondo: Debate Summary: Israel,Israel,Israel,Israel

The setup and railroading of Mansoor Arbabsiar, a mentally ill Iranian emigrant, in the alleged u201Cterror plotu201D to kill the Saudi ambassador was completed last week when he entered a guilty plea. The 57-year-old Iranian-American, a naturalized citizen, was charged with plotting to bomb the Caf Milano, in Washington DC, a favorite haunt of diplomats and other bigwigs. Faced with a possible life sentence, Arbabsiar, a former used car salesman, made his last deal: a 25-year sentence in return for a propaganda victory for the Israel lobby.

The facts of this case will never be known: no trial means no evidence will be presented purportedly u201Cprovingu201D his guilt. What we do know is that in the spring of 2011 – just as the war propaganda targeting Iran was reaching a fever pitch – Arbabsiar met with a DEA drug informant posing as a member of a Mexican drug cartel.

Of course, it was just a u201Ccoincidenceu201D that he chose this particular person as his contact – or was it? According to ABC News, the delusional Arbabsiar told a court appointed psychiatrist:

u201C'I have had so many girls. So many that you couldn’t count them. I never had one girl more than once…. Girls love money and cars. That was my weakness.'

u201CIt was, in fact, one of these women who put Arbabsiar in touch with a man in May 2011 who said he was a member of the Mexican drug gang Los Zetas. Arbabsiar went on to ask this cartel associate – actually a Drug Enforcement Agency informant – to kill the ambassador of Saudi Arabia in Washington D.C. using explosives.u201D

Oh please – if that doesn't smell like a set-up, then your nose is on backwards. Here is an informant, who has had drug charges dropped in return for his cooperation, and who is being paid to provide u201Cintelligenceu201D to law enforcement, clearly entrapping Arbabsiar.

The complaint, by the way, never quotes Arbabsiar as explicitly saying he wanted to carry out an assassination: this was no doubt suggested by the informant, who says the deluded car dealer was u201Cinterestedu201D in such a plot u201Camong other things.u201D Gareth Porter has suggested these u201Cother thingsu201D might well have been a drug deal involving opium, a product the Iranian Revolutionary Guards – the supposed co-plotters – are said to have a large supply of: Arbabsiar reportedly told associates, prior to his bust, that he was about to make some u201Cbig money.u201D How he expected to do that by bombing the Caf Milano is a bit of a mystery, one that will never be cleared up – because this case will never come to trial.

At the plea appearance, Arbabsiar told the judge:

u201CIn Mexico, we hired a person named u2018Junior,' who turned out to be an FBI agent, to kidnap the ambassador. Junior said it would be easier to kill the ambassador. I and others agreed to go along with this new plan. We agreed to pay Junior, and to do that we transferred money to the United States from Iran.u201D

It was the FBI's idea to blow up the Caf Milano, not Arbabsiar's. There never was any murder plot: the FBI was manipulating Arbabsiar from the start – not a hard task to accomplish, given his mental state.

After his arrest, a thorough examination of Arbabsiar, including extensive psychological testing, indicated he suffers from mania, bi-polar disorder, and paranoia: an MRI indicated u201Cabnormalities of the brain.u201D This was confirmed by Dr. Michael B. Frist, editor of the definitive Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, who extensively interviewed not only the accused but also his family and friends. Arbabsiar would lock himself in his bedroom, smoking cigarettes and pacing up and down, for weeks at a time: other times he would engage in grandiose gestures, and imagine himself a u201Cplayboyu201D with u201Cimportantu201D connections. He habitually lost his keys, the titles to cars, and could barely function: he eventually went broke, and couldn't even afford to go to a dentist when his teeth were practically falling out of his head.

In short, Arbabsiar is the perfect fall guy.

The supposed u201Ccousinu201D working with Arbabsiar, Abdul Reza Shahlai, is reportedly a top official in the Revolutionary Guards alleged to have been involved in several terrorist attacks against American targets in Iraq, a sophisticated operative with plenty of experience in this sort of thing. Yet in a Washington Post piece on Arbabsiar's alleged connection to the Revolutionary Guards, we are told:

u201CIt is unclear how much Shahlai understood about his cousin's life in the United States and if he understood how unlikely it was that a struggling used-car salesman in Corpus Christi, Tex., could successfully orchestrate a high-profile international plot.u201D

It's not just u201Cunclearu201D – the whole proposition portraying Arbabsiar as some kind of international assassin is utterly outlandish. Which is why, when the government announced their u201Ccaseu201D against Arbabsiar, it was met with widespread skepticism and outright mockery from analysts familiar with Iranian intelligence operations.

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Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

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One striking impression of this debate was that out of some 17,000 words uttered by both candidates and the moderator, about half of them were about domestic policy. Neither candidate wanted to talk about foreign policy – because the differences between them are negligible. Out of this half, about 1500 words were devoted to the subject of Israel – around 20 percent. And it's not as if the candidates disagreed: indeed, they competed for the role of Israel's Best Friend. Obama was first to pledge allegiance to Tel Aviv, less than ten minutes after the starting bell. Outlining the foundations of his foreign policy, he averred:

u201CWhat I've done throughout my presidency and will continue to do, is, number one, make sure that these countries are supporting our counterterrorism efforts; number two, make sure that they are standing by our interests in Israel's security, because it is a true friend and our greatest ally in the region.u201D

According to the President, Israel's security is our number two priority not only in the region, but also in a much broader sense, second only to going after our own enemies. That's an odd way to define our hierarchy of foreign policy values: what about the security and prosperity of the region as a whole? The Israel-pandering was obsessive and I'm not the only one who noticed it.

No aspect of our Middle Eastern policy was discussed without reference to how it might play in Israel. When Syria came up, Obama made a point of saying that although u201CSyrians are going to have to determine their own future,u201D our efforts to aid the rebels are being carried out u201Cin consultation with our partners in the region, including Israel, which obviously has a huge interest in seeing what happens in Syria.u201D Romney chimed in:

u201CSecondly, Syria's an opportunity for us because Syria plays an important role in the Middle East, particularly right now. Syria is Iran's only ally in the Arab world. It's their route to the sea. It's the route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of course, our ally Israel… We need to make sure as well that we coordinate this effort with our allies and particularly with – with – with Israel.u201D

Never mind what the people of Syria want: it's all about what Israel wants. This duet was sung in many variations. On Egypt, the President warned:

u201CThey have to abide by their treaty with Israel. That is a red line for us, because not only is Israel's security at stake, but our security is at stake if that unravels.u201D

This wasn't enough for Romney, however, who came back with:

u201CWe have to also stand by our allies. I think the tension that existed between Israel and the United States was very unfortunate.u201D

