Why the Racial Right is Wrong about Iraq

Does it never occur to you that the kind of fanaticism that was displayed in going to war against Iraq is similar to all other progressive plans to remake society?

I don’t think resistance against the Iraq war is out of touch with white values at all. I remember that you singled out “moderation” as a core white value. I did not see much moderation in how the Iraq war was sold to the American public.

“Since the worldview of the anti-war left is rooted in leukophobia, or fear and loathing of the white race, the racial right would have done better to side with pro-war conservatives, who fought manfully against the leukophobic interpretation of America.”

That is a ridiculous argument. The racial right should side with those who have the best arguments.

When you started this website, it was clear that you were still bitter about your experience at AR. You moved beyond that and published a lot of interesting articles. Unfortunately, this piece is not among them. Stick to what you are good at!

Iraq under Saddam was indeed a brutal, kleptocratic, and unfree dictatorship.

Yes, but Saddam Hussein was a modernist, technologically inclined, and non-religious dictator. If your goal is to take out Islamic fundamentalism, then Saddam is your ally. He was the Stalin of the middle east. I don’t view Saddam as Islamic. I view him as modern.

Unlike Duke and Buchanan, I do not blame Jews for the war. I recognize Jews as allies against the war. It’s more that I genuinely think Saddam was doing the best he could to fix a broken country. His violence was necessary to rule over that country. Democracy doesn’t work in the middle east. It’s either a strong secular government, or you regresses into the taliban.

The racial right is so reflexively hostile to liberalism that any enthusiasm about advancing democracy, freedom, and human rights incurs their wrath.

This is true. And I think they are right. I have no goals to advance democracy for people who it doesn’t fit with. It just doesn’t work.

Haven’t commented in a long time, but here goes.

Three cheers, kudos, hip, hip, horay for this column Ian!

In years of trying to post some sense at Amren, I could not get such comments in. (Well, once I got away with calling Roberts nuts)Try to defend Republicans,…. don’t get posted.

When VDARE began, I read it every day like a religion. I’m the guy who(years and years ago)wrote Peter Brimelow an email about the disturbance, threats and cave-in at my daughter’s high school,by Puerto Ricans, due to a talent show performance of “America” from “West Side Story”. He printed much of my letter and was gracious in his little note to me. I lived and breathed VDARE.

Some time after Sam Francis tragic death, VDARE “pundit” Paul Craig Roberts began his decent into madness, dragging VDARE and Brimelow after him. From a man writing brilliantly about economic nationalism and the madness of legal and illegal immigration, he tragically decended into his own madness. Suddenly, everybody was a “Jacobin”. He went off his rocker.

This was tragic, first and ever so sadly, because it discredited everything he had previously written (some of which had been important). But foremost, it tragicly brought discredit on VDARE. I can rarely bear to read VDARE anymore. I have wanted to contribute money, but Roberts precludes me. I know Bimelow hates to fire people because of his own Pope Buckley (another nut) firing and ostracism from mainstream conservatism, when Chairman Bill (for a few horrid years) turned “conservatism” against immigration restriction.

I must conclude, however, that at this point, such an aversion to firing someone is no excuse. Roberts should go, no ifs, ands, or buts.

That said, I believe that the Iraq war was probably a strategic and political mistake:

It was a strategic mistake because it hinders our military latitude in dealing with the far greater threat of an Iranian A-Bomb. Saddam was contained and could have been bombed into submission (to allow full inspection and stop shooting at our planes) It was a political disaster because, when no WMD were found, white voters turned on the very Republicans who had come fully around to our side on immigration. G.W.Bush’s Iraq war has been a political disaster for conservatism.

However…. having said the above, it is clear that the US had EVERY right to invade Iraq. Saddam’s aggression against Kuwait ended in his capitulation and agreement to terms with the UN and the US that he repeatedly violated blatently. He DID seek yellowcake uranium, and in fact, an enormous stockpile of it has been found and sent to America for disposal.He contimuoulsly shot at our planes, an act of war. He would still be in power if he had simply complied with inspection, but, as Pat Buchanan is fond of saying of Hitler, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

As to Buchanan and the other racial rightists opposition to the first Gulf War, what was the US to do? Were we to sit idle. Saddam, having overpowered and raped Kuwait, then massed his armor and other forces on the border of Saudi Arabia and waited to see if the world would do anything about it. Buchanan acts like, “who cares who controls Arabian oil”. Such thinking is simply blind, appeasing madness, and I am done with defending it or making excuses for it. It simply will not do. BOTH President Bushes had every right to invade Iraq and dispose of Saddam Hussein (even if I fear that history may record the second Gulf War to have been a strategic error).

So then it is all academic then, is it not? We are there and we MUST WIN !!!!!

This nation, as I once said on Amren, cannot afford another Viet Nam type loss to tin horn punks. But, you say, “The VietNamese Communists were not tin horn punks” Oh really. Could they really have survived an ALL-OUT, WORLD WAR TWO style war of utter conquest against North Viet Nam. About as long as Saddam’s forces did, they would have survived. The nation that had just defeated the mighty Japanese Empire (and the Japs would have gone through Ho Chi Mehn like crap through a tin horn)while simultaneouly fighting an overwhelming second front battle against Hitler’s jugernaught war machine (that would have gone through Ho….), had no business allowing its internal leftist wreckers to make it lay down its national and racial pride as a people.

Mr. Jobling writes,

The racial right is so reflexively hostile to liberalism that any enthusiasm about advancing democracy, freedom, and human rights incurs their wrath.

One explanation for their wrath: the racial right happens to be on the Right. “Human rights” are just the latest, most noxious incarnation of the “Rights of Man,” which have been opposed by conservatives from Burke and Maistre on down.

Words such as “democracy” and “freedom” are guaranteed crowd-pleasers, but in their concrete sense as used today they refer to what one 20th-century right-wing theorist called “mass democracy.” Once again, this has been consistently criticized or opposed by many (not all) on the Right. But even those who support American-style mass democracy understand that it’s a particular cultural and perhaps racial phenomenon, not for universal export. Of course there are “conservatives” such as Bush and Rice who buy into the whole human-rights worldview, but they’re out of touch with the conservative tradition.

On the racial right being out of touch with its desired constituency, well, what’s new? That’s obviously its most serious problem, and it demands a rhetorical approach which no one on the racial right, not even Pat Buchanan, has so far been willing to take. But that point shouldn’t be confused with the question of whether the racial right’s position on Iraq is right or wrong.

The IRAQ war is a “Bridge over the River Kwai”. There is nothing happening over there that is more of a threat to us than the mexican invasion or the impending economic disaster. Ian, I could agree with every point you make and still not agree with this war. What are we doing over there? - WMDs? - Making the world free for democracy? - Oil? - Making a better country for Iraqi’s? - Stopping them there instead of here (Can’t they go around us?)

While you have refuted those against the war you have not made a valid case for the war.

You have written many articles warning us of the current dangers such as,leukophobia, multiculturalism, the diminution of western culture, our eventual displacement. How does this war assist us in any of these dangers and is it not the biggest distraction to solving our actual problems?

I revised this article substantially this morning because I realized that I misstated my thesis in the original version. The original thesis was that the racial right should have supported the Iraq War, a claim that distracts readers from my real point and is not justified by the article. In reality, the body of the article made a much narrower, stronger, and more precise point, which the original thesis distorted. What I was really trying to say was that the racial right should appreciate the value of pro-war conservative commentary rather than rejecting it out of hand as Jewish treason because pro-war conservatives are the enemy of our enemy. As my revisions make clear, this thesis does not take on the massive and complicated question of whether the war was justified or not.

