‘Faster, Please’ Chickenhawk: Squawk! Squawk!!
Today in warmongering, Michael Ledeen, peddler of shit like this:
I mean, it may sound like an odd thing to say, but all the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war.
Ledeen, above: ‘I’m sorry, Henry Kissinger; though you are the proud incinerator of countless Indochinese, you’re just not bellicose enough for me.’
And this:
Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.
Adds this:
[Diplomacy] won’t work. Only the defeat of the Islamic Republic [of Iran] can accomplish that goal [of taming Iran], because that would demonstrate that the mullahs do not have divine support for their global jihad.
War to disprove another’s religious belief! Awesome. Way better than war to prevent use of WMDs, to spread democracy, to seize the ‘unipolar moment’, to secure oil fields, to topple tyrants, to… whatever. Great stuff, this new reasoning, but I for one will not be impressed until Ledeen or others among the neocon crew say what they really feel and have felt all along: ‘war because it’s fun to watch from the safety of my recliner because I am an amoral monster and I need such things to make me feel alive.’
Ledeen’s whole column is an attack on Henry Kissinger from the Right. How depraved are you when Henry Kissinger is too peacenik for your tastes? These neocon psychopaths simply hate diplomacy in whatever application.
only our mullahs have divine support for our global jihad! duh!
His is the perfect head for the next roboshop challenge!
How depraved are you when Henry Kissinger is too peacenik for your tastes?
An excellent summary of Ledeen and all his Neocon arsehole buddies, although the more literate among the Little Green Snotballs would undoubtedly point out that Kissinger did win a Nobel Peace Prize, just like those other librul boogeymen Yassar Arafat and Jimmy Carter, so there!!!1!
My own slender hope is that some freedom-hating academic will be able to track part of the $9,000,000,000 in PNAC funds Simone Ledeen “mislaid” during her tenure in Iraq back to her loathsome father and his buddies. Cheerleading for violence against Those Not Like Us will never damage his standing among the Redstate Reichtards, but getting caught with a few hundred million dollars stolen from the U.S. Treasury might just make a dent in his “scholarly” reputation.
Not that incredibly depraved, at least by wingnut standards. Kissinger got a lot of flak from both the irreducible 20 per cent of glue-eating, McCarthy/Orange County/Bircher/gun-nut fucktards and the Scoop Jackson faction for pursuing détente with the Soviet Union and China. Of course, Rumsfeld, Dick, and Daddy Pipes were behind that.
(PS: détente=not trying to start a nuclear war. You at least have to give him that.)
Michael Ledeen loves war, huh? So which branch did he serve in, the Army? No, wait, had to be the Marine Corps.
Blessed are the warmakers, for they shall inherit the salted earth.
It’s not so much that they hate diplomacy — they just hate stuff that stands in the way of their war porn.
I’m sure the people of Iran will be just tickled pink to be shown that their religion isn’t the one and only correct one while we reduce their country to rubble. I can already see the liberation parades now. Hell of a plan.
I’ve been disturbed by the increasing use of imagined future history to “justify” their plans for war. Was it Niall Ferguson (?sp) who had the one about “if only they hadn’t listened to the Europeans and that wuss Condoleeza Rice and negotiated with that Nazi from Iran. If only they had been RESOLUTE like us neocons, the nuclear exchange with Iran in September 2007 (or whatever) wouldn’t have happened.” etc etc
I can’t be bothered finding the link, but it was dire. Someone needs to write the alternative future history. Something along the lines of
“Iran didn’t have any nuclear weapons. They were years from getting them, even if they wanted them, which they didn’t really. In fact, most of what they knew about nuclear weapons technology they learned from Iraqi documents, which the Bush administration released onto the Internet without bothering to translate them first.”
“The Europeans and the IAEA were pretty sure that the Iranians had no nuclear weapons. There was no evidence they were even close. But ever since Valerie Plame’s CIA cover was blown, most of the anti-nuclear proliferation intelligence work had gone out the window. No-one had managed to re-institute her contacts, her network. The networks of her colleagues using the same front company were also completely blown. The CIA had had to start from scratch, and progress was slow.”
“But lack of evidence wasn’t enough for Cheney. He insisted that the US had to be sure. And that meant taking Iran’s military capabilities out.”
“Perhaps the preemptive nuclear strike seemed like a good idea at the time. Perhaps they didn’t mean to wipe out two-thirds of the Iranian population, only do discover that indeed there were no nuclear weapons — or even weapons programs — in Iran. They certainly didn’t expect that the Shiite population of Iraq would turn on the US troops there, massacring them as they fled towards Turkey without supplies or enough ammunition. Nor did they expect that the destruction of so much oil infrastructure in the Gulf would send oil prices so high. Certainly they didn’t expect that the supply shortages would lead to widespread starvation of Americans, stranded without gas in the overwhelmingly Republican suburbs and exurbs. Or that the survivors were the ones in inner cities, in coastal areas, who could receive the relief supplies from Europe and Canada on foot. (It’s just as well there were still some old sailing ships around.)…”
You get the idea. I feel this fake history from wingnets is something we need to neutralise.