Not to be out-Israeled, the President struck back:

u201COur alliances have never been stronger. In Asia, in Europe, in Africa, with Israel where we have unprecedented military and intelligence cooperation, including dealing with the Iranian threat.u201D

After all that, Bob Schieffer decided it was time to u201Cmove on to the next segment: red lines, Israel, and Iran.u201D A visitor from Mars might be forgiven for being confused at this point: didn't the last segment cover that territory? Us earthlings understand, however, that when it comes to foreign policy, one can never kowtow too long or too low in the direction of Tel Aviv, and so Schieffer gave the candidates yet another opportunity to prostrate themselves before King Bibi:

u201CWould either of you be willing to declare that an attack on Israel is an attack on the United States, which of course is the same promise that we give to our close allies like Japan? And if you made such a declaration, would not that deter Iran? It's certainly deterred the Soviet Union for a long, long time when we made that – when we made that promise to our allies.u201D

The President took over 250 words to declare his undying loyalty to the Jewish state, wielding all the familiar phrases endlessly uttered by both candidates over the course of the campaign like some sort of semi-religious litany: u201C a true friend,u201D u201Cour greatest ally in the region,u201D etc. – although purists will note u201Cin the regionu201D as a modifier is highly suspicious.

Repeating Israeli propaganda almost verbatim – including the long-debunked mistranslation of Ahmadinejad supposedly calling for Israel to be u201Cwiped off the mapu201D – Obama again touted u201Cthe strongest military and intelligence cooperation between our two countries in historyu201D as he committed this country to war under the murkiest of circumstances. His pledge to defend Israel against u201Cattacku201D raises some interesting questions: e.g. is that Hezbollah drone incursion grounds for us to start bombing Lebanon? What about Palestinian resistance to u201Csettleru201D incursions? But the President wasn't too concerned with nuance: he was too busy threatening Iran, hailing the u201Ccrippling sanctionsu201D and gloating that u201Ctheir economy is a shambles.u201D

Yes, and so is ours, a better Romney might have added, but instead he chimed in:

u201CWell, first of all, I – I want to underscore the – the same point the president made, which is that if I'm president of the United States, when I'm president of the United States, we will stand with Israel. And – and if Israel is attacked, we have their back, not just diplomatically, not just culturally, but militarily. That's number one.u201D

The Republican nominee went on to establish his pro-Israel credentials by mentioning that he had made the same point at Israel's Herzliya Conference, where he laid out u201Cseven stepsu201D to war dealing with Iran, but only mentioned two.

Not to be outdone, Obama went much further than he's ever gone on the Iran issue, coming very close to Romney's (and Netanyahu's) position:

u201CWe're not going to allow Iran to perpetually engage in negotiations that lead nowhere. And I've been very clear to them, you know, because of the intelligence coordination that we do with a range of countries, including Israel, we have a sense of when they would get breakout capacity, which means that we would not be able to intervene in time to stop their nuclear program, and that clock is ticking.u201D

Until now, the key difference between the two candidates on Iran has been this issue of u201Ccapabilityu201D – with Romney naturally echoing Netanyahu's stance that we must strike as soon as we – somehow – know Iran has the mere theoretical capacity to assemble a nuclear weapon. Presumably Netanyahu will supply us with the relevant u201Cintelligence.u201D The Obama administration, on the other hand, has been saying their red line is a clear attempt to actually acquire such weapons – that is, until now. u201CThe clock is tickingu201D on Iran, Obama growled – and, as of Monday's debate, it seems to be ticking much louder and faster.

Romney, in danger of being out-Israeled, struck back, attacking what he called the President's u201Capology tour.u201D This, he declared, was seen by the Bad Guys as a sign of u201Cweakness,” along with our failure to openly side with the leaders of the u201CGreen Revolution – who neither asked for nor wanted such a declaration. Another sign of u201Cweaknessu201D was u201CWhen the president said he was going to create daylight between ourselves and Israel that – that they noticed that as well.u201D

The u201Cdaylightu201D citation was reported by the Washington Post in the context of a 2009 meeting between Obama and US Jewish leaders on the collision between the US and Israel over the Palestinian question, not Iran. The delegation was dismayed by the President's insistence that construction of u201Csettlementsu201D on Arab-owned land does not serve American interests – the same position taken by George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Bush Senior.

As this debate demonstrated, the degree of daylight between Israel and the US is rapidly diminishing to the point of near imperceptibility. Unlike his predecessors, this President would never dare withhold aid, and as far as the Israelis are concerned the White House can kvetch about the u201Csettlementsu201D until the cows come home.

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Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

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Recently by Justin Raimondo: Roots of the Iranian ‘Crisis’

Back in the early 1990s, before Antiwar.com was founded, I was a regular at a roundtable discussion group sponsored by the late Bill Rusher, a founding editor of National Review: these seminars were organized by a young man associated with a prominent conservative educational organization. Bill lent us a room at the posh Union Club, at the top of San Francisco’s Nob Hill, where every month we would hear a speaker give an informal talk: we would then retire to the lounge, where refreshments and a lively discussion were enjoyed. I became friendly with the young organizer, and we had several interesting discussions about various matters: one day he confided to me how he had become involved conservative politics.

He had been attending a college somewhere in the Midwest, at which time his politics were vaguely conservative: one day he saw an advertisement for a lecture and meeting "in solidarity with Poland’s Solidarity" — the Polish anti-Soviet labor group that eventually overthrew the Communist party’s dictatorship — and decided to attend. Although he didn’t know it at the time, it was the beginning of his ideological hegira….

The group sponsoring the meeting was Social Democrats, USA, formerly known as the International Socialist League, a Trotskyist group founded and led by Max Shachtman. Shachtman had been Leon Trotsky’s chief intellectual advocate in the US until breaking with the Red Army commander in 1938 over the issue of the class nature of the Soviet Union. While insisting on retaining his socialist credentials, Shachtman gradually moved away from defending the Soviet Union — a favorite pastime of American commies and their numerous fellow travelers — and came to believe the Kremlin represented a far more deadly threat to socialist ideals than the West.

After breaking with the orthodox Trotskyists, Shachtman initially espoused the so-called Third Camp position, advancing the slogan "Neither Washington nor Moscow," and placing his hopes on an "independent" upsurge of socialist-minded workers. When that failed to materialize, and as the cold war got hotter, Shachtman slid further to the right: the ISL began emphasizing its opposition to "Stalinism," and issuing dire warnings about the alleged Soviet threat. When the Vietnam war broke out, Shachtman took the position that the US and its Vietnamese sock-puppets were preferable to the North Vietnamese Stalinists, and supported the war — a position that further decimated the ranks of his minuscule group, which had by that time dissolved itself into the Socialist Party of Norman Thomas.

