On the twentieth anniversary of America’s neocon invasion of Iraq, I wonder if anyone has asked John Howard on the NSW hustings, what he thinks of all of that now. Famously, Howard didn’t wish Australia to be a “70 or 80 per cent” ally of the USA in its time of 9/11 crisis, but, as Mark Steyn (also a supporter of the war on terror in the early aughts) now suggests, with hindsight, he could never now support a foreign military intervention by a nation without strategic goals, clueless about its objectives, and lacking a pathway to military victory. Many of us are now far less enamoured of the USA than we once were. The late leftist, albeit always a quirky one, Christopher Hitchens, was also a supporter of the “war on terror”. I wonder, if he were alive today, whether he, like Steyn, would have cause to reflect on it all, and to cringe a little.
Tony Blair and George Bush are regularly called “war criminals” by many, and not only by opponents the left.
https://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-bush-blair/index.html
We can all remember “Bush lied, people died”. Both of these things turned out to be true, unfortunately. History has been far kinder to Howard. (The Greens did ask the current Liberal leader, Peter Dutton, to say sorry for the Iraq War, and no apology has, so far, been forthcoming; rather, Michaelia Cash defended the decision, clearly sticking to the old Nationals warrior Ian Sinclair’s maxim, “never apologise”. Most famously, Sinclair never apologised for once comparing Bob Hawke to Charles Manson).
Perhaps America’s inability ever to win a war these days is the reason they are getting other people to do the fighting now, as we see in Ukraine. They just provide the money and weapons. A case of strategic out-sourcing.
(Incidentally, at least some observers, such as Paula Jardine at TCW Defending Freedom, have demonstrated that the apparatus for the Covid State, especially the vaccine program, actually emerged, almost fully formed, from the time of the war on terror, and featured many of the same bad actors within America’s deep state).
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/anatomy-of-the-sinister-covid-project-part-4/
The occasion of the Iraq War anniversary is a useful time to reflect on the way in which issues of great moment can cause fundamental political and ideological re-alignments. For example, one of the great divides now among conservatives in America is over the Washington war machine’s “endless wars”. The libertarian wing of the American conservative movement, exemplified by Ron and Rand Paul, has always been on the side of isolationism as the default foreign policy position. As Tom Woods notes about Paul Sr:
It's funny how many positions Ron Paul was pilloried and ridiculed for that have since become things "everybody knows."
Dr. Paul was a crank and a traitor for not supporting the war in Iraq. Now, everyone but the most bitter dead-ender admits what a horror show that was.
Yep. The paleo-conservatives at The American Conservative, led by Patrick Buchanan, were never supporters of the Iraq or Afghanistan wars or any of the other recent US foreign entanglements either. TAC is remembering the Iraq War this week:
Monday [last] marks the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It is easy to forget with what monolithic enthusiasm the conservative movement endorsed the Bush administration’s push to overthrow Saddam Hussein and democratize Iraq—and how much has changed in the two decades that followed.
On February 10, 2003, readers of the Weekly Standard were greeted with triumphant predictions from columnist Max Boot. The impending invasion of Iraq, Boot assured readers, would be a smashing success. “In all likelihood, Baghdad will be liberated by April,” Boot wrote, “It may mark the moment when the powerful antibiotic known as democracy was introduced into the diseased environment of the Middle East, and began to transform the region for the better.”
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-iraq-war-at-twenty/
Oops. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
The USA’s “endless wars” are also the subject of a strange new tendency, started by the old feminist leftie and now a heroine of the Covid dissident movement, Naomi Wolf, to say sorry to your erstwhile ideological opponents for supporting earlier policies that you now realise were major blunders and/or morally wrong. This is not the Ian Sinclair way.
(Naomi Wolf’s heartfelt apology was to conservatives for not believing the innocent explanation of the 6 January 2021 “invasion” of the US capital building.
Steve Deace at The Conservative Review has “come out”:
I believe in finding the victory in any situation. Perhaps that is especially true when apologizing.
So here I am, prostrating myself before God and country, Naomi Wolf-style. In fact, I see her humility and I am inspired to follow her example. I’ve learned my lesson. I wish to be made clean. And here’s the kicker: I have liberals to thank for it.