Here is my revised thesis paragraph:

The racial right’s position on the war is, in my view, a mistake, not merely because it rests on extravagant and poorly supported assumptions about the extent of Jewish power, but also because it causes the racial right to side with its enemies. Since the worldview of the anti-war left is rooted in leukophobia, or fear and loathing of the white race, the racial right ought to be able to appreciate the value of pro-war conservative commentary, which manfully opposes leftist leukophobia. Such an appreciation does not necessarily entail endorsing the war—-the debate about the legitimacy of the war is a complex one, with much to be said for both sides. Rather, my thesis is that we should value the perspective of pro-war conservatives because the enemy of our enemy is, to a certain extent at least, our friend.

I revised other parts of the article to make them conform to this new thesis statement. That’s why I love internet publishing! No version of anything I write has to be final.

Anyway, it would be nice if Julia, William Hope, and the rest of my critics would revise their opinions of this article, as they were attacking its original thesis.

The racial right’s position on the war is, in my view, a mistake, not merely because it rests on extravagant and poorly supported assumptions about the extent of Jewish power, but also because it causes the racial right to side with its enemies. Since the worldview of the anti-war left is rooted in leukophobia, or fear and loathing of the white race, the racial right ought to be able to appreciate the value of pro-war conservative commentary, which manfully opposes leftist leukophobia. Such an appreciation does not necessarily entail endorsing the war—-the debate about the legitimacy of the war is a complex one, with much to be said for both sides. Rather, my thesis is that we should value the perspective of pro-war conservatives because the enemy of our enemy is, to a certain extent at least, our friend.

Your own article shows that the “values” of the pro-war right are based on racial liberalism and one world humanism.

Of course, the pro-war conservatives never made their appeal to and defense of white racial identity explicit. Indeed, these conservatives view racial liberalism, with its suicidal excesses of tolerance, as one reason to take pride in America.

Read that again. You say they never made their appeal to white racial identity explicit (implying that it exists right below the surface) but then go on in the very next sentence to say that suicidal racial liberalism is one of the core beliefs of the pro war crowd!

Pro-white intellectuals could have explained that whites’ love for Western values is probably rooted in their distinctive biology and that the values of non-whites are very different.

No, they couldn’t, because the case for spreading democracy in the middle east rests on a completely opposite set of assumptions.

As far as the enemy of our enemy being our friend that’s obviously not always the case. I have no doubt that the anti-war crowd misjudges our motives and that their opposition is based on their inherent hatred of whites. But so what? Let’s say Bush orders an invasion of the South Pole in order to catch bigfoot. Thousands of soldiers die and the country becomes bankrupt. Do we support the adventure because Michael Moore opposes it and claims that the army exploits minorities?

No, we would both oppose Michael Moore and his anti-white agenda and be upset at the lives and treasure lost for no reason at all.

All this stuff about loyalty to the “enemy of our enemy” would make perfect sense if race realists had real political power, say if we made up a large voting bloc in one of the two major parties. We don’t, though. We’re not forming political alliances and coalitions because we’re not a player. Since our theory and praxis consist entirely of words, not votes in Congress or demonstrations on the street, we have the luxury of agreeing with our “enemies” whenever they say or do something right and disagreeing with our “friends” whenever they say or do something wrong. In other words, no permanent friends or enemies. We’re not important enough for that.

I think the racial right seems to want Iraq and Afghanistan to fail because they see good propaganda value in non-white failure. Setbacks in Iraq are just more evidence that non-whites are completely uncivilised and therefore must be completely separated from. Horrific suicide bombings and crowds chanting death to America is preferable in their opinion to seeing Iraqi cops shoulder to shoulder with American GI’s and seeing Iraq returning to normalcy because they fear that if nation building in Iraq succeeds it will justify multiculturalism at home.

Whenever, famines, epidemics, natural disasters or oppresion occurs in the third world there is never any call to do something about it but an almost grim satisfaction over non-white suffering and a feeling of well they deserved it anyway for kicking us whites out.

Emphasising the negative characteritics of non-whites, whilst ignoring the positive characteristics of whites only leads to a perception that racial realism is driven by hatred of non-whites.

On a practical level I think the origins of the Iraq war is now a question for academics and the real question is not should we invade Iraq - that happened 5 years ago! But what should we do about Iraq now? I am all for staying to defeat the insurgency and hand over to the Iraqi’s the keys to a closely supervised liberal democratic Iraq, with the implicit understanding if they mess it up we’ll be back.

“Such ranting is standard fare for Roberts, who began a column published earlier this year as follows:

It is 1939 all over again. The world waits helplessly for the next act of naked aggression by rogue states. Only this time the rogue states are not the Third Reich and Fascist Italy. They are the United States and Israel. It’s a disgrace that VDARE goes on publishing this psychotic.”

This is the point. Whence comes this kind of demented ranting, the kind of vile diatribe more appropriate to the 1960’s insane left or today’s insane Jimmy Carter/Moveon.org, Isreal hating left?

Whence this visceral hatred of Israel? From reason? Don’t make me vomit.

Pro war conservatives are our FRIENDS. It is they who oppose at least illegal immigration, not the anti-war left. It is they who oppose Jihad and MAKE WAR ON IT, not the anti-war left. It is they who oppose hate crimes laws, not the anti-war left(and not Bush 1 or 2).

I’m writing about people who disagree with and confront Bush over his leftism, but have favored and still favor the Iraq war. They are the enemy of our enemy, IN THE REAL WORLD - IN THE WORLD OF REAL POLITICS, WHERE REAL WORLD CHANGES HAPPEN.

No, they are perhaps not Burkean, patrician conservatives. They have swallowed the equality cool aid. But don’t be too sure that they have swallowed it fully. I hear a LOT of skepticism in regards to egalitarianism from these people. Oh yeah, there are warmed over liberals like Bennett and other Neo-cons. But there is still a very strong anti-egalitarian underpinning to mainstream conservatism.

One can oppose the DECISION to go to Iraq (as I do) and not go insane. Nothing can be built on madness.

“But there is still a very strong anti-egalitarian underpinning to mainstream conservatism.”

There is a very strong anti-egalitarian underpinning among mainstream conservative Republican voters. But among the talking head and think tank “conservative” class - such as George Will, National Review, Human Events, etc - they are essentially court eunuchs in the pallace of DC liberalism.

Its a shame there is no serious alternative conservative viewpoint in opposition to the Beltway Republican class, aside from the spiritually defeated and elderly paleos, but that is where we are.

Good piece. The anti-American rants of people like Paul Craig Roberts and Justin Raimondo make for absolutely lamentable reading.

Steve Burton

What’s Wrong With the World

We should value the perspective of pro-war conservatives because the enemy (pro-war conservatives) of our enemy (radical muslims) is, to a certain extent at least, our friend.

• If this is true then -

We should value the perspective of anti-war conservatives because the enemy (anti-war conservatives) of our enemy (radical leukophobics) is, to a greater extent at least, our friend.

Note that there is an anti-white element to support of the war. Some would like Whites to be forced to clean up every third world mess or disaster in the world. We must be the compassionate “giver” laying his coat over every puddle so the world may pass.