That head ought to be photoshopped onto a scarecrow. Or a corpse.
P.S. Bush was behind the U.S.Attorney firings.
Jesus H. Christ. WTF kind of morons do you you have running your country anyways? I knew they were stupid, and yes, really, really, really stupid, but nuking Q’om to prove that Allah isn’t on their side? Yeah, that’s going to work. It totally won’t radicalize the population.
The more I think of it, I see US foreign policy guided by the “plot” of a bad action movie rather than anything else.
At least he’s honest. Demented and sad, but honest.
If Kissinger was really hardcore he would have bombed Syria instead of a bunch of harmless gooks.
Ledeen really reminds me of a primary school bully. He’s shitscared of just about everyone, but he’s got a big brother who’s a thug and has lots of mates, so he can go around picking on littler kids and bragging about how his big brother’s gunna kick their arses.
But put that pissy-hearted kid in a dirt circle with just one other kid, his own size, and he shows his colours. Of course, he still gets his brother to beat the crap out of the kid later, but everyone including him knows he’s totally full of shit.
So. How can we arrange that for Ledeen? I volunteer my dirt-circle services, if someone will spot me plane fare to the US. I’ve had a shitty day, a shitty week, and a shitty year so far, and I’d really like a chance to kick some dickhead’s arse for him.
It would be really galling for him to get beaten by me, and beaten he definitely would be. I won’t expand further, but suffice to say I don’t look scary in the least. Nonetheless, I have a marvellous left cross and I can kick like a mule. He wouldn’t know what hit him.
Well, he would. And that would make his defeat all the more bitter.
I think Eric Idle summed up Kissinger best
Henry Kissinger
How I’m missing yer
You’re so chubby and so neat
With your funny clothes and your squishy nose
You’re like a German parakeet
All right so people say that you don’t care
But you’ve got nicer legs than Hitler
And bigger tits than Cher
Henry Kissinger
How I’m missing yer
And wishing you were here
Notorious P.A.T. said: Michael Ledeen loves war, huh? So which branch did he serve in, the Army? No, wait, had to be the Marine Corps. No, that would be the Moron Corps.
Wow, it seems like Ledeen is quite the pacifist. Where the hell are his balls?
A real American attack on Iran, one not restrained by the uber-peaceniks like Ledeen & co. would not be aimed at demonstrating “the mullahs do not have divine support”.
Demonstrating anything for “the mullahs” is for cowards and tree-huggers.
The only manly move would be to first attack Iran with so many nuclear weapons that no humans are left alive. (And animals would be left only to the degree that it would preserve our arsenal.)
A reasonable second move would be to follow up with complete nuclear annihilation of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Probably this should include Egypt, Libya, and Somalia as well, but I am not familiar enough with our arsenal to know if the degree of glassification would require a pause to manufacture more warheads and delivery systems.
However, given the possibilities of too much radiation exposure to Israel, a real manly patriotic man would recommend the absolute destruction and annihilation of Lebanon, the West Bank, and the Gaza strip through conventional weaponry.
I don’t understand why the conservatives keep allowing such America-hating, mullah-worshipping peaceniks like Ledeen such publicity.
Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.
Strange, I always thought the reason behind Grenada was “Save the medical students!,” and the one behind Panama, “Look, new war toys. Must use now/i>! And that Piña guy knows too much.”
Damn, I hate it when I blow my code.
cb,
And the rest of the history would read like Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”.
that would demonstrate that the mullahs do not have divine support for their global jihad.
Translation: Our Gawd can crush your Gawd. Manifest Destiny! Woot!
I think he’s right. After all, the destruction of the Temple, the Babylonian diaspora, the Inquisition, four hundred years of pogroms, the Holocaust and sixty years of warfare in the Middle East has certainly proven to the Jews that they aren’t God’s chosen people, right?
I love it how these guys, faced with the failure of their meager ideas at every turn, constantly decide that the simple and obvious solution is to get tougher!! No More Mr. Nice Guy!!!
It’s like they’re all pod people based on Red Foreman.
Bullies indeed. It’s the only thing they know, and as bullies, their only interpretation of anything less than violence is weakness.
Actually in the movie, “The Power of Nightmares” (which is fuckin’ excellent by the way), they go into just this issue- the Neoconservatives hated the rational, measured violence of Kissinger. They thought, and think, that he was a problem because he wanted a balance of power in the world.
It’s 3 parts, each about an hour. Totally available via the internet. Check it out. “The Power of Nightmares“.
Anyone who says, “[W]e are a warlike people and that we love war.” doesn’t, as a rule, actually live in a war zone and doesn’t ever expect to. Just sayin’.
That head ought to be photoshopped onto a scarecrow.