Yet the Shachtmanites retained their internal cohesiveness, eventually reemerging as Social Democrats, USA, a group which still exists, albeit only in the formal sense. Shachtman, meanwhile, had other fish to fry: he had become an advisor to AFL-CIO chieftain George Meany, and a confidante of Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the warlike Democratic Senator from Washington state whose foreign policy views often led his critics to describe him as "the Senator from Boeing." In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Shachtman’s followers became influential in the labor movement and in the budding civil rights movement: Bayard Rustin, the real organizer of Martin Luther King’s famous "March on Washington," was a Shachtmanite, although kept out of the limelight by his homosexuality.

It was at this point that a naïve Midwestern college student, motivated by his anti-Communist inclinations, attended a meeting in support of Poland’s Solidarity movement — and was introduced to the insular and highly obscure world of the Shachtmanites. After the lecture, he told me, he was invited to another SDUSA meeting, and found the group conducive to his hawkish anti-Communist views, and so he joined up. However, one thing puzzled him: at the end of the meeting, everyone rose and sang "The Internationale," the old commie anthem! A fine way for a supposedly anti-Communist group to operate!

Although he found this somewhat off-putting, to say the least, my young friend attributed this to the personal and ideological eccentricities of his new-found anti-Communist comrades. In any case, he became an active member of the group, and from there found his way into the conservative movement. And he wasn’t the only one: indeed, a whole generation of leftists-turned-rightists — known as the neoconservatives — were veterans of Shachtman’s circle: when Ronald Reagan came to Washington a whole government agency was turned over to these characters — the National Endowment for Democracy, the goal of which was to combat Communist ideological influence in the international sphere.

Weaseling their way into the US government, these "State Department socialists" began to become a real force in Washington. Shachtman’s cultivation of Senator Jackson paid off as several Shachtmanites found their way to his office and were hired as aides. Prominent neocons graduated from SDUSA and its youth group, the Young Peoples Socialist League (known as Yipsels), to become the War Party’s brain trust: Jeanne Kirkpatrick, James Woolsey, Carl Gershman, Max Kampelman, Penn Kimble, and Elliott Abrams, to name just a few. Irving Kristol, the neoconservative "godfather," wrote about his Trotksyist youth in this brief memoir.

While Shachtman’s tiny grouplet never had more than a few hundred members, they had influence way out of proportion to their numbers. Indeed, Shachtman’s reach extends even unto the present day, as we can clearly see from this recent op ed piece by Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior advisor to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. Entitled "Why Mitt?", this Jerusalem Post article is subtitled: "My support for Mitt Romney has something to do with a ship called the Serpa Pinto and with an American Marxist revolutionary."

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Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

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Why Target Iran?

On the front page of a prominent newspaper the news is grim: a Middle Eastern country run by a ruthless dictatorial regime has been secretly developing u201Cweapons of mass destruction.u201D While in public they deny it, in their underground labs their scientists are busy, cooking up a radioactive horror that will soon be visited upon the world – that is, unless we act.

How do we know this? An exile group of so-called u201Cfreedom-fightersu201D has made this u201Cintelligenceu201D available to a reporter for a widely-read US newspaper, which splashes this scoop all over its front pages.

I could be talking about the year 2002 – or 2012, with only difference being the names of the target countries. We have been down this road before

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now saying it is only a matter of a year or so before Iran is ready to join the nuclear club – of course, he said the same thing last year, and the year before, and the year before that.

Adding to our sense of deja-vu, we have an Iranian version of the Iraqi National Congress exile group providing the same quality of u201Cintelligenceu201D: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), or Peoples' Warriors, a weird Marxist-Islamic cult which once served Saddam Hussein and was given a base in Iraq to conduct terrorist activities in Iran. When the southern Shi'ites rose against Saddam in the 1990s, Saddam called in these mercenaries to slaughter the ill-armed rebels. The War Party won a big victory the other day when Hillary Clinton announced the MEK had been taken off the official list of designated terrorist groups. They have been a constant source of phony u201Cevidenceu201D that Iran is secretly working on nuclear weapons

Hardly a day goes by without some supposedly sensational revelation or claim about Iran's alleged u201Cweapons of mass destruction.u201D It seems like only yesterday, however, that we were seeing exactly the same headlines, and the same articles, only this time it is Iran instead of Iraq that stands accused. Back in 2002, it was a series of pieces bylined by a New York Times reporter, Judith Miller – whose name has become virtually synonymous with deception. Ms. Miller was being fed her information by Chalabi's group, via her close connections to the administration, and in particular to a group of political operatives deemed the neoconservatives.

This was – is – a small but highly influential coterie of what used to be called cold war liberals, whose views were shaped by migratory ex-Trotskyites with a bone to pick with Stalin. Not your run of the mill European-style Social Democrats, mind you, but militant interventionists with a vision of a world reshaped by American military power. Or, as one neocon writing in a prominent foreign policy journal put it: the goal of US foreign policy ought to be u201Cbenevolent global hegemonyu201D – as opposed, one must assume, to the malevolent global hegemony dreamed of by Communists, national socialists, and other villains throughout history.

The fabled journey of the neocons from far left to far right has been celebrated in story and song, and there is no need to go into all the gory details here: we've heard it all before – in a PBS documentary, u201CArguing the World,u201D and in numerous memoirs by the participants. Yet this famous hegira didn't take them anywhere: it was a journey standing still. For they had simply transferred their allegiance from the Soviet Union to the United States without changing the basic underlying assumptions of their radical universalism: instead of a world communist revolution as advocated by Leon Trotsky and his followers, these disillusioned Marxists now dreamed of a u201Cglobal democratic revolution,u201D as one of George W. Bush's speechwriters put it in a presidential oration celebrating the anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Having walked out of the Democratic party, disgusted with the alleged u201Cpacifismu201D of George McGovern, these Scoop Jackson Democrats wound up in the Republican party just as the Reagan Revolution, so-called, was picking up steam. When Reagan went to Washington, the neocons followed in his wake, and wound up ensconced in the National Endowment for Democracy, which was founded with them in mind. There Reagan's advisers could keep an eye on them, while they stayed largely out of sight of the general public.

From a small coterie of social democratic intellectuals, the neocons soon branched out and established a Washington network that tied them into the right-wing cold war coalition of social conservatives, free market types, and professional anti-communists. The neocons fit neatly into the latter category, but were never quite comfortable with the other members of the coalition. Some of them remained socialists, or at least social democrats of one sort or another, and as far as capitalism was concerned, they could only give it two cheers, at the most – as Irving Kristol put it in the title of one of his books. When it came to domestic issues, the neocons were all over the map, from Sidney Hook – the quintessential New York intellectual – who remained a socialist until his dying day, to Irving Kristol, a former Trotksyist who wound up founding a veritable dynasty based on the ideological assumptions to be found in the Republican party platform.