Some even want us to clean up the mess twice. Simon writes, I am all for staying to defeat the insurgency and hand over to the Iraqi’s the keys to a closely supervised liberal democratic Iraq, with the implicit understanding if they mess it up we’ll be back.

So we have to surrender trillions of dollars in money and lives to give an ungrateful people a democracy on a silver plate. And if they drop the plate we are expected to come and give them a nice, fresh one all over again. And a liberal one at that.

Please take another look at this. Read about the program committing the United States to spending up to $48 billion to fight AIDS in africa. Some say Reagan won the cold war by making the enemy “outspend” themselves. This is what is being done to our country.

For an experiment it would be interesting for the following poll to be placed on the site. Should U.S. troops be removed from Iraq and placed on our southern border to protect us from the illegal alien invasion?

Although I supported the war at its outset I think we can regard it as a strategic blunder. Iraq simply posed little threat to the vital interests of the United States. Dr. Greg Cochran is one of very few people to correctly determine the extent of the Iraqi WMD program before the war (almost non-existent). To assert that Iraq posed no threat to the US and simultaneously state that Iraq was a grave threat to Israel is preposterous, yet that seems to be the assertion of some people. Sometimes we are just plain wrong… How long shall we continue in this misadventure? How long shall Iran continue to enrich uranium and breed plutonium in a heavy water reactor?

Mr. Jobling,

did you also support the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia? After all, according to Western propaganda, this campaign was conducted to instill “democracy” and “human rights” in the Serbs’ collective psyche. No matter that thousands of innocent Europeans died in the process…

“they are essentially court eunuchs in the pallace of DC liberalism.”

They are, indeed, with regard to racial liberalism: i.e., they reject what we know to be true,that race is not a social construct, that racial diferences in IQ and personality are real.

That is different than believing in “equality of outcomes”, that all humans have about the same abilities or at least deserve to have government enforce “fairness”. (This is Marxism: “From each, according to his ability, to each, according to his need.”)

Even weenies like George Will reject that kind of egalitarianism. The radio talking heads (Limbaugh, Ingraham, and ALL the rest)strongly reject and despise such Marxism.

That is the anti-egalitarian underpinning that I mean. They do not believe that all men are created equal as to abilities or capacity to succeed. They believe in so called equal oportunity. They opine that it’s all the fault of those greedy white teachers unions (but even Peter Brimelow wrote a book along those lines). Or it’s a lack of fatherhood, or it’s the welfare state. All of which, by the way, are PARTLY true.

However, I notice them even question so called “non-descrimination” (i.e., airport security or other “racial profiling”).

These are our political bretherin, though unquestionably blind to the harsher realities of human differences. It is our job to inform and convince them through the only means that holds any hope of getting their ear: SANE REASON.

Some general comments about the essay, as amended.

1) The term “Racial Right” as a category of discourse has some problems. No one I know calls themselves a member of the “Racial Right.” It is true that I don’t know people in the fringes, but I’ve never seen this term used as a self-identifying label.

2) The term “Racial Right” can also be misleading as it suggests that it represents a slice of the old French-style right wing, while it is utterly clear that someone can oppose Gulf War II from the left, middle, or right of any overall political philosophy. There is no way to predict how an opponent of Gulf War II would feel about a parcel tax in his school district, about offshore drilling, or about gay marriage.

3) The term “Racial Right” suggests that it is an element of the right-wing of American politics, but a close look will reveal that it exists on another level altogether. Racial politics or rhetoric doesn’t really exist in a direct link with the older left and right. And it appears that the “Racial Right” is growing in response to the kinds of discrimination and defamation supported by groups of people of color, not to mention claims of competing nationalism or tribalism.

3) It appears that no one has mentioned that it is the young diverse white American men who are paying the highest prices for the war —- they are seriously over-represented among the disabled and killed service men in Iraq. It seems to me that this would be the number one problem for a “Racial Right” —- the destruction of so many genetic lines and future generations of the best and bravest white Americans. If there is a racial problem, this is the largest of all the possible problems —- just as it was in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and Gulf War I. American wars murder young diverse white American men first, foremost, and very disproportionally.

4) One comment that needs close examination is, “In constructing this narrative of America as liberator, conservatives appealed to whites’ instinctive loyalty to Western values, such as individualism, pluralism, and the rule of law.” First, real conservatives cannot possibly be considered as having constructed the narrative of America as liberator. Real conservatives couldn’t even consider going to war without Constitutionally-driven procedures like a declaration of war. Second, the idea that there are Western values that include pluralism is not on a sound footing —- we cannot possibly declare what Western values are without some definition of what the West is, and there is no way to say that pluralism is one of those values. It is true that pluralism has divided America into many voices and many cultures which may or may not be healthy for national unity, but pluralism per se cannot be put on the same level as individualism or the rule of law, much less the freedoms of speech, association, and contract, and the freedoms from discrimination and defamation, all of which outrank pluralism, multiculturalism, and multinationalism by miles.

5) I understand that the purpose of the essay is to rebut claims that one ethnic group in particular supported Gulf War II, and that is something for history to sort out. Those of us not on the inside have no way of knowing the truth of the matter, but clearly not every member of any ethnic group supported the war.

Mr Hope, there are far more Iraqi’s waiting to join the army and the police to co-operate with the Americans than there are strapping bombs to their chest to become a martyr. After the US changed strategy under General Petraeus many Iraqi’s have actively co-operated with our soldiers providing intelligence as to the whereabout of suspected terrorists and IED’s, the massive drop in attacks in the result. Such a situation hardly conforms to the stereotypical image that all Iraqi’s hate America and the West, ungratefull for everything we have done for them. The facts on the ground suggest otherwise.

As for the cost of the Iraq war and intervention in general. Firstly I might say that much of the cost in lives and treasure was caused by poor post-invasion leadership. Secondly I see no reason why altruism cannot play a part in foriegn policy, The British Empire led the world in abolishing slavery around the globe at significant cost, do you also scoff at this compassion?

Also when I mean liberal democracy I don’t mean rule by limosine liberals, but a free press, representive instituions and the rule of law rather than the kleptocratic democracies that exist in name only in such places like Africa.

My article does not discuss the question of whether the Iraq War was justified and whether it was in US interests, so I’m going to use this long comment to explain my opinion on this subject. I believe the answer to both questions is yes. The war was justified because Iraq refused to comply with UN resolution 1441 of 2002. The US was thus upholding the rule of law. The war was also in US interests because Saddam promoted terrorism against the US and its allies. It is clearly illegitimate then to say as a commenter above did that in the war US lives and treasure were lost “for no reason at all.” You still might argue that the war, while not completely unjustified, was not worth what it cost in lives and treasure. That is a separate question that I’m not going to take a position on now.

On the question of whether the Iraq War was justified, I recommend this recent article in Commentary, Why Iraq Was Inevitable, by Arthur Herman.

The reason we started the war was that Saddam refused to comply with UN Resolution 1441, which required that Iraq cooperate “immediately, unconditionally and actively” with weapons inspections or face “serious consequences.” In January 2003, Hans Blix, who was in charge of UN weapons inspection in Iraq, said in a report to the UN that Iraq had not met these requirements: “Unlike South Africa, which decided on its own to eliminate its nuclear weapons and welcomed the inspection as a means of creating confidence in its disarmament, Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.”

Blix also stated in March 2003:

It is obvious that, while the numerous initiatives, which are now taken by the Iraqi side with a view to resolving some long-standing open disarmament issues, can be seen as “active”, or even “proactive”, these initiatives 3-4 months into the new resolution cannot be said to constitute “immediate” cooperation. Nor do they necessarily cover all areas of relevance.