They were stone-cold right about stuff like forever wars and corporate greed.
https://www.conservativereview.com/deace-dear-liberals-im-sorry-2659613232.html
Here is Tom Woods, again, on Deace:
He now describes the war in Iraq as the greatest foreign-policy disaster of our lifetimes, and the Covid response as the greatest domestic disaster.
He is co-author of a new book called Rise of the Fourth Reich: Confronting COVID Fascism With a New Nuremberg Trial, So This Never Happens Again.
And Tucker Carlson of Fox News has his own regrets about Iraq:
"I've spent my whole life in the media," said Carlson. "My dad was in the media. That is a big part of the revelation that's changed my life: the media are part of the control apparatus."
"Not only are they part of the problem," he continued, "but I spent most of my life being part of the problem, defending the Iraq war. I actually did that.... I've had a million regrets not being more skeptical, calling people names when I should have listened to what they were saying.... For too long I participated in the culture where I was like, anyone who thinks outside these pre-prescribed lanes is crazy, is a conspiracy theorist. And I just really regret that.
Yes, indeed. And we can see that Tucker Carlson’s awakening is double-barrelled. It is about both futile wars AND the role of the media as agents of narrative-support, aka propaganda. Tom Woods notes, in relation to Carlson’s awakening and to the media:
He sure seems to be figuring things out.
It is one of the purposes of the media to cultivate a range of allowable opinion that is safe for the existing regime. Anything outside that range is by definition "extremist," "bigoted," etc.
For instance, you can favor whatever crazed military intervention the uniparty engages in, no matter how transparently self-serving the alleged rationale, no matter how many millions of people are killed or displaced, and that is not extremist at all. No problemo. Why, if Mitt Romney and Chuck Schumer both favor it, it must be wonderful!
But if you think there might be something wrong with this, that there's something weird or sinister about the bipartisan apparatus that supports this crap, or the propaganda that tricks poorly read conservatives into thinking that cheering for the empire is the patriotic thing to do, then you are the extremist, dear reader.
It isn’t only attitudes to military entanglements that have created new alliances.
Just like the latter-day conservatives’ contrition over their former support of what turned out to be unjust and unprofitable wars, corporate greed, too, has brought into being fresh fissures and new ideological alliances. Many conservatives, especially social and cultural conservatives, now see far more clearly than before, and find abhorrent, big business’s greed, its embrace of all things woke, its powerful reach into all of our lives, its abandonment of any semblance of customer service. Not to mention its desire to remake the world and democratic nations. Equally sinister is the ever-growing crony capitalism we observe everywhere – seen now most clearly in the “public-private partnership” and “stakeholder capitalism” global governance model of the World Economic Forum and its corporate partners like Larry Fink of BlackRock.
Other left-liberals, or at least those decidedly not of the right, like online podcast stars Russell Brand, Joe Rogan and Glenn Greenwald, haven’t necessarily apologised for earlier positions, but they have evolved in response to new developments and these days break bread with those on the right who have turned against the capitalist model that now confronts us. Other, local, straws in the wind are the metamorphosis of One Nation’s Mark Latham, from Labor leader to anti-woke, pro-fossil fuel crusader; the embrace of social democracy by social conservatives (like those who created Compact magazine and the brand new Republican Senator from Ohio, JD Vance); the sterling efforts on behalf of Covid freedom by the old leftie American playwright, CJ Hopkins and the liberal journalist Alex Berenson; and the emergence in Britain of Left Lockdown Sceptics as the mirror image of Toby Young’s right-of-centre version. There is a shared love of free speech and a loathing of cancel culture that is often at the heart of the new partnership. This version of the left actually cherishes freedom!
https://real-left.com/
(Mark Latham, of course, would correctly point out that it isn’t him who has changed; it is his former Party).
This new finding of common cause – on some issues, at least – with former ideological opponents has been given massive impetus by the coming of Covid totalitarianism.