What unified them, and defined them as a cohesive group, was a fanatical hatred of Stalinism and their dedication to the idea of spreading democracy – at gunpoint, if necessary – throughout the world. During the cold war, the CIA made use of them as the US sought to counter Soviet influence on the international left. Having displaced the older generation of conservatives, who were derided as u201Cisolationists,u201D these New Conservatives – or neoconservatives, as they came to be known – came to dominate the American right-wing and soon seized control of the philanthropic foundations that poured money into right-wing causes.

As the cold war ended, however, they saw their influence waning. When Reagan met with Gorbachev and signed a treaty limiting long-range missiles based in Europe, they accused the man who had coined the phrase u201Cevil empireu201D with selling out to the commies and leaving the US defenseless against the Kremlin. They failed to understand what was happening when the Soviet colossus began to crack because they never u201Cgot itu201D that communism's biggest enemies were its own internal contradictions.

With the fall of Communism, and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, the professional anti-communists were out of work. Suddenly there was a big hole in their worldview: the rationalization for our interventionist foreign policy had disappeared almost overnight. Worse, from their point of view, the Republicans were drifting back to their u201Cisolationistu201D roots. When, during the Clinton administration, the Republicans in Congress threatened to pull the funding from our military adventure in Kosovo, Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, threatened to walk out of the Republican party.

Ah, but all was not lost. When George W. Bush went to Washington, a gaggle of neocons followed him. Showing up for work that fateful winter were all the familiar faces who had worked for Sen. Scoop Jackson (D-Boeing), organized the Committee on the Present Danger (and other neocon front groups), and served as the de facto command center of the War Party in previous administrations: Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Eliot Cohen, Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith – and, sitting in the peanut gallery, the neocon publicists like Bill Kristol, son of Irving, editor of the Weekly Standard: Max Boot, former CIA analyst, the gang over at Commentary magazine, the staff of the American Enterprise Institute – the most prominent and certainly the wealthiest conservative think tank – and various and sundry Republican politicians, as well as ostensible Democrats like Sen. Joe Lieberman. The policy office of the Pentagon and the National Security Council were packed with neocons, and they had their agenda all set to go when George W. Bush entered the Oval Office.

They went to Washington with a plan: invade and subjugate Iraq. They had found a new enemy to take the place of the Kremlin, and it wasn't just the Iraq dictator – although Saddam was their initial target – but the entire Muslim world, which they determined had to be transformed. The u201Cswamp,u201D they averred, had to be u201Cdrained.u201D In their view, the entire Arab world had been deformed and kept back from achieving u201Cmodernityu201D due to certain characteristics of what they called the u201CArab mindu201D – deformations that could be traced back to the all-pervasive influence of Islam on the development of Arab civilization.

The stage was set for the disaster that was about to unfold….

It’s All About Israel

It was and is a matter of high principle for the neoconservatives that the US unconditionally support Israel in its struggle against the Arab world. Disputing the neocons' claim to the mantle of Wilsonianism, Michael Lind described this odd nexus of radical universalism and ethno-nationalism as “Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism,u201D adding: u201CGenuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.u201D

Saddam Hussein, you'll recall, had been offering bounties for suicide bombers, at least according to the propaganda we heard, and – alongside the contention that he was also developing nuclear weapons – this was the pitch the neocons, and the Israel lobby, gave in public to justify the invasion. Yet there was another layer of rationalization which went largely undetected in America, and the argument was contained in a paper prepared for then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in 1996, under the auspices of the Israeli Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, which had organized a “Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000.” The paper was shaped by a series of seminars in which several figures who would figure prominently in the administration of George W. Bush participated, including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser. Entitled u201CA Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,u201D the proposal proffered by these future American policymakers urged Netanyahu to undertake a long-term project to break Israel out of its geographic and demographic boundaries and engage in a campaign of u201Cregime changeu201D in the Middle East. To the incoming Prime Minister, who had upended the long rule of the Israeli Labor Party, they gave the following advice: ditch the peace process, and make a u201Cclean breaku201D with the policy of appeasing both the Palestinians and the United States. Stand up to Uncle Sam, insist on mutuality, build up support for Israeli objectives in the US Congress, and go on the offensive against the enemies of the Jewish state:

u201CIsrael can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right – as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions.u201D

The entire regime change operation we are seeing unfold in the Middle East is a veritable laundry list of neoconservative goals as outlined in the u201CClean Breaku201D document, as well as in the agenda of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), Bill Kristol's vehicle for injecting a strong dose of interventionism into the incoming Bush administration. Aside from calling for regime change in practically every Middle Eastern state – all this prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks – PNAC’s proposal for tripling the military budget was prefaced by a yearning for u201Ca new Pearl Harbor,u201D which would wake the American people up to the imperative of American military supremacy at any cost.

The neocons got their Pearl Harbor on September 11, 2001, and they were more than ready to take full advantage of the opportunity to implement their agenda of permanent war. While the administration made a half-hearted attempt to capture Osama bin Laden they failed to corner him in Afghanistan, and the top leadership slipped through the American dragnet with the help of its Taliban allies. This, however, didn't really concern the neocons all that much: Paul Wolfowitz and others were arguing inside the administration that the real enemy was in Baghdad. After the preliminaries in Afghanistan, they turned their sights on the real object of their war-lust: Iraq.

The u201CClean Breaku201D scenario envisioned the overthrow of Iraq's Ba'athist regime as a prerequisite for Israel's success, and the Israel lobby, in concert with the neoconservatives, played a key role in dragging us into that disastrous war of aggression. Yet that was just the beginning of the road they wanted to take us on, and we are halfway down it already. As Ariel Sharon told a delegation of American congressmen in 2003, after Iraq must come Iran, Libya, and Syria:

u201CThese are irresponsible states, which must be disarmed of weapons mass destruction, and a successful American move in Iraq as a model will make that easier to achieve," said the Prime Minister to his guests, rather like a commander issuing orders to his foot-soldiers. While noting that Israel was not itself at war with Iraq, he went on to say that u201Cthe American action is of vital importance.u201D

Of course it was, but as far as the Israelis and their American amen corner were concerned, it was to be just the beginning.

The Israelization of American foreign policy under George W. Bush was a policy consciously promoted by the neoconservatives from their well-situated perch at the heights of the national security apparatus. The progenitors of the u201CClean Breaku201D scenario saw the Israeli state facing a terminal crisis: the Jewish state, in their view, was suffering from an “exhaustion” that could lead to extinction. The idea was to break with the idea of “containment” and go for a policy of preemption. As the u201CClean Breaku201D document put it:

“Notable Arab intellectuals have written extensively on their perception of Israel’s floundering and loss of national identity. This perception has invited attack, blocked Israel from achieving true peace, and offered hope for those who would destroy Israel. The previous strategy, therefore, was leading the Middle East toward another Arab-Israeli war. Israel’s new agenda can signal a clean break by abandoning a policy which assumed exhaustion and allowed strategic retreat by reestablishing the principle of preemption, rather than retaliation alone and by ceasing to absorb blows to the nation without response.”

