Peace Party Fellow Travellers

by Milton Batiste
by Milton Batiste

Armed conflicts create many problems. Even people who strongly support a war can be highly critical as far as particular problems are concerned. They may not come to the most obvious conclusion – that the problem could have been avoided if there had been no war – but they will nonetheless be part of the opposition in a broad sense, and thus a potential political threat to the sitting administration.

We can see this happening now. Just take a look at some current developments at WorldNetDaily.

Founded by Joseph and Elizabeth Farah in May 1997, WND is now an important and influential conservative newssite. Antiwar opinions have been expressed by some WND columnists, notably Pat Buchanan, but it would nonetheless be fair to count WND as very much a part of The War Party. This makes some of the recent content on the site all the more interesting.

On July 15 WND published one of their featured "exclusives," titled "Rumsfeld corrects testimony – twice." In the article, Paul Sperry notes that in congressional testimony last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld swore repeatedly that he’d just "days" earlier learned that the uranium charge President Bush made against Iraq six months ago was bogus. Furthermore: "Since then, he’s had to correct the record twice, finally admitting he knew the allegation was false as early as March – less than two months after Bush’s now-controversial State of the Union speech and just before the Iraq war started."

Paul Sperry is Washington bureau chief for WND and also the author of Crude Politics: How Bush’s Oil Cronies Hijacked the War on Terrorism. The book is to be published by WND in August. Here is some information from the pre-order offer:

"Crude Politics: How Bush’s Oil Cronies Hijacked the War on Terrorism makes the unsettling case that the Bush administration, though engaged in an unavoidable and moral war on terror, also tried simultaneously to secure future energy production in the terrorists’ home turf and ended up compromising America’s national security interests."

That sounds like pretty exciting stuff, coming from a pro-war website. I really have no idea, but it is quite possible that Paul Sperry sees himself as a member of the "loyal opposition." Seen from the White House, however, I suspect he would appear as a threat to the war effort. The truth can be a dangerous thing these days, and those who care for it tend to end up on the same side of the fence as the libertarian Peace Party.

July 16, 2003

Milton Batiste (send him mail) lives in Sweden. His website is ONE IS A CROWD.

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