(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
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[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Wednesday, March 19, 2003
Some truly vile and ignorant material at NRO today.
It was bad enough when Rod Dreher wondered aloud why there was insufficient public enthusiasm for "nuking" Baghdad, Tehran and Riyadh, "and maybe even Damascus." He drew the line at Mecca, but it was a line Rich Lowry was willing to notionally cross. Never mind that, as per G.W. Bush, our never-ending war is one against "terror" and not Islam, Lowry was certain "few people would die and it would send a signal."
Today the NRO gang can't even bother themselves to take seriously a war which will kill unknown numbers of Iraqis and Americans. Instead of pondering the possibility of mass death, further destabilization, and the moral implications of just what the fuck an unelected president has committed his hapless subjects to, Jonah Goldberg uses the occasion of the commencement of hostilities to find glee:
THIS MUST DRIVE THE LEFT NUTS [Jonah Goldberg]
Now that the decision's been made to use force, the Left-Right/should we-shouldn't we stuff is over. Now it's just one articulate former Army, Navy, Airforce or Marine officer explaining how the war will be fought and -- God willing -- won. We don't see an anti-war activist come on to declare "Wolf, that's simply not the best way to navigate through a mine field."
As if "the left's" opposition to Bush's war were merely a ploy to grab face time on O'Reilly.
Just as pathetic is David Frum's safari to watch the paleocons. It is, alas, a derivative performance, with Frum sputtering at length about hostility to both Israel and America. After ANSWER, the left, the Catholic Church, ad infin, were all conclusively shown to be irredeemably flawed, Frum stalks a novel quarry: conservatives of deficient fealty to state power. The sins of these conservatives are ponderous: "They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror."
While the imbecility of the former charge is patent, the latter requires examination. Frum:
Terror denial: In his column of December 26, 2002, Robert Novak attacked Condoleezza Rice for citing Hezbollah, instead of al-Qaeda, as the world's most dangerous terrorist organization: "In truth, Hezbollah is the world's most dangerous terrorist organization from Israel's standpoint. While viciously anti-American in rhetoric, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah is focused on the destruction of Israel. 'Outside this fight [against Israel], we have done nothing,' Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the organization's secretary-general, said in a recent New York Times interview." The sheik did not say, and Novak did not bother to add, that Hezbollah twice bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, murdering more than 60 people, and drove a suicide bomb into a Marine barracks in October 1983, killing 241 servicemen.
Ignoring the salient fact (which Frum did not bother to add) that Hezbollah piloted precisely zero of the planes on September 11, this excursus on two-decade-old history says what about contemporary Hezbollah? Is this a Lusitania moment? A Gulf of Tonkin moment? posted by Anonymous3:00 PM
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The Watchers
WBW: Keeping track of the war exhortations of the warbloggers.