This doctrine of preemption came to be known as the Bush Doctrine, but it really ought to be called the Sharon-Bush Doctrine, given its true origins. When George W. Bush declared that the United States has the u201Cright,u201D and even the obligation, to attack any nation on earth, on the grounds that the target poses a potential threat to US interests, he was merely echoing what had by that time already become official Israeli policy. This policy was given free rein in a whole series of wars, aside from the permanent state of war prevailing in the occupied territories of Palestine: two invasions of Lebanon, and, today, terrorist attacks inside Iran carried out by Israeli intelligence agencies in cooperation with their proxies, such as the Mujahideen Khalq. The ultimate example of preemption would be an attack on Iran – and here we see a real conflict developing between the Obama administration and Netanyahu's government.

The Israeli position on Iran is an application of the Bush Doctrine taken to its logical extreme. While the American intelligence community is clear that the Iranians abandoned their embryonic nuclear weapons program in 2003, and all subsequent u201Cevidenceu201D of a viable Iranian nuke in the making has turned out to be either forgeries or pre-2003 materials, Netanyahu gets around this by upping the ante. The danger, he says, is that the Iranians will achieve the capacity to put together a nuclear weapon on very short notice. The Romney campaign, taking its cues from Tel Aviv, has echoed this escalation of Israeli demands, with the formulation that they don't want Tehran u201Cone turn of the screwdriver awayu201D from acquiring nuclear weapons.

This is a technical impossibility, a crude bit of war propaganda that has no basis in reality: but then again, that's what war propaganda usually is – blind assertions meant to evoke an emotional response rather than one based on reason, or, in this case, on science. As the Wilson Center study on the costs and benefits of an attack on Iran put it, it would take at least two years or more for Iran to develop a deliverable nuclear warhead – and the effort would be detected long before that.

In short, the ticking time bomb scenario described by Netanyahu and his American co-thinkers is pure nonsense: in no sense could the Iranians ever be u201Cone turn of the screwdriver awayu201D from nuking Israel. Even given the doctrine of preemption, in light of these facts the justification for war simply does not exist. Netanyahu and his defense minister claim Israel faces an u201Cexistentialu201D crisis, nothing less than the prospect of a second Holocaust. Yet there are no facts to back up this assertion: it is simply an emotional appeal. Something else is at work here other than fear of a genuine threat, and it is quite simply politics – that is, the internal politics of Israel, and also of the United States.

Objectively, there is no threat to Israel, or to the West, emanating from Iran: armed with nuclear weapons, and so far advanced militarily over its neighbors that the distance between them can only be measured in light years, Israel has no real reason to fear an attack that is not forthcoming in any event. The whole thing is manufactured by politicians who have but one goal in mind: to stay in power.

Meir Dagan, former head of the Mossad, says the idea of a preemptive attack on Iran is u201Cthe stupidest idea I've ever heard,u201D and inside Israel support for Netanyahu's gambit is far from solid. Shimon Peres, one of the last of the old-style (i.e. rational) Israeli leaders, recently went on television to expressly dissent from Netanyahu's apocalyptic rhetoric and to give support to President Obama as a reliable ally.

What's interesting is that the rhetoric coming from Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, has a distinctly anti-American strain. As Barak put it, in arguing for a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran:

“Ronald Reagan did not want to see a nuclear Pakistan, but Pakistan did go nuclear. Bill Clinton did not want to see a nuclear North Korea, but North Korea went nuclear.”

“If Israel forgoes the chance to act and it becomes clear that it no longer has the power to act, the likelihood of an American action will decrease… We cannot wait to discover one morning that we relied on the Americans but were fooled because the Americans didn’t act in the end…. Israel will do what it has to do.”

Barak's message is all too clear: the Americans are mercurial, and weak-willed – they can't be counted on, and besides we have to do what we have to do. This is the spirit and letter of the u201CClean Breaku201D document, which decried US u201Cinterventionu201D in Israel's internal affairs, and it is the language of the extreme nationalists, such as Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister, who once advocated bombing the Aswan dam and is a former bouncer in a bar. His extremist right-wing party advocates a u201CGreater Israel,u201D and is supported by the u201Csettleru201D movement – violent fanatics who want to create a Greater Israel based on their interpretation of the Bible.

In the context of growing extremism infecting the Israeli body politic, a politician like Netanyahu is considered a centrist. To his right are even more anti-American ultra-nationalists, and this movement is growing. In order to accommodate it, and contain it within the confines of his own party, Netanyahu has had to move in an even more extreme direction, even going so far as to threaten that Israel will strike Iran on its own, without US support.

This, of course, is a policy of de facto blackmail, since any war between Israel and Iran will almost inevitably see the Americans dragged in. This has been the whole Israeli strategy, so far – except that it hasn't worked. The President has steadfastly refused to give in, at least up until this point. He has even gone so far as to inform the Iranians in advance that any such attack by Israeli forces will not have the sanction or support of the US – and, in such an event, to please refrain from attacking American targets in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

In view of the lack of American support for war, both in Washington and among the American electorate, the persistence of the debate within Israel over whether they should attack all on their own is disturbing. Such a scenario could only be disastrous for the region, and for Israel in particular, as Gen. Dempsey, head of the US joint chiefs of staff, has recently made plain. The Israeli defense and intelligence establishment has been saying the same thing, and still Netanyahu and Barak continue to talk about it as if it were a real option.

While Netanyahu is bound to be deterred by the cold reception this idea has received in Washington, in this context we have to ask ourselves a sobering question: will Avigdor Lieberman's finger some day be on Israel's nuclear trigger? This is a question the Iranians, and others in the region, have no doubt asked themselves. That it is even a possibility is profoundly unsettling – and this, not the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, is the source of the real danger looming over the Middle East.

Israel's nuclear monopoly in the region is the real issue at hand, and it is one the Israelis have not had to face. It is known the Israelis possess at least two-hundred warheads. Their policy is one of u201Cnuclear ambiguity,u201D neither confirming nor denying the existence of their deadly arsenal. Unlike Iran, they have refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), and inspections of their nuclear facilities are therefore out of the question.

Iran, on the other hand, regularly submits to a tight schedule of inspections from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which would soon discover any weaponization procedures in progress. Israel's contemptuous attitude toward the international community is given a free pass by the US and its allies, while the Iranians are subjected to crippling sanctions and an international campaign of vilification on the mere suspicion that they might one day have the capacity to develop nuclear weapons. To call this a double standard is to understate the case.

