Justin Raimondo’s critics must concede that he’s an exceptional thinker and eloquent commentator. Why else do the animal trainers, who must fear public humiliation if they debate him directly, dispatch their apes instead?
I don’t think we share a lot of views; how to transition from oppressive government to the smallest possible, the right to health care, debts owed – reparations – domestic and international, and several other things including whether the pope has fan-worthy traits. I recently learned that the church demands celibacy of its servants for monetary not doctrinal reasons. If the cruelty of such a tax does not enrage then its consequences should. George W. Bush granted Ratzinger immunity from prosecution in pedophilia cases despite any evidence that he conspired with Rupert Murdoch’s good friend Cardinal Roger Mahoney in prolonging the abuse and suppressing the evidence. View Amy Berg’s “Deliver Us From Evil” and defend those family values.
Raimondo writes in his current editorial for Antiwar.com:
To understand what is going on with the $60 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and a number of small Gulf potentates – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the UAE – we have to go back to Seymour Hersh’s last piece in the New Yorker, “The Redirection,” which revealed, among other things, that the U.S. is funding Sunni radical groups possibly linked to al-Qaeda in Lebanon and in the Eastern reaches of Iran. It’s all part of a new turn in American foreign policy in the Middle East, toward the Sunni “mainstream” and away from our former Shi’ite allies-of-convenience in Iraq.
I believe it was clear the U.S. had no far-fetched plans to shake-up Iran by installing a U.S. friendly, Shia regime in Iraq, when it emerged that U.S. trained death squads were at large in Iraq and Sunni warlords loyal to the Saudi royals were being courted. The reports surfaced around the same time the al Askariya Mosque* was destroyed and the incident was promoted as the start of civil war between the Sunni and Shia. But where do the ideological fault lines lie?
Our current strategy in the Middle East is to forge the Sunni despots into a mighty defensive wall, a Maginot Line, against the rising Shi’ite tide – a tide, you’ll recall, unleashed by the destruction of the Ba’athist regime and the creation of a power vacuum in Iraq that was quickly filled by the majority Shi’ite parties, which had been financed and succored by Tehran for many years. I wouldn’t say this is an unintended consequence of the invasion, because it was so clearly foreseeable that it couldn’t have been accidental: indeed, the principal exponent of “regime change” in Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi, was an Iranian agent, betraying U.S. secrets to Tehran and presumably keeping the mullahs apprised of his progress in gulling the Americans into going along with the war plan.
It has always been the strategy but it required a detour down democracy alley whilst the U.S. set-up shop. I agree chaos was expected, but Chalabi remains free and prosperous. Perhaps the point is to portray him as an Iranian operative, not that he is one. And where is Aras Karim Habib, Chalabi’s scapegoat, suspected by both the CIA and the FBI since the 1990s of being an agent for Iran? He “escaped just before the serving of an arrest warrant.” Who tipped him off?
I believe two things about the Iraq invasion. The government knew the intelligence was phony and the only strategy has been kill everyone who wants the U.S. out. Concern about instability in the midst of this gruesome chaos is a stalling tactic, such as appeasing Turkey by cautioning the KDP over their support for the PKK. The reprimands, if you can call them that, will continue until the Kurds are awarded Kirkuk’s oil “by referendum in Iraq later this year“, adding yet another worthless document to the trash heap and ensnaring countless more people in yet another genocidal death match.
*edited 4 August 2007