Antiwar: What's it good for? And RIP Justin Raimondo

Antiwar activist Justin Raimondo, one of the most vocal voices in opposing not only the Iraq War but the Afghanistan one as well, has died at 67.

Justin was not only antiwar, he was Antiwar as in Antiwar.com, which, as its linked eulogy for him notes, he cofounded in 1995 with Eric Garras.

On Twitter, I noted that he was an "always interesting political thinker and wanderer." And, that he was, though not in ways I'd agree with. Nor do I agree with every antiwar stance of his; I am against more dumb wars than Barack Obama, though I'm not a pacifist.

I was wrong to go along with the mainstream on Afghanistan. Raimondo's successor as editorial director at Antiwar, Scott Horton, in a recent interview with Ken Silverstein, pointed out the options we had there short of a full invasion. Ted Rall is someone else who was right about this.

That said, Raimondo founded the site over Bosnia. And, while non-Serb actors both inside and outside Bosnia were themselves less than perfect, genocide was happening in the Balkans. Just as it was earlier in Rwanda, which we ignored because "darkest Africa." So, I disagree with Raimondo, Alexander Cockburn and others. Could we have done some things better in the Balkans? Yes. Some things without focusing on American empire? Yes. But, we shouldn't have ignored that genocide, nor Rwanda.

Now, that's just the antiwar part of Raimondo.

Outside of that, he was a full nutter, and I'd forgotten that until I wrote this up.

The piece first notes that from childhood, he was a Randian. As in THAT Rand. Ayn Rand. Objectivism.

It adds that he was an anarcho-libertarian in the 1980s.

The piece also notes that he supported Pat Buchanan in all three of his runs for president, in 1992, 1996 and 2000.

You have to have either a high degree of cognitive dissonance or else a high degree of political and personal self-partitioning to be so antiwar-driven that as an uncloseted gay and organizer of libertarian anarchism to support a paleoconservative Catholic (Tridentine mass, maybe even?) who agrees with you on about nothing other than antiwar issues. I mean, Pat is anti-gay, and though Raimondo is not Jewish, Pat's also anti-Semitic and just plain racist. Plus, as a paleocon, as in his take on the Central Park Five, he's perfectly fine with coercive state power if it wears a blue uniform.

So, while I admire the strength of his antiwar activism, and wish that like him, Ted Rall, and some others, I had thought more about Afghanistan as well as Iraq at the time, overall, I shook my head at him for years. Plus, as a Libertarian Radical, I suppose Raimondo supported nutter positions such as people not needing driver's licenses to drive.

That said, Raimondo, and even more, Garras, had Lew Rockwall connections in their political history, too. Here's one sample of Raimondo, and specifically on war issues, being in bed with Rockwell. Garris, like Raimondo, is gay, and like Raimondo, a past backer of Buchanan, too.

Weirder yet, Raimondo jumped from backing Buchanan the last time in 2000 to supporting Ralph Nader in 2004. That said, if you read his defense of that support, you recognize he's at least partially right in calling Nader a "voice of the Old Right."

I know some current or former Greens, like Jeff St. Clair of Counterpunch, were totally butt-hurt at David Cobb getting the nomination in 2004. That said, there was no deck-stacking; it was the bottom-up stacking of state Green Party organizations that was (and still is) the problem. Frankly, outside of nuclear power issues, I don't think Nader was or is all that much of a Green, and he sure as hell isn't an ecosocialist.

Of course, Raimondo had no problem believing in a conspiracy theory or two. Like claiming Trump was a false flag for Hillary Clinton to get elected. We do know she did what she could to help him, but the idea that the Clintons officially, let alone outside forces, "planted" him? Tosh. And, contra Raimondo's "no true Scotsman," the likes of Corey Robin have shown that Trump's in line with much of American conservativism. And Raimondo followed that claim with later butt-kissing Trump. As for his claim that Alexander Litvinenko radioactively poisoned himself? His nuclear smuggling happened six years before he was killed. And Raimondo himself, in a piece linked inside that, noted that Po-210 has a has a half-life of just 138 days.

And, above all, Raimondo, in book length, repeated and developed a version of the canard that Israel knew about 9/11 in advance, while then going on to claim that 9/11 Falsers who claimed the buildings had been rigged to blow up were themselves a false flag. And, from this and other things, he's probably earned his own reputation as anti-Semitic even without taking into consideration his Pat Buchanan endorsements.

Now, the first half of the header?

Ken Silverstein recently interviewed Scott Horton, the current editorial director at Antiwar.com.

Let's call this "interesting," too.

Horton is right on spelling out the options we had to a full invasion of Afghanistan.

He's right on that we shouldn't have entered WWI, but doesn't go into details. (The correct answer is not that all war is bad, but that, beyond the idea that wars fought for vague "national interest" are bad, the US had no compelling national interest in this fight and that Wilson's neutrality was fake.)

Then, he totally jumps the shark by blank-check supporting Robert Stinnett's "Day of Deceit," a Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory book. Beyond the refudiations at the Wiki link, the claims that FDR hoped to use Pearl to lead us to war with Germany as well are refuted by two actual facts.

First, we'd been in an undeclared naval war with Germany for six months before Pearl. I am sure Horton is not that uninformed.

Second, on Dec. 8, 1941, FDR ONLY asked Congress to declare war on Japan. Germany was not mentioned, which left Churchill crestfallen. I am quite sure Horton knows this, too.

