Notes From All Over David Horowitz and Ben Johnson at Frontpage (hat tip: MIG) ask "who killed Marla Ruzicka?", the activist who w...
Notes From All Over
David Horowitz and Ben Johnson at Frontpage
(hat tip: MIG) ask "who killed Marla Ruzicka?", the activist who was
killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Horowitz doesn't answer the question but
suggests that at the time of her death Ruzicka had parted, or was on the way to
parting company with the radical Left.
In the last year of her short life, she had moved away from the agendas and
organizations of extreme left that had originally directed her life path to
the war zones in order to establish a path of her own. In her new endeavor she
guided partly by her genuine concern for the defenseless victims of the
conflict and partly by political forces that continued to exploit those
concerns.
Unlike Rachel Corrie, who lost her life in Gaza serving a solidarity
movement with terrorists and who consequently became a martyr for the
anti-American cause, Marla Ruzicka was respected and mourned not only by the
left but by supporters of the war who knew her, and even by members of the
Bush administration and military whom she first harrangued and then petitioned
and who ended up in a partially voluntary cooperation with her endeavors.
Jeffrey Goldberg of the New
Yorker interviewed UnderSecretary of Defense Douglas Feith in his library.
Feith is famous as the man who Tommy Franks once called “the fucking stupidest
guy on the face of the earth”, though current JCS Chief Peter Pace likes him.
Pace said, “early on, he didn’t realize that the way he presented his
positions, the way he was being perceived, put him in a bit of a hole. But he
changed his ways.” You could see how Feith could rub Franks the wrong way.
Feith asked the New Yorker correspondent if he had read "the
McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1916" as if that's what people did in
their spare time. Feith probably does. It was probably his obsession with
history that kept him from the seductions of the antiwar movement in his youth.
Feith formed his views as a teen-ager in the Philadelphia suburbs during
the Vietnam War. “I had done a lot of reading, relative for a kid, about
World War Two, and I thought about Chamberlain a lot,” he told me. “Chamberlain
wasn’t popular in my house.” Feith’s father lost his parents, three
brothers, and four sisters in German death camps. “What I was hearing from
the antiwar movement, with which I had a fair amount of sympathy . . . were
thoughts about how the world works, how war is not the answer. I mean, the
idea that we could have peace no matter what anybody else in the world does
didn’t make sense to me. It’s a solipsism. When I took all these
nice-sounding ideas and compared it to my own little personal ‘Cogito, ergo
sum,’ which was my understanding that my family got wiped out by Hitler, and
that all this stuff about working things out—well, talking to Hitler to
resolve the problem didn’t make any sense to me. The kind of people who put
bumper stickers on their car that declare that ‘war is not the answer,’
are they making a serious comment? What’s the answer to Pearl Harbor? What’s
the answer to the Holocaust?” He continued, “The surprising thing is not
that there are so many Jews who are neocons but that there are so many who are
not.”
For once, Henry Kissinger is stumped. In an interview with MSNBC
Kissinger described why it is important to keep Iran from acquiring nuclear
weapons. Kissinger, like most men of his vintage, was steeped in the lore of
Cold War deterrence, not just in its general principles, but in all the
quasi-mathematical models, the game theoretics and mathematical calculations of
choice which underlay it. He looked back almost wistfully at the Cold War as a
time of relative certainties: "this was a two-power world" and
recoiled in horror at the almost chaotic international situation of the present.
Now if you imagine a world of 30 nuclear powers, deterring each other by
criteria, very hard to calculate, affecting us with their nuclear capabilities
and the alignments they might cause. And the intentions they might generate
from other observers of this situation. And if you add to it what we've
already seen in the disposition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan, a friendly
country. That, whose weapons in so-called private hands spread to Libya, North
Korea, and we offer to Iran or we give them to Iran, then the possibilities of
extreme action somewhere along the line, would rise.
Supposing a nuclear weapon went off anywhere in the world, New Delhi, New
York, Europe, and 100,000 people got killed, not 3,000. The Trade Center was
relatively tame. People got killed in one place. The civic structure of the
city was barely affected. All hospitals were operating. All social services
were intact. It was a terrible tragedy, but if much of a town is wiped out and
all social services collapse, two things happen: one, the impact on that
society. But impact on the consciousness of people everywhere. Even today
families wonder what may happen to their children under conditions of
terrorism. But not yet accurately. But supposing they have to think that they
really might lose everything in one minute. Totally unpredictable. You will
get new demands on international relations in my view, for which we're not
prepared anywhere in any country and then you might get demands that these
nuclear weapons have to be brought under some international control.
Which was Kissinger's roundabout way of saying that if war really broke out
-- really broke out -- America might have to do something that few would like
(what that might be was the subject of a very old Belmont Club post, The
Three Conjectures) Kissinger hesitated on the brink of speculating what
course of action lay at the end of a road in which first Iran and then others --
including 'so-called private hands' held nuclear weapons, and passed on the
question. "I have no precise idea how to do all of this. ... So I’m more
conscious of the problem than of the solution. I’m not saying I have a master
plan for doing this."
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