Iraq’s behavior after the passage of resolution 1441 was consistent with its long tradition of resisting weapons inspections. The US government then justifiably declared that Iraq was in breach of the resolution and decided to go through with the “serious consequences.”

All that Saddam would have had to do to avoid the war was comply with the UN’s procedures for verifying that his WMDs had been destroyed. Absent this, the US had every reason to think that he was hiding WMDs and that Iraqi disarmament would never happen without the use of military force.

Summarizing inspections after the invasion, David Kay, head of the Iraqi Survey Group, said that, while no WMDs were found in Iraq, nevertheless, there was evidence of “dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment,” which proved that Saddam was indeed in breach of resolution 1441.

Moreover, it should be recognized that it was not the Bush administration that declared war against Iraq. Bill Clinton, in fact, declared war against Iraq in 1998 when he signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which authorized the overthrow of Saddam and was passed almost unanimously by congress. Shortly after, the Clinton administration launched Operation Desert Fox, a four-day bombing campaign designed to degrade Saddam’s weapons programs.

Furthermore, it is clear that, while there is no evidence that Saddam collaborated in the 9/11 attacks, he promoted terrorism against the US and collaborated with Islamic terrorists, including al-Qaeda, that targeted the US and its allies. As the Herman article says:

We now know, thanks to captured Iraqi documents, that American intelligence seriously *under*estimated the extent of Saddam’s ties with terrorist groups of all sorts. Throughout the 1990’s, it emerged, the Iraqi intelligence service had worked with Hamas, the Palestine Liberation Front, and Yasir Arafat’s private army (Force 17), and had given training to members of Islamic Jihad, the terrorist group that assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Saddam also collaborated with jihadists fighting the American presence in Somalia, including some who were members of al Qaeda. It may be that al Qaeda had no formal presence in Iraq itself, but the captured documents show that it did not need such a presence. Saddam was willing to work with any terrorists who targeted the United States and its allies, and he reached out to al-Qaeda-affiliated groups (and vice-versa) whenever the occasion warranted.

A series of articles by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard substantiates these accusations. Hayes articles rely extensively on documents captured after the invasion.

It is beyond any doubt that the Saddam regime publicly supported terrorism against the US. According to Hayes, in 1998:

A statement from Saddam’s Baath party called on Muslims to be steadfast in the ongoing Mother of All Battles and to undertake “unprecedented heroisms” to fight the Zionists and Crusaders. And then, a call for attacks: “All living capabilities of the Arab nation should be toward the unity of the pan-Arab [world] and toward escalating the struggle to the highest levels of jihad… The escalation of the confrontation and the disclosure of its dimensions and the aggressive intentions now require an organized, planned, influential and conclusive enthusiasm against U.S. interests.”

The Hayes article just quoted contains a detailed summary of Saddam’s connections with al-Qaeda. For example, Saddam provided funding for the group Ansar al-Islam, a group containing many al-Qaeda members and led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the foremost al-Qaeda terrorists. Ansar al-Islam was set up in northern Iraq in 2001.

A May 2002 signals intelligence report, included in the Feith memo, stated that “an Iraqi intelligence official, praising Ansar al Islam, provided it with $100,000 and agreed to continue to give assistance.” Another report from the National Security Agency in October 2002 said that “al Qaeda and Iraq reached a secret agreement whereby Iraq would provide safe haven to al Qaeda members and provide them with money and weapons.” It was this agreement that “reportedly prompted a large number of al Qaeda members to head to Iraq.”

Saddam provided funding for al-Qaeda terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri:

On February 3, 1998, Ayman al Zawahiri, bin Laden’s Egyptian deputy, came to Baghdad for meetings with Iraqi leaders. The visit came as Islamic radicals gathered once again in the Iraqi capital for another installation of Hussein’s Popular Islamic Conferences. Iraqi vice president Taha Yasin Ramadan welcomed them on February 9 with the language of jihad: “The Islamic nation’s ulema, advocates and preachers, are called upon to carry out a jihad that God wants them to carry out through honest words in order to expose the U.S. and Zionist regimes to the world peoples, to explain facts, and to say what is right and to call for it. This is their religious duty. The Muslim ulema are called upon before Almighty God to act among the Muslim ranks to confront the infidel U.S. moves and to raise their voices against the U.S.-Zionist evil.” We do not have reporting on when, exactly, Zawahiri left Baghdad. But we do know from an interrogation of a senior Iraqi Intelligence official that he did not leave empty-handed. As first reported in U.S. News & World Report, the Iraqi regime gave Zawahiri $300,000 during or shortly after his trip to Baghdad.

This Stephen Hayes article provides more information about Saddam’s connections with al-Qaeda. Iraqi documents prove Iraq funded al-Qaeda operative Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines:

In another instance, the new Pentagon study makes reference to captured documents detailing the Iraqi relationship with Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines founded by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law. But the Pentagon study does not mention the most significant element of those documents, first reported in these pages. In a memo from Ambassador Salah Samarmad to the Secondary Policy Directorate of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, we learn that the Iraqi regime had been funding and equipping Abu Sayyaf, which had been responsible for a series of high-profile kidnappings. The Iraqi operative informs Baghdad that such support had been suspended. “The kidnappers were formerly (from the previous year) receiving money and purchasing combat weapons. From now on we (IIS) are not giving them this opportunity and are not on speaking terms with them.” That support would resume soon enough, and shortly before the war a high-ranking Iraqi diplomat named Hisham Hussein would be expelled from the Philippines after his cell phone number appeared on an Abu Sayyaf cell phone used to detonate a bomb.

Iraq promoted terrorism by other Islamic groups:

More recently, captured “annual reports” of the Iraqi Intelligence Service reveal support for terrorist organizations in the months leading up the U.S. invasion in March 2003. According to the Pentagon study, “the IIS hosted thirteen conferences in 2002 for a number of Palestinian and other organizations, including delegations from the Islamic Jihad Movement and the Director General for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of al-Ahwaz.” The same annual report “also notes that among the 699 passports, renewals and other official documentation that the IIS issued, many were issued to known members of terrorist organizations.”

Saddam also gave compensation to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.

Saddam’s support of Islamic terrorism against the US and its allies made his removal a US national security interest. Additionally, there are clear US interests in the establishment of a friendly power in the heart of the Arab world that contains significant oil reserves.

There was little if any connection between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. Remember, America itself collaborated with Bin Laden to overthrow the soviets. By the deductive logic that Saddam is an associate to Al Qaeda because there was a rare instance of collaboration, we could also deduce that America is an associate of Al-Qaeda. Not to mention America collaborated with Saddam too in the 1980’s. I find it pathetically funny how America is always doing stupid stuff, that comes back to haunt the country. America aids Bin Laden against USSR, than aids Saddam against Iran, than changes its mind. Now it wants to gear up against Iran but it can’t, because Saddam isn’t there to ally with any more. I truly think our leaders are not very bright. If you are a zionist, you quickly realize Iran is a lot more antisemitic than Iraq, that’s exactly why the militant JTF opposes the Iraq war too.

I guess my definition of “a link” is different than your definition of a link. Saddam’s links to Islamic leaders were pretty weak compared to others. Once in a blue moon collaboration between two opposing ideologies is not a link in my book. By that logic, Hitler and Stalin were “linked” because of the non-aggression pact. As a whole, Saddam was basically secular, and considered a heretic by Al-Qaeda, and hated even more by the Shia Iranians.

