I did not include Pat-Buchanan-style paleoconservatives on the list of people who are sad about Zarqawi’s death. My apologies to the nutters on the far right, especially the ones who believe that Iran is a better country than the United States. If you are taking up a collection to emigrate, please send me your PayPal account information and I will gladly donate to your cause.
Please note that I am not talking about people who merely disagree with the decision to go to war. But if you think Iran is a harmless, traditional country with great family values, and you write columns called “Is Bush a Sith Lord?“, you are a nut. If you give this blathering nonsense a platform by publishing it, you are irresponsible.
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uh – how do you really feel.
Very well stated and right to the point. I also am willing to help send others to Iran if that is their wish.
Mr. Johnson, ad hominem attacks are not a proper substitute for rational argument.
The simple fact is that my publication, Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, has been warning against the dangers of insurgent Islam for 15 years now—longer and more consistently than any other American publication. Our foreign-affairs editor, Srdja Trifkovic, is the author of two blockbuster best-sellers on the Islamic threat, The Sword of the Prophet—�Islam: History, Theology, Impact on the World and Defeating Jihad: How the War on Terrorism Can Be Won—�In Spite of Ourselves. (Both are available from Amazon.com.)
And, in our April 2002 issue, I wrote a long exposé of a local Muslim school, based on a day that our associate editor Aaron Wolf and I spent there interviewing teachers, administrators, and students. (You can read the article by clicking on my name at the end of this comment.)
And yet we opposed this particular war. Why? Well, in addition to the fact that the guardians of the Faith (with whom you “respectfully disagree”) clearly saw it as failing to meet the criteria for a just war, it is not in the American interest; it does not address the terrorist threat, but in fact distracts us from fighting the real threat effectively; and, while it is not, in fact, being fought against Islam (no matter what some supporters of the war, such as you, wish to believe, in spite of President Bush’s repeated denials), it has galvanized Islamic militants against us. All of that was known or could have been predicted (as we did, in our special February 2003 issue, devoted entirely to the coming war) before the Bush administration launched this war.
Good Heavens. I had no idea Paul Craig Roberts was capable of such fevered talk.
He complains that the neocons “deal in absolutes” of Manichaean good and evil — while Roberts himself compares Bush to evil characters such as the insidious Palpatine and to Anakin Skywalker, who became the über-evil Darth Vader. Tu quoque, Mister.
Scott, criticizing your colleagues for their choice of hats and facial hairstyles would be ad hominem. But describing the certain writers you publish as “nutters” is a fair characterization of their writing: it is unhinged and bears little resemblance to reality. In general, hard-core paleoconservatives are mostly useless in the effort to reform America at home or in confronting our enemies abroad.
As for your efforts to expose Islamic radicalism, I applaud you for your work, and I hope it continues.
I have to correct your misreading of my words: I stated that we are fighting Islamofascism, not Islam. Again, I am sure that someone who deals with words for a living can appreciate the difference. Islam is a religion that takes many forms in many different cultures. Islamofascism is a species of pan-Islamic totalitarianism, embodied by al Qaeda and similar movements.
The United States and its allies will be fighting Islamofascism for the foreseeable future. I believe that destroying two murderous, terrorist-supporting governments was a good place to start. I pray that we can undermine Syria and Iran as well, preferably by supporting reform movements in those countries. This would be a major advance for world peace.
More importantly, Scott: do you or do you not consider President Bush to be a Sith Lord? If you do, how does that affect U.S. relations with other species in our home galaxy?
RC, I was as surprised as you to read Roberts’ rantings. I used to read his column frequently in the Washington Times, and always regarded it as a bastion of economic common sense. He has not made the transition to foreign policy writing very smoothly, to say the least.