Homocon

Claiming that the invasion of Iraq is "the greatest moral quandary of our day", Whitney goes on to state that the radical Islamists insurgents, who are more and more rejected by the Iraqi population as they continue their indiscriminate violence against their own fellow Iraqis, "are the legitimate expression of Iraqi self-determination," that "the Bush administration bears the responsibility for the death of every American killed in Iraq just as if they had lined them up against a wall and shot them one by one" and that "we should be able to agree that the people of Iraq were better off under Saddam Hussein in every quantifiable way than they are today."

Whitney, in his zeal to embrace a violent culture that has supported the rule of dictators, theocrats and tribal thugs centuries after Western civilization established the primacy of democratically elected government, declares that "The UN, as imperfect as it may be, is the proper venue for deciding how to affect the behavior of foreign dictators", conveniently neglecting to mention that the hallowed halls of his merely imperfect UN is filled with the representatives of those very same foreign dictators, each with a voice and vote equal to any representative of a democratic society in the common assembly. While Mike Whitney prefers to dismiss the continued presence of dictators and monarchists in the UN as just some mild flaw to be overlooked, many Conservatives, instead, have given up on any pretense of UN legitimacy, seeing the UN for what it actually is -- a chummy thug's club that functions off the largesse of the United States while attacking our distinctly individualistic policies and values at every turn.

To support his assertions of American Evil (tm), Mike Whitney uses source quotations from Pepe Escobar, another "anything but the Bush Administration" conspiracy-nutter who's penned numerous, er, "journalistic" tidbits, such as: "The last thing that the White House, the euphemistic Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the ICG (dubbed "the imported government" by Iraqis) want is real democracy in Iraq", "The hawks’ designs for the post-Ottoman Middle East are based on total control over oil resources, breaking the Palestinian resistance to Israel’s colonial occupation, and establishing total American and Israeli control over the region" and "An influential Jewish European banker reveals that the ruling elite in Europe is now telling their minions that the West is on the brink of total financial meltdown; so the only way to save their precious investments is to bet on the new global crisis centered around the Middle East . . ."

Poor Pepe and Mr. Whitney are finding it psychologically difficult to exist in a rapidly modernizing and Westernizing world -- a world which is increasingly interconnected and, therefore, increasingly dependent upon the global stability of cultures, peoples and economies. Mr. Escobar quotes the lyrics to a song by punk-rock outfit The Sex Pistols at the beginning of his "IRA and Sinn Fein in Iraq" article, because The Sex Pistols were . . . what, exactly? Voices of reason? Advocates for the spread of democracy and freedom? Hardly. They were a frickin' rock band, for god sakes, whose members were strung out on various hard drugs, who found it cool to wear Nazi swastikas on their clothing while issuing incitements of social chaos, and whose career appeared to consist mainly of organizing one abusive and foul-mouthed "look at me!" press conference after another.

This is what I find ridiculous about so-called "journalists" like Mike Whitney and Pepe Escobar -- their whole hackneyed, 60's-fueled, Rock-and-Roll, anti-authority ethos. In their praise of bloody chaos, their strange wish for a decisive and humiliating defeat of the very cultures from which they sprang, and their worship of punk rock attitude and Hunter S. Thompson "Gonzo" style, what they write becomes relevant only as disposable pop-culture reference rather than as any type of useful political analysis.

In a December 2003 TIME Magazine article, "Life Behind Enemy Lines", Abu Ali, a Saddam Loyalist and chief Islamist military leader at the time, stated in response to a question regarding Iraqi civilian casualties: "I will kill 10 Iraqis to slaughter one American." With a dismissive wave of his hand to surrounding military officers who objected that "a dead G.I. was not worth a single Iraqi," he said: "They are not like me. I drink blood."

So is this what the likes of Mike Whitney and Pepe Escobar support? In their mad dash to trip all over themselves condemning what they insist is the barbarity of the corporate-controlled West, they obscure the nastier, bloodier and infinitely more brutish nature of what the economically focused West seeks to replace.

Perhaps this quote regarding Escobar's darling Sex Pistols best sums up the political and social disintegration of the modern Left: "In some ways, however, the Sex Pistols were perhaps not rock's greatest success but it's greatest failure. For, having built their name on controversy and outrage, they took things too far; they allowed themselves to be carried away by their own image and, in doing so, destroyed themselves."

Indeed.