I agree with the goal of standing against radical Islam. But when Bush targets one of the most secular leaders in the middle east out of a vendetta to one up his father, he’s substantially sidetracked from that goal. It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist, or a raging anti-semite, or a Democrat, to see that Bush deserves his 29% approval rating.

Iceman,

The fact is that we don’t know a great deal about what Saddam was up to. I know that the Weekly Standard is a very pro-war magazine, but it’s prominent enough to be held accountable for what it says, so when they cite this much documentary evidence of connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda, I take them seriously. And WS isn’t alleging insignificant and occasional links, but a pattern of Iraqi funding of al-Qaeda and other terrorist outfits and Iraqi collaboration on al-Qaeda missions. Saddam’s secularism did not prevent him from collaborating with radical Islamists—he, at least, understood that the enemy of his enemy was his friend.

It is morally repugnant that you would suggest that the US should have sought to cooperate with Saddam. Yes, I know we did once before, but we shouldn’t have and that alliance is a discredit to our nation. Moreover, since we’d fought a war against him since we allied with him during the Iraq-Iran War, collaboration would have been impossible. This is a man who committed mass murder using biological weapons against his own people, and who, in order to get information out of people, would threaten to rape their female relatives. He abused the Oil-for-Food program, generously, even indulgently set up to provide aid for his people. While he got rich off of selling oil vouchers, his people continued to starve. This was a deeply sick and dangerous man, as bad as any Islamist leader, and it is a credit to our country that our policy was to remove him from power.

It is a myth that the US aided bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 80s. The CIA funded Afghan mujahadeen, but not Saudis, who were funded by their own government.

We are trying to reform people who have done nothing but kill each other for thousands of years.Let them continue!Let them blow each other into oblivion!The only reason we are there is the oil and the effect on the money our corrupt government stands to make off of it.We are so worried about “fixing” these third world neanderthal countries and people we are letting our own country slip to their level.Our government has to keep us paranoid so they can take more of our freedoms and rights in the guise of “The war on terror” so that we end up becoming the old USSR!We need to close our borders and take care of our own problems before we fret with policing the world.We have the technology and the know-how to be almost independent of the rest of the world.We do not need to waste White American lives on people who want us all dead!

I’m frankly puzzled by this piece. Yes, the U.S. intervention in Iraq is opposed by diverse groups of people with very different beliefs. But isn’t this true for other issues? Politics is the art of coalition-building. If you want to get things done, you have to ally yourself with people who hold different opinions.

Let’s turn the question around. Should White nationalists support the U.S. intervention in Iraq? If so, why? Do you think the war will mainstream White nationalism into public discourse? I see no evidence of that happening. In fact, the war seems to be part of the same globalist narrative that calls for mass-immigration and the destruction of European societies: “Invade the world! Invite the world!”

You can’t look at this war through a microscope and say certain portions are working or were justified. You have to look at the entire picture and ask do the benefits outweigh the costs. We know the costs have been. What has been the benefits to improving the future for white people in America?

So many comments have accumulated on this thread, most of them in disagreement with my article, that answering them is an intimidating prospect. But I’ll just dive in.

As I explained in my first comment on this thread, the issue at stake in the article is not whether the Iraq War was right or wrong—I happen to think it was right, but that is not the essential matter. Rather, the question is whether the racial right’s response to the war was productive. I think that focusing on the connection between the war and Jewish interests was profoundly stupid, and even rather hateful, not merely because the influence of this connection was greatly exaggerated, but because this response failed to exploit the passions that caused such fierce enthusiasm for the war among so many whites. War supporters were motivated above all things by national pride, pride in the American way, and pride in the heroic history of their nation. American values are a local variant of basic Western values, like individualism, pluralism, tolerance, respect for the rule of law, and so forth. In the mind of the war hawk, we were going to spread these values to Iraq, and by God, we were right to because they are the good values of a great and compassionate people, no matter what anti-American hatriots like Moore and Chomsky said. The war thus brought the essence of our peoplehood into prominence.

Pro-whites could have exploited this national pride by saying, “Yes, these values that you talk about are good values, and you are right to hold them in such high esteem. People like Moore and Chomsky are indeed wrong to slander our great nation. But the values you so cherish do not belong to all races equally. These are the distinctive values of the white race, and they are threatened by the influx of non-whites into this country. Do you think blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims have any respect for pluralism, tolerance, and the rule of law? Do their own countries embody these values? If you think it is worth paying such a price to plant these ideas in the Middle East, isn’t it a matter of the greatest urgency to preserve them at home?” Even opponents of the war could have taken this line.

This is what I meant by “linking national and racial pride” in the article. However, instead of respecting and exploiting the national pride generated by the war, the racial right scoffed at hawks, who were supposed to be mere dupes of the conniving Jew. That meant insulting the people who are among the most likely to come to our movement. After all, both hawks and pro-whites love America and want to preserve it. There is much overlap between patriotism and pro-whiteness.

At the end of the article, I speculated on the reasons why the racial right’s perspective on the war was so narrow and dogmatic. I left out one, which I think played a large role: snobbery. There was so much preening on the racial right about how they were the real conservatives, unlike those flag-waving Bushbot dittoheads. Only the shrewd eyes of Pat Buchanan, Paul Craig Roberts, and their followers could see the war for the heinous Jewish plot that it was, but all those sheeple and lemmings who voted for the chickenhawks were just lambs for the slaughter. Working for American Renaissance, I spent a lot of time around Paul Craig Roberts fans, so I had ample occasion to inspect their motives.

And none of this is to say that no intelligent commentary came out of the racial right—I made that point in the article itself. And I’m not accusing my readers of being snobs, at least not most of them. But there is a lot of snobbery on the racial right. That kind of arrogance often goes hand-in-hand with total powerlessness, and the racial right is no exception.

Donald,

I have defined the West in two articles—the relevant one was linked to in the article. Here are the links again. Pluralism is defined as a core Western value explicitly by Samuel Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and implicitly by other writers on the subject. Pluralism does not mean multiculturalism or multinationalism, but rather the cultural frame of mind that permits different social interest groups to form organizations that advance their agenda. Western societies have been more characterized by pluralism than other types of society—see the first link for more details.

As for your complaint about the number of white soldiers who died in Iraq, remember that ours is a volunteer army—no one is being pressed into service. The soldiers who died in Iraq chose their professions in full knowledge that they might be put in harm’s way. All of the information I’ve read on this subject tells me that American soldiers in Iraq believe profoundly in America’s mission in Iraq and are honored to serve and die for their country. Do you want to prevent people from following their callings to be soldiers in the name of preserving their bloodlines?

DTF wrote, “Pro war conservatives are our FRIENDS. It is they who oppose at least illegal immigration, not the anti-war left. It is they who oppose Jihad and MAKE WAR ON IT, not the anti-war left. It is they who oppose hate crimes laws, not the anti-war left(and not Bush 1 or 2).” Very much to the point. I’m glad I struck a chord in at least one of my readers.

Ian,

This thread is long, but fair and productive and getting close to the heart of the matter. I wanted to address two issues.

You stated, In the mind of the war hawk, we were going to spread these values to Iraq. To me, this sounds closely linked to the altruism which is the source of our problems.

Pro war conservatives are our FRIENDS. How many of these friends would support your site or the other articles that you have written?