The astonishing inability of most on the left to see the irony in its current rabid support for the smashing of civil liberties (and free speech in particular) in the name of Big Pharma’s corporate greed and power has taken us all by surprise. Or to see the irony of standing idly by, without demur, over the last three years, while watching the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in human history. The modern left has shown itself to be quite comfortable with neoliberalism, great wealth disparities, and the abandonment of the working class that the left sees now as simply “deplorable”. As racist, sexist, homophobic and all the rest of it.
The Covid State has been a far bigger disaster than any of America’s recent military and foreign policy blunders. For here, Western Governments declared war on their own people, and waged it relentlessly and without remorse. With biological weapons (aka poisonous injectables). With propaganda. With the imprisonment of citizens in their own homes. With psychological warfare. With wartime lies. With police batons and rubber bullets. With the use of financial instruments for totalitarian purposes. With quarantine camps for the internment of deplorables. Camps that cost Australian taxpayers billions. Just as all the Jobkeeper scams cost billions. Just as lockdowns have delivered us a global cost-of-living and supply chain crisis.
Fauci lied, people died. And not only Fauci. The retiring head of Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration, John Skerritt, once said that the Covid vaccines were safe and effective. 95 per cent, to be exact. He may even have believed it. As did Joe Biden. Boris Johnson. Daniel Andrews. The Chinese Communist Party. The World Health Organisation. Bill Gates. Pope Francis. And the rest of the vaccine industrial complex, or what some, at least, have called the Covid criminal class. The Uniparty. The vaccines were only ever experimental, and never shown to be safe or effective. Pfizer has been caught lying about the clinical trials. Lockdowns were only ever imposed to keep people frightened until the vaccines arrived. People died because of the lockdowns, too. This has been industrial scale prevarication. It all makes the Bush-Blair weapons of mass destruction frolic of to decades ago this week look like a walk in the park.
Where are the Covid apologies? It is long past time for the Covid equivalent of a Naomi Wolf-Steve Deace effort by the Covid perpetrators. Meantime, many of us are finding comfort in our new best buddies, people who we would formerly have refused to watch, read or listen to, let alone be cheering on. New times, new friends. As JM Keynes once famously said, “when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” Well, I suppose many of us have come to recognise that left versus right is no longer the main game. It is the globo-cap rulers (them) versus the ruled (us).
Mark Steyn, when recently interviewing Naomi Wolf, asked her if she felt ideologically “homeless”, having lost many of her friends of many decades over her Covid dissidence and her finding common cause with the likes of Steyn.
https://www.steynonline.com/12900/naomi-wolf-a-steyn-show-special
No, she said, she merely felt ashamed that she once regarded as friends people who could defend the actions of those now doing lethal harms to their own citizens. Indeed.
Despite all of the cover-ups and the non-apologies, and the endless media-driven narrative that we are in business-as-usual mode – just ponder the ho-hum coverage of the current and recent, elections across Australia – and that anyone who thinks differently is a nut-case, we are, in reality, not living in normal times.
Paul Collits
24 March 2023
There is much wisdom in hindsight. A study of history is highly recommended for all, young and old, but seldom taken up.
Regret for past mistakes is sobering but is this sobriety translated into making sensible decisions in the here and now? Far too often hubris and naked self interest govern thinking and action.
I see this tendency in the increasing opposition to supporting Ukraine, mainly in the USA but also here. Maybe applying the KISS principle is in order. Putin and fellow traveler Xi, at bottom, are common thieves - what is mine is mine, what is yours is mine. Is it only when a thief strikes at us that we act?
A lingering odor of the Bush,Blair,Howard era is present here in Australia. While the USA had ample reason to destroy Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan the decision to stay and turn the country into a democracy was ignorance and hubris, pure and simple. One does not make a silk purse out of a sows ear. The likes of Howard et al sent many honest and capable men into the country to help achieve that impossible task.
Now there are Afghanistan veterans being charged with war crimes. How many of these useless creatures who are responsible for this persecution have ever been at the sharp end of any war, let alone an insurgency where friend, neutral, foe can be one and the same depending on the circumstances at the time?
This another example of the silly, shameful behavior so prevalent at present in Australia.