The destabilizing effects of Israel's nuclear monopoly are a major cause of regional tensions – and the entire basis for assuming Iran has nuclear ambitions above and beyond its stated intention of harnessing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. One of the arguments against containing Iran, as opposed to taking the military option, is that the acquisition of a nuclear arsenal by Tehran will spark a dangerous arms race throughout the region. Yet this is disproved by the existence of Israel's own arsenal, which has sparked no such race – even though the Jewish state's Muslim neighbors have ample reason to believe the Israelis could conceivably launch a first strike on them. This, after all, is the essence of the doctrine of preemption, which the Israelis have embraced.

While there is zero evidence the Iranians have restarted their nuclear weapons program, could one blame them if they did? How else could they possibly hope to deter an Israeli first strike? In a 2008 op-ed piece in the New York Times, the noted Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote:

“Iran’s leaders would do well to rethink their gamble and suspend their nuclear program. Bar this, the best they could hope for is that Israel’s conventional air assault will destroy their nuclear facilities. To be sure, this would mean thousands of Iranian casualties and international humiliation. But the alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland.”

An Israeli nuclear strike at Iran is not inconceivable: indeed, it is all too conceivable. So who are the real aggressors in the Middle East?

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Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

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Recently by Justin Raimondo: In Defense of the President

It's no wonder the Israeli Foreign Ministry initially held back from releasing a transcript of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the UN General Assembly: Bibi's wackiness doesn't bear close scrutiny. Perhaps u201Cwackyu201D isn't quite the right word for his 40-minute peroration, during which he pulled out a bomb u201Cdiagramu201D and a red marker to illustrate where he would draw a u201Cred lineu201D defining the outer limits of Iran's nuclear program. Cartoonish is more like it. The cartoonish quality of the bomb drawing underscored the content and tone of the speech, which was the jeremiad of a radical ideologue rather than anything one would expect from a statesman:

u201CToday a great battle is being waged between the modern and the medieval. Israel stands proudly with the forces of modernity. We protect the right of all our citizens, men and women, Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians, all are equal before the law.u201D

Israel, which privileges its priestly caste, has a state religion, and bases its national mythology on a u201Cpromiseu201D from G-d, is as medieval as any of its neighbors. Aside from being a lie, however, this statement is interesting because it evokes the very same supremacist spirit that animates the controversial pro-Israel public relations campaign launched by the Jewish state's extremist American supporters. Posters in the public transport system, from New York to San Francisco, proclaim:

u201CIn any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.u201D

No wonder the Israeli consulates in New York and San Francisco won't disavow those vile subway posters: Pamela Geller is the new public face of Israel.

Yes, Israel protects the rights of all citizens — unless they're Palestinians who happen to own property coveted by the u201Csettlers,u201D in which case it doesn't. And the key word here is citizens: of course, the Palestinians in the occupied territories are not citizens, but helots, with no rights, and no protection from fanatical Jewish fundamentalists who have launched hundreds of attacks on their homes, and sought to displace them at every opportunity, with the active complicity of the Israeli government.

This idea that Israel represents u201Cmodernityu201D is rich, considering that every day Israeli society is sinking lower into the morass of religious and cultural fundamentalism, a regression that has not gone unnoticed in the West. Bibi opened his speech with biblical references, describing Jersusalem as the u201Ceternal capitalu201D of Israel and declaring that u201Cthe Jewish state will live forever.u201D Yet as we secularists know, nothing lives u201Cforever,u201D and the idea of a city being the u201Ceternalu201D capital of anything is a metaphor, at best, at worst a dangerous delusion. If this is the u201Cmodernu201D then one wonders how much it differs from the u201Cmedieval.u201D But let's not linger too long over the obvious. Bibi rants on:

u201CMilitant Islam has many branches, from the rulers of Iran with their revolutionary guards to al-Qaeda… but they’re all rooted in the same soil. It’s not whether this fanaticism will be defeated, but how many lives will be lost before it’s defeated. Nothing could emperil my country more than arming Iran with nuclear weapons. To imagine what the world would be like with a nuclear Iran, imagine what the world would be like with a nuclear al-Qaeda. There’s no difference.u201D

The Israeli Prime Minister may have been addressing the UN General Assembly, but he was really talking to the Americans, whose fear and loathing of the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks can always be counted on to raise them to new levels of hysteria. Outside that context, however, equating the Iranians with Al Qaeda makes about as much sense as likening the late unlamented Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden — and, hey wait, didn't we hear that equation made endlessly in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq? Yet this was not a time for subtlety from the Israeli Prime Minister — the cartoon u201Cbombu201D ended all hope of that — but for the crudest sort of propaganda, which is, of course, war propaganda.

Imagine if Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who addressed the UN that day minutes before Netanyahu took the stage, had said: u201CMilitant Judaism has many branches, from the Washington offices of AIPAC to the center of Jewish power in Tel Aviv — but they're all rooted in the same soilu201D of intolerance? Picture him conjuring images of violent Jewish u201Cfanaticismu201D — not a hard task, given what is happening in Israel today. If he had done so, Abbas would have been denounced in every Western capital as the 21st century incarnation of Hitler.

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Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

The Best of Justin Raimondo

Whatever one may think of our President, it has to be admitted that his speech to the United Nations showed real leadership. He took the time to explain, at length, that although the noxious Innocence of Muslims video had nothing to do with the US government, and that it represents only the views of marginal extremists, we defend their right to engage in such speech because of the nature of our system. He explained why we don't ban such speech – because, you see, there's this thing called the Constitution – and, more importantly, why it's not in America's interest to have the world believe we endorse the hate that emanates from such efforts.

I'm ignoring, of course, the threats directed at Iran and Syria: that, after all, is routine for this administration. I'm ignoring the irony of his remarks about the evils of u201Cextremismu201D against the backdrop of US support to Sunni extremists in Syria, who are killing civilians, driving out Christians and others, and engaging in what can only be called terrorism under the rubric of a US-supported movement for u201Cdemocracy.u201D Every time an American president opens his mouth to talk about u201Cdemocracy,u201D u201Cfreedom,u201D and All Those Good Things, the charge of hypocrisy hangs over him like a storm cloud, and I won't be the one to defend him.

However, I will defend him when he's right against those who attack him for u201Cappeasementu201D – such as Matt Welch, editor of Reason magazine and former u201Cwar-blogger.u201D As editor of a magazine considered by many the voice of libertarianism – a movement I consider myself a part of – Welch's views on this matter are apt to be confused with the movement at large. In this case, that would be a very dangerous and undesirable assumption.

So what's Welch's beef with the President? He finds it u201Cnoxiousu201D that Obama described the Innocence video as u201Cdisgusting.u201D He finds it equally noxious that the President went on to say u201Cits message must be rejected.u201D Yet how could anyone outside of Pam Geller, Robert Spencer, and the rest of the hate-mongers amongst us object to that?

