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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Where are the laptop bombardiers now? Pick almost any date on the calendar and it'll turn out that the US either started a war, ended a war, perpetrated a massacre or sent its UN ambassador into the Security Council to issue an ultimatum. It's like driving across the American West. "Historic marker, one mile", the sign says. A minute later you pull over and find yourself standing on dead Indians. "On this spot, in 1879 Major T and a troop of US cavalry beat off..." Last Sunday I was in a used-paperback store in a mall in Olympia, Washington, flicking through Tina Turner's side of the story on life with Ike. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, March 18, one day short of the anniversary of US planes embarking on an aerial hunt of Pancho Villa in 1916; of the day the US Senate rejected (for the second time) the Treaty of Versailles in 1920; of the end of the active phase of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2002; of the 10pm broadcast on March 19, 2003, by President GW Bush announcing that aerial operations against Iraq had commenced. My mobile phone rang. It was my brother Patrick, calling from Sulaimaniyah, three hours drive east through the mountains from the Kurdish capital of Arbil in northern Iraq. He gave me a brisk precis of the piece he'd file the next day: every road was lethally dangerous; every Iraqi he met had a ghastly tale to tell of murder, kidnappings, terror-stricken flights, searches for missing relatives. Life was measurably far, far worse for the vast majority of Iraqis than it had been before the 2003 onslaught. Not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died. Not hundreds of thousands but two million have fled the country, mostly to Syria and Jordan. It's the largest upheaval of a population in the Middle East since the Palestinian Naqba of 1948. Saddam dragged his country into ruin. Then the US took it from ruin to the graveyard, plundering the corpse as it did so. There's plenty of blame to go round. You'd think that these days the cheerleaders for war were limited to a platoon of neo-cons, as potent in historical influence as the Knights Templar supposedly were. But it was not so; the coalition of enablers spread far beyond Cheney's team and the extended family of Norman Podhoretz, the founding neo-con who, as editor of Commentary, led the liberal defection into the Reagan camp in the late 1970s. Atop mainstream corporate journalism perch the New York Times and the New Yorker, two prime disseminators of pro-invasion propaganda, written at the NYT by Judith Miller, Michael Gordon and, on the op-ed page, by Thomas Friedman. The New Yorker put forth the voluminous lies of Jeffrey Goldberg and has remained impenitent to this day. The war party virtually monopolised television. AM radio poured out a torrent of war bluster. The laptop bombardiers such as Salman Rushdie were in full war regalia. Among the progressives, the liberal interventionists thumped their tin drums, often by writing pompous pieces attacking the anti-war "hard left". But today, amid Iraq's dreadful death throes, where are the parlour warriors? Sometimes I dream of them - Tom Friedman, Christopher Hitchens (left), Rushdie - like characters in a Beckett play, buried up to their necks in a rubbish dump on the edge of Baghdad, reciting their columns to each other as the local women turn over the corpses to see if one of them is her husband or her son. Liberal interventionism came of age with the onslaught on Serbia. Liberal support for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were the afterglows. Now that night has descended and illusions about the great crusade are shattered for ever, let us tip our hats to those who opposed this war from the start – the real left, the libertarians and those without illusions about the "civilising mission" of the great powers.
Poster Comment: Paging BeAChooser...
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#2. To: scrapper2 (#0)
Liberal interventionism came of age with the onslaught on Serbia. Liberal support for the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq were the afterglows. Now that night has descended and illusions about the great crusade are shattered for ever, let us tip our hats to those who opposed this war from the start – the real left, the libertarians and those without illusions about the "civilising mission" of the great powers. well put! good article, scrapper.
Paging George Washington. We need you, if you can stop spinning in your grave long enough to make an appearance.
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