William Hope,

You avoid the question raised in this article, which is whether the racial right’s response to the war was productive. I wish my critics would respond to what I’m saying before criticizing me on other grounds.

But Ian, it’s not just PCR and Kevin MacDonald who have placed the Iraq fiasco at the foot of the Jew. It’s Professor Stephen Walt of the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor John Mearshreimer of the University of Chicago. Not exactly the lunatic fringe, it seems.

Ian:

In my next entry I will write about this war, but I want to get this off my chest.

During the Gulf War my senior officer, Lieutenant Colonel (LTC) Smith (not his real name), had served in a previous assignment as aide to a high ranking and popular Military Intelligence Major General, who I know fairly well. As aide to this general, LTC Smith was privy to some of the Army intrigues inside the Beltway. One of the Israeli liaison officers wanted to obtain some intelligence information for which he did not have access, and LTC Smith told him no. Strings were pulled through then NYC Congressman Ted Weiss and LTC Smith was told by then Lieutenant General Sydney Weinstein, the Army’s highest ranking intelligence officer, to provide the Israeli the intelligence. Of course LTC Smith was outraged but he had felt compelled to obey the order. Normally such intelligence was available to the Brits, the Aussies, and Canucks - but definitely not the Israelis.

Please don’t tell me there is no excessive Jewish influence in our government. LTC Smith, who was married to a Jew, by the way, felt as such he could rant about it to a semi-Semite as me without appearing to be anti-Semitic. The mere fact we give billions in aid to a country that practices religious discrimination tells me there is a blatant double standard when it comes to liberal American Jews and Israel. Of course we have walked this ground before, and I believe in what Israel does, and I call myself a Zionist, but it just annoys me that liberal American Jews who would crucify any other country if it engaged in religious discrimination, give Israel a pass when it comes to such practices. Yes, I know they criticize Israel for some of its military actions and settlement policies, but they do not rail against the wall, they do not rail against policies of keeping Palestinians from returning, and they do not rail against the laws which prohibit Christian missionaries from operating in Israel.

Mike,

I linked in the body of an article to a review of Walt and Mearscheimer’s book on the Israel Lobby that found that the book was a complete mess—here’s the link again. W&M;lump together disparate organizations with discrepant goals under the rubric of the Israel Lobby and consequently have no clear conception of what its agenda is. Furthermore, they come far short of providing evidence for the extraordinary influence they claim for the lobby. As an example of the slipshod nature of the book, take this passage from the review:

>Mearsheimer and Walt argue that financing campaigns is an important source of the Israel lobby’s power, but their analysis of this phenomenon leaves much to be desired. Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), they breathlessly report, received $30,000 from pro-Israel PACs for her 2006 reelection campaign. In fact, this figure significantly understates the support she received from what the Center for Responsive Politics calls “pro-Israel” money, which amounted to $328,000 toward her 2006 campaign. Still, although that number may look impressive, it was less than one percent of the money Clinton raised for her Senate reelection bid. Against the $328,000 in “pro-Israel” money, she received more than half a million dollars from the printing and publishing industry, $800,000 from health-care interests, $1 million from groups and individuals interested in women’s issues, $2 million from donors based in real estate, and more than $4 million from lawyers and law firms. Had every dime of “pro-Israel” money gone to her opponent, there would have been no significant difference for her campaign.

You can’t put any stock in these people.

Also, why do you think Iraq is a fiasco? Currently, the country is almost completely pacified, and it has a functioning democratic government, which is so confident that it can maintain law and order that it’s pressing American troops to leave. At least for now, the war is clearly a success.

markjaws,

I wrote an article about Jews who are in fact against the wall, who support Palestinians’ right of return, and who oppose the idea of a Jewish state. Here it is.

Your anecdote obviously doesn’t count for much in the debate about whether the Israel Lobby launched the Iraq War in Israeli interests.

Here are the following reasons why this member of the racialist right is against the Iraq war - and it has nothing to do with the Jewish lobby. I am a retired Army intelligence officer who participated in Desert Storm as the US VII Corps Order of Battle Officer. Since retiring I have worked in several jobs, all of which have involved operations in the Middle East, and for the past six years I have worked on a research and development program designed to enhance intelligence support to counterterrorism. I know more on this topic than the average person.

First, we are not fighting to win. For far too long we have been playing cat and mouse, by catching, detaining and then releasing the same bad guys over and over again. Had we declared martial law in 2003 and shot any armed adult on sight during curfew hours, we would have restored order a lot quicker and not given both al Qaeda and the Shia militias an opportunity to grow and fester.

Second, the Arab Islamic mind is incapable of building democracy. 50% of the marriages in Iraq are between cousins and there is not enough money on the planet to drag this tribal and backwards people into the 21st century. They do not want democracy, which they see as a Jewish instrument to subvert and control their society. Don’t be deceived by those Iraqi voters with the purple fingers. Those were Shia who were voting for a government to exact revenge on the Sunni population. Furthermore, 75% of Moslems worldwide believe the Jews were responsible for flying those aircraft into the WTC towers. You can’t ever win those hearts and minds, or what passes for minds.

Third, we are breaking the military. Since I used to work at Fort Belvoir and most of my neighbors are either active duty military or recently retired, I know dozens of people who have deployed to Iraq and/or Afghanistan - some of whom for the fourth time. By violating his campaign pledge not to engage in open-ended nation building, President Bush is bleeding the Army. It cannot go on.

Fourth, President Bush is too inarticulate and too weak of a leader to sell this long-term commitment to the American public. While I cannot discuss or reveal sources, I have seen intelligence reports which would lead any reasonable person to conclude that WMD were indeed in Iraq. However, because of the sheer incompetence or lethargy of this administration, now the mindset has long settled in that “Bush lied - thousands died.”

And finally, it costs too much money and the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. If we were to withdraw, the worst thing that could happen is that the Iranians might temporarily gain the upper hand, but Iraqi Shia Arabs are still Arabs, and wary of Iranian influence. The Sunni Arab world would not hand Iraq over to the Persians, and perhaps, with some luck the Iranians could become bogged down in their own Vietnam type war. Anyone who thinks that Al Qaeda will win, or the Iranians will win if we pull out is missing the key point that al Qaeda is Sunni and working against the interest of most Shia, and that Iranians are not Arabs and not Sunni. No one is thus postured to permanently dominate the region. Our only concern should be the free flow of oil.

Concerned,

Those all seem like pretty reasonable criticisms of the Iraq War. My thesis, once again, was not that the war was justified, but that the racial right’s position on the war was stupid and unproductive. Since you don’t seem to think the Jewish lobby was at fault for starting the war, you must agree with me that it was stupid for the racial right to lay such emphasis on it.

Concerned,

You make a number of very important and lucid points.

I believe that you are absolutely right that we should have declared martial law in 2003, and should not be setting the bad guys (whose disguise is their lack of a uniform) free, once captured. But we are still doing this in Afghanistan too. Was not our Afghan invasion unavoidable? Seems to me, the problem is one of very foolish and stupid, way too soft tactics that Petreas is now addressing. I do not see how you can say that the surge is not producing some sort of victory. The American press won’t cover the success of the surge. They are pulling their reporters out because of its success. It takes the quite left wing British Guardian to value enough journalistic integrity to report this victory. According to this London paper, Al Quida in Iraq has been essentially destroyed ; from a force of 12000 it has been killed down to a force of 1200. This is a proud accomplishment of American Arms.