According to Welch,

u201CSo many things wrong in so few words. Why this video, and not Theo Van Gogh’s Submission, or Lars Vilks’ animation of Mohammed wanting to go to a gay bar, the ‘Super Best Friends’ episode of South Park, or Funny or Die‘s ‘How to Pick a Pocket’? Is it the degree of the insult, the craptasticness of the production values, the size of the release, or the vociferousness of the outrage expressed?u201D

Welch is playing dumb here by dropping the context: did an American ambassador die due to Theo Van Gogh's obsession with Muslims? Or the inanities of South Park? Welch writes: u201CIt is not any politician’s job, and certainly not any American politician’s job, to instruct the entire world on which films to criticize.u201D This is Welch's idea of advocating u201Cless government,u201D and yet this impulse in him is strangely selective: we heard not one word of criticism from the editors of Reason (or Welch) when the US government denounced the u201CHolocaust Denial Film Festivalu201D put on in Tehran, which the White House attacked as u201Can affront to the entire civilized world.u201D In short, the US government engages in this sort of thing all the time – and yet why were no objections raised by Welch and his crew until the subject was obscene anti-Muslim bigotry?

Welch writes:

u201CAnd speaking of that favorite State Department word, rejected – isn’t that a word to describe what you do to something that gets in your face, or body? In medicine, the body u2018rejects” organs or other dissonant substances that have been introduced within it. In basketball, not every blocked shot is a u2018rejection,' mostly those that come when the offensive player is driving aggressively toward the vicinity of the hoop.u201D

Ignore the incoherent style – how is a hate video like a basketball game? – and get to the essential issue: does Welch reject the u201Cmessageu201D of Innocence? It's not clear. He writes:

u201CInnocence of Muslims didn’t get all up in someone’s grill. it lay forlorn and neglected on YouTube until some people (pro and con) decided to get excited by it. Even then, it is a remarkably easy piece of culture to avoid coming into contact with. u2018Rejected' implies a cultural potency that u2018Sam Becile' (or as I prefer, u2018C’est imbecile') could never dream of.u201D

As I've pointed out in this space repeatedly, Innocence didn't just lay forlorn and neglected on YouTube: the makers actively promoted it to Muslims in hopes of u201Cflushing outu201D alleged Islamist cells in the US. They also promoted it abroad, in Egypt, where news of it first surfaced. It was, in short, a deliberate provocation, a work of u201Cartu201D designed to inspire a violent reaction – a job at which it succeeded all too well.

The President of the United States no doubt has better intelligence on the origins of the Innocence video than I do, but for him to pay so much attention to it in this high profile speech indicates – at least to me – that his information comports roughly with my guess: that it was and is a deliberate ploy to direct violence at American interests throughout the world, including embassies and US government personnel.

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Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

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Recently by Justin Raimondo: The u2018Pro-Israel' Network Behind the Innocence Video

"Little wheels spin and spin, big wheels turn around and around Little wheels spin and spin, big wheels turn around and around Merry Christmas, Jingle Bells, Christ is born and the devil's in Hell Hearts they shrink, pockets swell Everybody know and nobody tell" ~ Buffy St. Marie

Washington can't seem to get their story straight: first we were told the attack on our Benghazi consulate and the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens was the result of a spontaneous demonstration that got out of hand — and today we're told it was all a plot initiated by a heretofore little-known "al Qaeda affiliate."

Before we get to the obvious question — which is it? — let's linger awhile and wonder: why the sudden change in spin? This is important because in Washington, and the world of American politics, there is no reality: there's just spin. People have opinions carefully tailored to the political demands of the moment — and during a presidential election year these change by the minute.

It was Senator Joe Lieberman who made news when he asked National Counterrorism Center chief Matt Olsen whether the Benghazi incident was a terrorist attack: "I would say yes, they were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy,” Olsen replied. This was immediately pounced on by Fox News and our good friends over at Reason magazine, among others, as proof that it was, as Sen. Susan Collins put it during Senate hearings the other day, "a premeditated, planned attack that was associated with the date of 9/11, the anniversary of 9/11."

The video, these spin-meisters aver, had nothing to do with it: it's just because those Muslim freaks hate not just America but the modern world, of which we are the preeminent example. Fox & Co. have been pushing this line from the beginning, and they were delighted to re-broadcast Olsen's remarks as supposedly confirming their view.

Yet if you investigate further — beyond reading the first line of Olsen's remarks — this alleged confirmation evaporates:

"We are looking at indications that individuals involved in the attack may have had connections to al Qaeda or al Qaeda’s affiliates; in particular, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

"It appears that individuals who were certainly well-armed seized on the opportunity presented as the events unfolded that evening and into the morning hours of September 12th. We do know that a number of militants in the area, as I mentioned, are well-armed and maintain those arms. What we don’t have at this point is specific intelligence that there was a significant advanced planning or coordination for this attack."

Translation: it was a terrorist attack if you say so, Senator Lieberman.

In the world outside Washington, D.C., the laws of logic operate as follows: first we find the evidence, then we draw conclusions from it. In the Imperial City, however, these laws are inverted: first the conclusion, then the evidence — which can always be manufactured or spun to suit.

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Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

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Recently by Justin Raimondo: Blasphemy and Empire

If someone had planned to upend US foreign policy – to utterly destroy the very basis [.pdf] of all our diplomats (and military personnel) have been working to achieve in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world – they couldn't have done a better job of it than whoever put together Innocence of Muslims.

As violent protests spread, the consequences continue to roll in: the suspension of joint US-Afghan military operations, the suspension of US aid talks with Egypt, the rapid decline of US prestige in the region, and the growing influence of the radical Islamist movement US support for the u201CArab Springu201D was designed to counter. The Obama administration's effort to split the Islamist upsurge and lend its support to u201Cmoderatesu201D has been stopped cold.

Was the release of the video a random event, one of those unpredictables that can arise at any moment to foil the best-laid plans? Perhaps. Yet one is hard-pressed to explain what the makers of Innocence sought to accomplish, if not precisely what has occurred. According to various explanations floated in the media – primarily by anti-Muslim agitator Steve Klein – the idea was to promote the video to Muslims. In one account, Klein says he hoped the video would u201Csmoke outu201D Muslim radicals in the US, who he is convinced have organized secret u201Ccellsu201D that will strike on command. On the other hand, we are told the film's authors and promoters hoped to u201Cconvertu201D Muslims.

Neither explanation is very convincing. The video itself is so crude, so inept, and so deliberately insulting it is hard to believe anyone thought it could convert anyone to anything. And as for the prospect of u201Csmoking outu201D secret Islamist cells – if there were such cells, one would hardly expect them to reveal themselves because of a YouTube video.

In order to understand the real motives and goals of the makers of Innocence, it is necessary to take a good look at the people who have, so far, been identified as the film's authors and promoters.