Meanwhile, a Google search has Horton claiming in more than one place that he's abandoned conspiracy theories. Really? Corey Robin busted you in a Democratic Party related conspiracy theory just a year ago and nearly a full year after you said you gave up conspiracy theories. Robin has since deleted that Tweet, but Bernhard at Moon of Alabama (himself a nutter in many ways) links to it and quotes it.

That said, to the degree Horton has partially given up conspiracy theories, he's had some doozies of his own invention on his record.

And, through uncritical interviewing of Julian Assange's toady and flunky Craig Murray, he's done his bit to help perpetuate the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.

So, in answer to the rhetorical question: "Antiwar — what's it good for?"

Louis Proyect, kind of a nutter at times himself, warned about right-left or red-black alliances, specifically mentioning Raimondo. He also notes there that Raimondo's god, Murray Rothbard, was a Holocaust denier, or at least, a fellow traveler. No wonder Raimondo and Horton opposed any involvement in even Bosnia.

So, what's Antiwar worth?

Good god, not much.



Oh, and Ken? Respectfully but firmly, speaking of uncritical interviewing? Don't let Horton pass on conspiracy theory bullshit unchallenged in the future.

A new example of why I call myself a #skeptical left-liberal

I do, in terms of US politics at least, consider myself a left-liberal. But, along the likes of Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer, I maintain a healthy skepticism about more wild-eyed economic ideas of some left-liberals. (Henwood was good at shooting down sillier ideas from Occupy Wall Street a year or two ago.)

In the foreign-policy side of things, we have this: Counterpunch Magazine, nuttier than anything that comes from Alternet, Truthout, or similar.

For example, in light of possible intervention in Syria (which I oppose) Jeffrey St. Clair has updated an old piece about Bosnia and Serbia that he co-wrote with the now-deceased founder of Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn.

And, it's over-the-top indeed.

Even if Clinton did oversell some things about Serbian asshattery, nonetheless, having just read an excellent book on the run-up to WWI, "The Sleepwalkers," and another, "Kosovo: A Short History" about 2 years ago, about the history of Serbia/Serbian identity from the famed battle of Kosovo on, I can say bluntly, as I Tweeted St. Clair, that Serbs have been thugs for at least a full century, since the two Balkan Wars of 1912-13. Maybe they didn't resort to (too much? as much?) murder then, but, ethnic cleansing by thuggery short of murder was a regular practice in the new lands they acquired after those two wars.

Noel Malcolm, in his "Short History" of 500 pages, documents that Serbia was doing ethnic cleansing a century ago.  Christopher Clarke, in "Sleepwalkers," ties this in with general Serbian expansionism in the two wars, including refusal to let go of disputed territory when directly confronted by a combination of other Balkan states PLUS Austria-Hungary.

I normally reject the idea of "cultural DNA," but with the people and land of Serbia, I am more than willing to make an exception.

And, if I use "cultural DNA" more loosely, I'm willing to use it about Counterpunch, too.

St. Clair's been wrong in the past on some environmental issues, his putative specialty, because of ax-grinding. Cockburn more than once stuck at least one toe over the line of anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism. Paul Craig Roberts is less of a left-liberal than a non-socialist left-libertarian of some sort with one foot back in David Stockman's world.

At times, while not being anti-American overall, the St. Clair-Cockburn duo do, though, seem to be opposed to any major action of whatever American president/polity is in power "just because." And, the Bosnia story, based on what I've actually read about Serbia, is a tipping point.

Beyond that, the Bosnia-Serbia situation was much more "clear" as far as bad and not-so-bad actors than Syria is. Either St. Clair and Cockburn knew that 20 years ago, or their duplicity is matched by their stupidity.

So, for now, Counterpunch is unlinked from my link list.

Libya - the 'rough beast'

Former Lt. Gen. Robert Dubik has both advice and hindsight on Libya for President Obama. Among the best hindsight, that Juan Cole and other liberal interventionists need to heed, comes from Bosnia, per Dubik, but could also come from Afghanistan or even, to some degree, Iraq, and that is — air power doesn't "win" anything. Libya once again shows that, if not boots, tanks and Bradleys on the ground are necessary.

The advice? If we're not going to pull out or just "avoid losing," then we have to do more, he says:

To give (rebels) a fighting chance, NATO must put military advisers and combat air controllers on the ground — not just British, French and Italian, but also a small number of American ones.

Try selling that to Congress and the American public, Mr. Nobel Peace Prize. Actually, no, let war hawks Lindsey Graham and John McCain go on the sales line first.

Then, let's see the Juan Coles of the world are still so gung-ho about interventionism.

The "rough beast"? Riffing on W.B. Yeats, Libya is part of the Arab gyre of Roger Cohen's focus. And, Bethlehems in the Middle East as birthplaces for world-transforming events are few and far between. The actual site is the birthplace, if anything, to riff on the Arab world, of Israeli perfidy, Palestinian Authority ineptness, corruption and weakness and ... a Hamas threatening to be born with more virulence than ever.

With that in mind, Preznit Kumbaya had better be damned sure he gets different rebels in Libya straightened out before further intervening.

U.S. allegedly protected Karadzic

A Serbian paper is reporting, via AFP, that until 2000, the CIA was on the down low with Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, as long as he withdrew, and kept withdrawn, from political life.

What happened then? He was caught on cell phone talking with old associates.

There’s some HUGE questions to be answered.

1. How high up in the CIA was this known?
2. Who officially signed off on it?
3. And, the biggest, who knew about it outside the CIA? Clinton Administration members could be sitting on a land mine.

Personal refrigerators, coffee makers and microwaves will also be verboten from classrooms if the new policy is adopted.