While I do not doubt your level of professional knowledge (and respect deeply how you obtained it), you should know that some of what you mention requires only that one pay attention to mainstream conservative take radio. No one screamed more than Sean Hannity that WMD were certainly in Iraq. He recently reported on some 400 tons of yellowcake uranium found in Iraq and sent to the US for disposal. As someone who’s professional expertise is in construction management, I can tell you that a standard tri-axle dump truck (the kind that salt your roads in the winter) holds 20 to 22 tons of asphalt. I bet that uranium is close in mass to that. You are absolutely right that Bush failed to articulate the facts and allowed himself to be called a liar. He is indeed a weak leader. No one screamed more about this than pro war conservatives.

Just as an informed citizen, I have known that the Iraqi’s, Shia or not, are Arabs and hate the Persians. Any informed person will know that the Sunni, who vastly outnumber the Shia, will not tolerate an Iranian ruled or even dominated Iraq. This does not require professional knowledge. And, indeed, history may well record Iraq 2 as a strategic blunder. This does not change the fact that the Bush Administration had every right and duty to depose Saddam Hussein.

Bush most defiantly broke his pledge to avoid nation building projects, but 9/11 made such a pledge break unavoidable in the case of Afghanistan. I can think of no worse place on earth to try nation building. History is often unavoidable. The US should fare far better in Iraq than Afghanistan. It is unthinkably irresponsible to abandon either .

I deeply worry about the Army being crushed by all this. We are overextended. This is a magnificent volunteer army, but we cannot shelter it. I wish we could pull out of places like Europe, Japan and South Korea, but is that really wise. That is our real imperial overextension, not fighting the people who are out to kill us all.

Finally, you make an irrefutable point “the Arab Islamic mind is incapable of building democracy”, and “You can’t ever win those hearts and minds, or what passes for minds.”

The racial right is correct to condemn such a utopian hubris, to think we can be an empire spreading democracy. As if democracy (not republican governance) were our own standard. As if the Zulu’s can build a Switzerland. That is not an achievable goal.

A goal that may be achievable is to make Iraq a country “friendly” to the US. This is controversial. Recently, on View From the Right, Lawrence Auster criticized Andrew McCarthy for believing that such was possible for the plain and simple reason that Iraq is a Moslem country. This is, in my mind, sound thinking. Ian Jobling would seem to agree with McCarthy and not with Auster.

I think that the definition of “friendly” defines who will be judged right by history in this question. I believe it is far too soon, and there is too much positive news from Iraq, to say what the outcome will be. However, I do not believe it utopian to envision an Iraq that does not want to challenge the US again.

I usually like this site, but I totally disagree with this post. Usually there is a correlation between interventionism and open borders. Those who want to futilely “westernize” the easterners abroad overlap with those who want to make western countries non-white. The reason is that these people believe that all races and religions are the same. Therefore, Muslims will accept democracy, a Cgreco-Roman Anglo-Saxon institution, and non-whites will accept the laws and languages of the western countries they immigrate too.

Only a minority of leftists, like Gore Vidal, oppose all wars, and even these leftists are not as fanatically open-borders as the neocons. The rest of the leftists oppose the Gulf War which they think only helps oil businesses and instead support military adventures in Kosovo or elsewhere.

OUr goal as a western country should be to keep it thus, and since so few politicians favor that, our work is cut out for us. Our goal should not be to destroy the identities of countries, western or eastern, as both destructions would be immoral.

By the way, some anti-war pundits, mostly on the right side of the specftrum who are pro-Israel and anti-Islam are Lawrence Auster, Martin Sieff, Peter Hitchens, Hugh Fitzgerald, Gordon Smith, Rod Dreher, Howard Sutherland and Robert Spencer etc. Even George Will, the late William Buckley, Daniel Pipes, Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo, John Derbyshire, Alan Keyes and Ralph Peters etc. have expressed skepticism towards Iraq democratization.

I wonder if anyone is ever going to address the point I made in the article, which was, once again, not that the war was justified, but that the racial right’s reaction to it was unproductive.

Lawrence Auster was very pro-war in 2003. Despite all of his subsequent complaints about Bush’s conduct of the war, I don’t remember him ever saying that he thought we shouldn’t have invaded. I’m not familiar with the views on Iraq of the other commentators that you mention.

I myself am skeptical about democratization in Iraq, as I made clear in the article itself.

By the way, I find it extremely bizarre that you would think that removing a tyrant from power was destroying Iraq’s identity. For all their ambivalence about the war, almost all Iraqis are glad Saddam is gone.

I should have clarified myself. I think the anti-war activists on both right and left in every country were extremely unproductive because of their hateful rhetoric. Despite the overwhelming oppostion to the war on the right and left abroad and even in the US, the US is still in Iraq and plans on staying there for the next 100 years.

The removal of Sadam Hussein should be subject debate, but it is reasonable to expect white nationalists and Islam critics to be skeptical about the US’s long term pressnce in Iraq.

On looking back, I don’t think we disagree on too much.

I really don’t know if DTO agreed with me or not, but I will remind him that even “friendly” Arab countries, such as Kuwait, vote against us in the UN more often than not. I am not holding UN voting records as the yardstick, but just what exactly is a “friendly” Arab country? For example, consider “friendly” Saudi Arabia. There is a country that does not allow non-Moslems to practice their religion and which finances hundreds of subverting radical mosques throughout the West. Such friends we can clearly do without.

With the same sense of unity and urgency lavished on the Manhattan Project and on the Apollo Program, we need to devote ourselves to weaning our industry and society off of foreign oil. And as long as we are urinating hundreds of billions of dollars into the Iraqi sand, we are postponing by years that day of independence. Islamic Arabs are not like us, and they will never be like us. I hold President Bush and the right-wing (“all men are created equal”) liberals just as responsible for this fiasco as I would any alleged member of the Israeli lobby. If we had to act military, then we should have broken Iraq, killed Saddam, if possible, and left it that way, with the warning that our bombs would fall again if they stirred up any more trouble.

Concerned

“but just what exactly is a “friendly” Arab country? For example, consider “friendly” Saudi Arabia. There is a country that does not allow non-Moslems to practice their religion and which finances hundreds of subverting radical mosques throughout the West. Such friends we can clearly do without.”

A friendly MOSLEM (not just “Arab”) country would be one (unlike Iran), that would be AFRAID to train, abet, harbor or sponsor active Islamic terrorists.

A “friendly” Moslem country would be TERRIFIED to be caught doing so, let alone be the planning, or worse, the operations base (the base in Arabic is “al Quaida”) after a catastrophic attack on the West such as 9/11 (as was Afghanistan).

As to Saudi Arabia, their little game of promoting only the religious philosophy of terror worldwide (the insane Wahabi brand of the religion of the “prophet”) and eschewing the training abeting, etc. mentioned above, is a tightrope they alone walk; they fear America on one side and an Iranian type revolution of their own “umma” on the other.

If the West were doing its job of expelling from and forbidding entrance to its shores of any such agents of this evil religio/political system, Saudi Arabia’s little game would be of no consequence here.

BTW, I am DTF, not DTO (whoever they is)

Ian, I’m not sure that Auster is right. My only point is that his logic seems sound as far as Moslem “friendliness” being phony or superficial. History may produce a so called friendly Iraq of the “healthy fear of the US” variety I envision above.