The central figure in all this is reported to be one Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a 56-year-old Egyptian immigrant: although Nakoula presented himself in an interview with the Associated Press as u201CSam Bacile,u201D a 56-year-old u201CIsraeli-Americanu201D real estate developer, he is a Coptic Christian, a member of a persecuted minority in Egypt – and a convicted felon. Media reports portray him as the central figure in the making of Innocence: he denies this, and describes his job as arranging u201Clogisticsu201D for the film. Nakoula’s role seems to have been that of a facilitator – gofer – rather than u201Ccreative director,u201D and in any case he hardly seems the type to have originated the idea for the movie. Having been released from jail – where he was serving a sentence for bank fraud – barely a month before filming started, Nakoula was hardly in a position to undertake such a project. Chances are he was recruited by someone else, the real originator and driving force behind Innocence – but who is that someone?

Public records show a filming permit was taken out by u201CMedia for Christ,u201D an outfit run by one Joseph Nasrallah Abdelmasih. His group sponsors Christian programming in Arabic, including u201CThe Way,u201D a production that has featured such prominent Islamophobes as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. The Geller-Spencer collaboration goes back to the protests against the New York City u201CGround Zerou201D mosque in which the duo achieved national notoriety: Nasrallah was one of the speakers at their rally. The idea for just such a movie as Innocence showed up on Geller's blog in February, in a post entitled u201CA Movie About Muhammad: An Idea Whose Time Has Come.u201D Ali Sina, an ex-Muslim and board member of Geller and Spencer's u201CStop the Islamization of Nations,u201D exhorted Geller's readers to support his movie project:

u201CThe movie shows Muhammad's raids, plunders, massacres, rapes, assassinations and other crimes. A small subtitle in the lower right corner of each scene will give reference to the source of the story. This movie is entirely factual. Wherever possible, I copied the Quran, the Sira and the Hadith verbatim. It is a riveting story. Truth about Muhammad is more shocking than fiction.

u201CThe world does not know Islam. What is known is a watered down and euphemized version of it that has no bases [sic] in reality. The truth is that Muhammad was a cult leader, much like Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara and Charles Manson. Unlike them he succeeded because there was no central power in the seventh century Arabia to stop him.

u201CThe other good news is that I have been promised a substantial angel financing. I have been daydreaming about this movie for ten years. It was this promise that prompted me into action. I put everything aside for five months, read everything I could about my protagonist, selected the most salient episodes and wrote the script.

u201CThe seed is now sown. Now it's time to nurture it. What I need is an experienced executive producer, someone who shares my values, to make it happen with professionalism and missionary zeal.

u201CI am not thinking of a high budget movie, but given the subject matter, it can become one of the most seen motion pictures ever. (Recall Danish cartoons?)u201D

This may or may not be the same movie as Innocence, but what's important here is that the idea of such a provocation – u201Crecall Danish cartoons?u201D – was percolating in these circles when the movie was in production.

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Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

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Americans are baffled: why oh why are Muslims up in arms over a YouTube video, one which no one in America even knew about prior to the attack on our Libyan consulate and the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens? Having abandoned their own religion sometime in the last century or so, they just don't understand why someone would get all hopped up over a little thing like blasphemy – after all, all one has to do is turn on the TV or view the latest Madonna music video and you'll get a full dose of it.

Of course, this isn't true for everyone: in Flyover Country, the rubes still persist in the faith of their fathers, and our elites pander to that whenever they must. However, the Georgetown cocktail party circuit and the world of the Washington power brokers isn't a notably devout milieu: it is instead decidedly secular, and tinged with more than a little contempt for those Flyover Folks who must be pandered to around election time.

This is one major reason for Washington's incomprehension when it comes to understanding the wave of hatred for the US currently sweeping the Middle East. That complete cluelessness is endemic, too, in the US media, where reporters are no different than the elites they cover in their militantly secular outlook. So when a deliberately insulting video depicting the prophet Mohammed goes out over the internet, after its makers made a determined effort to get Muslims to view it, they scratch their heads and say they just don't get it.

Even as the protests spread, they insist it just can't be about what Muslim protesters say it's about: it's all just a u201Cflimsyu201D excuse, as Reason magazine editor Matt Welch told u201Cnational security Democratu201D Heather Hurlburt. The US response, he went on to aver, was u201Cnot a robust statement of American values.u201D It was, instead, u201Ckick me, pleaseu201D rhetoric from a spineless Obama administration. This is a fair summation of the general right-wing response to the crisis, limning the Romney campaign, and over at the Weekly Standard the neocons concur:

u201CWhat we have seen unfold in the Middle East over the last week is what distinguishes the region's societies from our own. The protests in Cairo and Benghazi were not really about the film, the preacher, or Muslim sensitivities. They were an exercise in raw power politics, partly aimed at intramural rivals in the Arab political sphere, but mainly against the United States.u201D

Like Welch, the Standard found attempts by the White House to remind YouTube of its terms of service agreement u201Cappalling.u201D Like Welch, the magazine claims the protests are about something other than what the protesters themselves say they're about. This view isn't limited to the political right, however: it's just what Rachel Maddow and some other Deep Thinkers on the left have been saying. Forget the video, we're told: it's not about that. It was all a pre-planned carefully-thought-out al-Qaeda operation, in effect another 9/11 – maybe not as spectacular, but hey it happened on the same day. Now that the administration is denying this, however, I bet we'll be hearing much less about that particular theory from Rachel and the other partisan shills at MSNBC.

In any case, the Standard is right about one thing: the riots now threatening the security of US diplomats throughout the Muslim world do indeed dramatize what distinguishes the region's societies from our own, and it's all about the role of religion in society.

Yes, I know, it's hard to believe: how could any civilized person take seriously the impulse to achieve transcendence and find meaning in the universe besides the pursuit of pleasure, fame, and money? I mean, really! How primitive can you get? Didn't that kind of superstition go out with corsets, free silver, and the horse and buggy?

A society in which blasphemy is impermissible is inconceivable to the warlords of Washington, who, after all, live in the same society you and I do: one in which religion is increasingly pushed to the margins and regarded by the country's elites with ill-concealed contempt. It's a culture in which gays want to get married, straights are setting records for divorce, and the way to appeal to women in an election year is to make it easier for them to kill their unwanted babies. It is, in short, a culture so far removed from the u201Cmedievalu201D world of our recently conquered Middle Eastern satraps that the distance can only be measured in centuries rather than mere miles.

In the modern world, physical distance is no barrier to empire-building on the other side of the globe: however, this only exacerbates the problems created by the incalculable cultural distance between Washington, D.C., and the somewhat run-down suburb of Benghazi, in Libya, where a mob took the lives of four Americans.

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Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.

The Best of Justin Raimondo