I said in an earlier post that given their volume, there’d be no way I could keep up with the government’s lies and deceptions on the subject of Iran. And there isn’t. But four lies (or more charitably, four egregious falsehoods) are so central to the case for war, and so easily rebutted, that they’re worth highlighting. Continue reading
Goodbye, Neil Peart
[A guest post by my younger brother, Suleman Khawaja.]
I can still remember being six years old, sitting on the asphalt basketball court behind St. Joseph’s church, tagging along with my older brother and the other neighborhood 12-year olds, trying hard not to be so conspicuously small. A hushed anticipation fell over the churchyard. I can still hear the ephemeral bumps and clicks as the tape unspooled in the little boom box, the sonic artifacts of fingers pressing Record and Play on someone’s Dad’s hi-fi, the click of the needle touching down on vinyl. “This is it, man!” The LP-to-cassette knock-off of Moving Pictures cued to launch the opening burst of “Tom Sawyer” into the air of North Jersey suburbia.
1981. West Orange, New Jersey. That’s the first time I heard Rush. The first time I ever heard of Neil Peart. One story among so many others. But mine.
War with Iran (12): Imminent Threats and Moral Blackmail
This abstract presents a slightly more formal, structured version of the argument I gave in the second installment in this series. Comments welcome.]
The Iran War of January 2020 (hereafter, “the War”) was widely justified by way of the following morally loaded question, addressed primarily to an American audience:
(Q1) If you had certain intelligence of an imminent threat to American lives, would you use military force to stop the person responsible for that threat?
Typically, an interlocutor hoping to defend the War would pose Q1, demand an unqualified “yes or no” answer to it, and take the “yes or no” to be an exclusive disjunction. Continue reading
War with Iran (11): Protest at Hinds Plaza, Princeton
A couple of shots from an anti-war protest I attended this past Saturday in Hinds Plaza, Princeton, New Jersey, sponsored by the Coalition for Peace Action and Bayard Rustin Center for Social Justice. An earnest, upbeat, sedately (almost stereotypically) suburban college-town crowd of about 300. Outstanding speeches by Zia Mian and Lukata Mjumbe. Irene Etkin Goldman read a poem of Yehuda Amichai’s, and Sadaf Jaffer (a distant acquaintance of mine) read one by Aga Shahid Ali. Both poems are now reproduced in the comments below. (I missed two speakers’ names in the original post: Nassau County Democratic Vice Chairman Ali Mirza and Sadim Lone, a former UN official). Personally, I did nothing but attend, clap, and pretend to sing Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” but I was proud to be there.
Roger Scruton (1944-2020), RIP
It’s considered disrespectful to speak ill of the just-deceased, so I hope this post will be read in a spirit of candor rather than ill-will. But the truth is, I’ve always had mixed feelings about Roger Scruton, who’s just passed away. On the one hand, it was impossible not to admire the sheer breadth of his interests and learning, and impossible not to be awed or intimidated by his sheer output. He seemed in so many ways to embody the ideal of The Public Philosopher: clear, erudite, iconoclastic, occasionally brilliant, capable of technical sophistication, but also capable of writing for a wide audience. That said, I hated his politics and a lot of his cultural grandstanding, and often found myself wondering how a man as intelligent as Scruton could come up with views as dumb as the ones he sometimes put into print. Continue reading
War with Iran (10): Militarism, Trust, and Character-Based Voting
Back in 1950, during the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur was famously (“famously”) invited by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) to give a speech at one of their annual conventions. Given the exigencies of war, MacArthur was unable to attend, but accepted the invitation and sent the VFW the text–we’d call it a “hard copy”–of his speech. The speech, an instance of saber-rattling of the kind for which MacArthur was famous (and is still admired today, at least by conservatives), flatly, obviously, and deliberately contradicted the official policy of the U.S. government at the time on Formosa (Taiwan). MacArthur sent it to the VFW as a kind of provocation, and succeeded in his aim, putting Truman in a quandary about how to respond. Continue reading
Neil Peart (1952-2020), RIP
For those who think and feel
In touch with some reality
Beyond the gilded cage
P.S. Calling Ray Trumbo. Contact me!
War with Iran (9): Distracting Ourselves to Death
I just spent 30 excruciating minutes watching coverage of the “Iran crisis” on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. Amazing to see a country mesmerized by irrelevant distractions:
- Did the Iranians shoot down the Ukrainian airliner? Did they? Did they? How else did it go down? What do they have to hide? Let’s ask a former FAA official. Then let’s ask some bereaved people with friends and relatives on the flight how it feels to be deprived so abruptly of their loved ones. With any luck, they’ll cry on screen.
- Is the War Powers Act really a law? Really? Let’s ask a general.
- Are Democrats mourning Suleimani’s death? Let’s ask a Democrat who clearly isn’t.
Without venturing an answer, let me just pose this question: what psychological mechanism explains why a country facing a single fundamental issue would work so hard to avoid it, but spend so much effort to address so many others? The fundamental issue is straightforward. The Iranian missile attack on American bases was a signal that Iran can hit us, that we have no effective defenses against even the most benign attack they can muster, and that they are about to begin a proxy war against us, via Hezbollah and its allies, to force us out of “the region.” Continue reading
War with Iran (8): Know the Enemy
And who is the enemy? The enemy is the self-appointed, unaccountable cultural commissar who enforces ersatz patriotism through arbitrary terminations of the easiest people to fire, as in this case at Babson College (ht: Robert Platt).
A Babson College adjunct professor was fired after making a joke on his Facebook account about Iran bombing American cultural sites.
“In retaliation, Ayatollah Khomeini should tweet a list of 52 sites of beloved American cultural heritage that he would bomb,” wrote Asheen Phansey, the Massachusetts college’s director of sustainability.
“Mall of America?… Kardashian residence?” he suggested. …
Babson released a statement announcing Phansey’s termination.
“Babson College conducted a prompt and thorough investigation related to a post shared on a staff member’s personal Facebook page that does not represent the values and culture of the college,” the school said, according to CBS Boston.
“Based on the results of the investigation, the staff member is no longer a Babson College employee,” it said. “As we have previously stated, Babson College condemns any type of threatening words and/or actions condoning violence and/or hate.”
“Babson College condemns any type of threatening words and/or actions condoning violence and/or hate.” Could we get any stupider? Phansey made a joke. A joke is not a threat, and doesn’t condone violence. There’s nothing hateful about this one, either. I actually find it kind of amusing. My first reaction to the story: too bad he didn’t include Babson’s administrative offices in the bargain. (For the humor-impaired: that, too, is a joke.) Continue reading
War with Iran (7): It’s Not Over Yet
The conventional wisdom has it that “for now,” the war with Iran is over. According to this supposed wisdom, Iran followed up our assassination of Suleimani with a lot of rhetorical bluster but an oddly anti-climactic and hapless missile strike on US bases in Iraq. The strike caused no casualties, and did no “serious” damage. Meanwhile, Trump, in his magnanimity, seems not to want to “escalate.” And so, war has been averted, and we can all emit a collective sigh of relief over everything’s having ended so well. I don’t claim to be an expert on military affairs, but to state my verdict on the conventional wisdom in a word: bullshit. The war isn’t over. It’s just begun. Continue reading