Who honestly cares about a reaction to the war,when are we as white Americans going to stand up for our rights and quit getting trampled on by what is supposed to be OUR government!We have been thrust into this war by those who do not have to send their sons and daughters to that sandpit to fight and protect themselves with inferior equipment because they(our government) stand to make millions.This war is just more fuel for these islama-fascists to hate us and try more acts of violence.The government hasand will continue to put out propaganda and play mindgames to keep all of us against each other and in our little groups nitpicking at each other just enough so that no one unites again like in 1776!

As I’ve said, I’m skeptical about whether democracy will work in Iraq, and I’m also skeptical that it will remain a friendly country. That said, I don’t think calling Iraq a fiasco is being faithful to the truth. Things are going remarkably well there. Al-Qaeda has been decimated; the Sunni-Shiite civil war is over. The Iraqi Security Forces grow and seem more and more ready to take over the task of securing the peace of the country.

Although I’m skeptical about Iraq’s future stability, I say, give it a chance. I mean it would be a good thing if Iraq turned into a decent place and a US ally, wouldn’t it?

The $64,000 question, Ian, “Was Iraq worth the spilling of blood, the breaking of our Army, and the hundreds of billions when here at home we are facing a tremendously imposing financial shortfall?” I think not.

While I often exhibit a propensity to overstate my case and cause, I think I can say with a degree of certainty that it will be a long time before we ever put boots on the ground of an Islamic country again. And I respectfully disagree with you. I think Iraq has been a fiasco, and only after four years and a tremendous expenditure in blood (my friend, and member of my church, Colonel Paul Kelly, was killed in January 2007) did we finally take security seriously. Had we moved in with sufficient force (the Shinseki Option) and the will to apply it in the 2003-2004 time frame, the situation would have gotten a whole lot better a whole lot sooner.

A previous writer hit the nail on the head - the elites have not had to sacrifice one damn thing for this trumped up war. It is only a small sliver of society which is making the sacrifice. And what advice and guidance did our commander in chief relay to the rest of the American people? Go out and shop. Spend money.

“I mean it would be a good thing if Iraq turned into a decent place and a US ally, wouldn’t it?”

Let’s suppose Iraq does become a US ally. Is this cause for rejoicing? Look at Pakistan. It too is a US ally, yet it plays a leading role in spreading Islamism within the Muslim world and in the Muslim diaspora. Also, with Turkey (another US ally), it is exporting large numbers of Muslim immigrants to Western countries. Go to Oslo or the English Midlands and you’ll see what I mean. Under the cover of being a friend of the West, Pakistan is radicalizing the Muslim world and colonizing the non-Muslim world.

With friends like these, who needs enemies? I enjoy reading your posts, but you seem to be missing the big picture here. Foreign policy is not about collecting allies as one might collect postage stamps.

Concerned,

I’m sorry your friend died in Iraq. But for you to portray this war as a betrayal of the common man by the callous elites is demagogic nonsense of a deeply noxious kind. The soldiers fighting in Iraq were not pressed into service. They chose their profession and knew perfectly well that they might be required to sacrifice their lives. The willingness to die in the service of their country is one of the things that soldiers are paid for. Having accepted money for their pledge to die for their country, soldiers have no right to complain of injustice when they are called to make good on it, and neither do their friends. If you accept the benefits of military service, you should also accept the costs. It’s a fair deal.

Furthermore, there is no evidence at all that the US government irresponsibly and callously put soldiers in harm’s way. Indeed, the number of US military deaths in this war, about 4,000, is very small compared to those of previous wars—the Vietnam War cost 58,000 lives. The military works hard to prevent soldiers from dying, as improvements in body armor and medical treatment attest. There has been some “expenditure in blood,” but it has not been “tremendous” by historical standards.

As for the war being “trumped up,” see my comment above where I lay out I lay out what I see as the justification for the war.

I suspect that none of us here are fans of the US government. But there’s a difference between rational, balanced criticism, which strengthens our cause, and demagogic ranting, which discredits it.

Perhaps I did not state my case very effectively. I don’t think I am engaging in demagogic ranting, Ian. Obviously your standards of rational, balanced criticism differ with mine. Demagogic ranting is the typical “Bush lied, thousands died” and “no more blood for oil” mantra you hear from the Left. Back on Aug 4th you responded to my five reasons for my opposing thhe war:

“Those all seem like pretty reasonable criticisms of the Iraq War.”

I willingly and without hesitation put my life on the line when I served in the Army. I volunteered for airborne duty and served for over four years in the XVIII Airborne Corps. My successor jumped into Panama in December 1989. I served in Desert Storm on the forward line. The overwhelmingly majority of our military personnel serve with distinction and without any backsliding and shirking of their duty to fight for US interests.

However, if we are to put American soldiers on the battlefield, then we should let them fight to win rather than handcuff them with restraining rules of engagement. We should not catch, detain, and release bad guys after American soldiers have put their lives on the line to get them. We should not let the Iraqi government dictate our tactics to us, which has been the case. Those are my big beefs and if that (in your opinion) makes me a ranting demagogue, then I stand in good company, because most soldiers with whom I have expressed my opinions, agree with me.

No one denies that progress has not been made. I just question whether this progress is worth all that it has cost us?

Unlike Duke and Buchanan, I do not blame Jews for the war. I recognize Jews as allies against the war.

Jews were the primary supporters of the war because Saddam Hussein was giving families of suicide bombers in Palestine financial rewards.

Ian,

Some people’s belief that “Jewish power” in America encouraged and supports the war in Iraq depends on how one defines Jewish power.

An overwhelming majority (77 percent) of American Jews oppose the Iraq war. That’s according to a 2007 Gallup poll cited by The Los Angeles Times in America and Ha’Aretz (The Land) in Israel. A similar poll taken in 2005 by the American Jewish Congress found that 70 percent of American Jews opposed the Iraq war.

However, an influential minority of American Jews, allied with “neoconservatives” (many of whom are not Jewish and none of whom are real conservatives), did encourage and do support the war.

Americans and Israelis do share a political tradition and a common civilization that Islamic states oppose. Whether that is sufficient reason to for the United States to attack a country that had not attacked and did not threaten it is questionable.

Miles

Racial “rightism” is a knee-jerk reaction to its ideological polar opposite(s), without any substantial platform or groundwork to build from. I wouldn’t listen too much to what they bloviate about, although I basically agree with 90% of their viewpoints.

Two sides of the coin.

A. Wars throughout white history have shown our bravery,ability, and given us the resources to do great things.

B. depleted our stock. it doesnt help that whites use the pill and have abortions at higher rates than any other race.

Pro war yes, but we do not replenish our gene pool with new babies thus our own institutional genocide.

Ian,

I like a lot of your writings, but let me mention, I am a paleoconservative, and not a neo.

I would be willing to support the ethnostate of Israel that nearly all Jewish organizations support across the political spectrum, if they are equally willing to support a White ethnostates in Europe and the USA. Tit for tat. If it were not this way, it would be far easier for use paleocons to get steamrolled.

I have not seen changes; instead, I see the overall thrust of major Jewish organizations geared towards policies that will displace Whites and encourage multiculturalism. The more this changes the more we will support Israel. See, it goes both ways. We need some leverage, you know.

Sincerely,

Shawn

Do you really think it is fair to say Jared Taylor was hoping for the defeat of American forces? I didn’t sense that from reading his articles, I mean, not even a little bit. I think he just hoped for a change of heart in Washington (unlikely though it may have been) and the safe return of American forces.