Aw, he looks a lot like one of my uncles did, who was a total sweetheart. Not a good looking sweetheart, though, I admit.
Or a corpse.
Too bad we can’t trade him for my sweet uncle, who would never have advocated throwing tiny countries against a wall. He once carefully wrapped a twenty-dollar bill as a gift. I bet a couple wrapped twenties here and there would work better as a foreign policy than any of Ledeen’s brain farts.
“Why don’t we just admit it? why don’t we just admit it?
we like to watch things die, (from a good safe distance)”
tool, first song from the last album. pretty much sums it up for me.
I have an extremely right wing…colleague, i guess friend, a writer, a pretty well known one, who has ledeen esque tendencies. at night he plays on-line war games. i suspect that ledeen does the same, in fact, fuck HE’S IN MY BASE RIGHT NOW!!!!!!)!)!11!!!!
tell me if I’m wrong, but did he not steal those lines from Bill Hicks?
Michael Ledeen is a closeted homosexual, just like analtrannie and dickylimpy
Faster, Chickenhawk, Kill Kill!
HTML that “Ledeen Doctrine” was actually written by Jonah Goldberg.
Also
“the defeat of the Islamic Republic [of Iran] can accomplish that goal [of taming Iran], because that would demonstrate that the mullahs do not have divine support for their global jihad.”
hmmm, funny that I haven’t seen many conservatives admitting that our failures in Iraq show that their Christian God is against our foreign policy.
Maynard is a huge Hicks fan, one album is dedicated to him. I’m sure he credited it if he used his lines. I haven’t picked up the new tool yet or I’d go look.
Kathleen – I know, but I’ve never seen Ledeen disavow the characterization, and it’s been repeated so much at The Corner that Ledeen should have said something by now. Besides, it’s accurate; and Pantload didn’t mean it as a putdown.
Alex — Quite right, and I have often mentioned something about that in past posts — not only did necons loathe Nixon/Kissinger/Ford’s detente policies, but they also at times attacked St. Reagan himself when they thought he did not fully appreciate the Soviet Menace. They cannot be pleased until we are at war with everyone, everywhere forever.
Marq said,
Anyone who says, “[W]e are a warlike people and that we love war.� doesn’t, as a rule, actually live in a war zone and doesn’t ever expect to. Just sayin’.
Gold star, Marq. Hey, just as a present for Ledeen and his very manly buddies, let’s hold the next one in the US! Hey, yeah! What a great idea: they’re such a warlike people, and they love war so much, it’ll be like, totally cool for them! Don’t waste it on those pussy Iraqis, who only want to live their lives without being interrogated or seeing their children murdered. Give it to the US, as a gift!
You can download The Power of Nightmares here. It was a documentary on the BBC, and was made available for free at the Internet Archive project.
I see US foreign policy guided by the plot of a bad action movie rather than anything else.
Yer Grace, Considering that our TeeVee and radio don’t do any serious foreign policy discussion and our policy-oriented print media really only reach the elite, yeah, that’s about right.
Sports probably plays a certain role, too.
Scares the bejeebers outta me somedays. {
I wonder who’s Kissinger now.
Some of them went way beyond just attacking Reagan for daring to talk to Gorbachev. A few of the early-on neocons were convinced that the first signs of the breakup of the Soviet Union were actually a ruse, designed to trick us into “lowering our guard” so that they could launch their final, devestating attack against freedom and decency. I think Nat Hentoff actually maintained this position for some time past the point where the Politburo attempted to place Gorbachev under house arrest and Boris Yeltsin had pulled his stunt with the tanks in Moscow.
In fact, if you managed to find a neoconservative who believed that the evil Soviets were *still* engaged in some evil trick plot to make us lower our guard – a very wily trick, what with the dissolving their government and returning autonomy to all their western republics – I wouldn’t be all that surprised.
They’re all mentally ill. Seriously, seriously mentally ill. Not a one of them has recovered from the death of Leon Trotsky – it somehow scarred their collective psyche so badly that they all wander around in a barely functioning fugue state.
They’re all mentally ill. Seriously, seriously mentally ill. Not a one of them has recovered from the death of Leon Trotsky – it somehow scarred their collective psyche so badly that they all wander around in a barely functioning fugue state.
Think there’s some smart, evil ones in there too? Or does it look like total insanity to you? I can never tell.
The Neoconservatives always make me think, “So this is how Neitzsche sounded on a bad day”.
“Smart” and “totally insane” don’t have to be mutually exclusive categories.
Bill Kristol is living proof of this.
Although in his case, you just might be able to persuade me that “insane” simply ought to be replaced with “evil”.
The spirit of Col. Chivington lives! onward to Sand Creek and glory!
and if anyone doubts our warlike and genocidal nature as a government, just look up how many congressional medals of honor were awarded at the “battle” of Wounded Knee. Plus ca’ change…
[…] and psychopath Michael Ledeen = Fifteenth-century French serial killer Gilles de […]