Olbermann to call Homeland Security!

On Tuesday of this week, Keith Olbermann, MSNBC’s equivalent of Sean Hannity, demonstrated why I refuse to watch that network with the rare exception of when they permit Pat Buchanan to utter five syllables in a row.

In Olbermann’s notable segment, “The Worst Person in the World,” the former sportscaster took aim at Fox News’ Glenn Beck and the CIA’s former head of its bin Laden unit Michael Scheuer. The charge: Scheuer is advising that Osama bin laden detonate a nuclear device in the United States and Beck should “be stopped” for allowing such speech to take place.*

How awful. What American would have the temerity to suggest that our enemy, our real enemy, ought to attack the U.S.? By all means, keep Guantanamo open just for Americans such as these.

If only that’s what Michael Scheuer actually said.

Listening to Olbermann’s opinion of the conversation, one could easily conclude that Scheuer is a traitor to the country he once worked to defend while Beck is his accomplice. Listening to Olbermann, Scheuer must have said this: “Osama! Get a nuclear bomb as soon as you can! Detonate it in this country so thousands, maybe even millions of my countrymen can be vaporized!”

Here’s what was really said:

Beck: Do you really, honestly believe, that we have come to a place where those very senior people in the highest offices of the land, Congress and the White House, really will not do the right thing in the end, that they won’t see the error of their ways? [in their failure to prevent terrorism]

Scheuer: No, sir, they will not. The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States, because it‘s going to take a grassroots, bottom-up pressure, because these politicians prize their office, prize the praise of the media and the Europeans. It‘s an absurd situation, again. Only Osama can execute an attack that will force Americans to demand that their government protect them effectively, consistently and with as much violence as necessary.

So Scheuer did say that a nuclear device needed to be used in order for real change to American foreign policy to be enacted. He is not saying that he desires it to happen.

If Olbermann knew anything about Scheuer, or did a meager amount of research, he would know, by virtue of Scheuer’s career, books, and articles, that he is an American nationalist and patriot who does desire to see America protected from terrorism. During the Bush administration, Scheuer was frequently labeled a “Bush Basher” for suggesting that the invasion of Iraq would isolate America and would further radicalize Islam. Now he is vilified by a faux journalist for describing what may very well be necessary before real change in foreign policy takes place.

Scheuer, the author of 2008’s “Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam after Iraq” and the anonymous author of “Through our Enemy’s Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America” and “Imperial Hubris: How the West is Losing the War on Terror,” has the consistent theme that our country’s ruling elites are either oblivious to the terrorist threat or are unwilling to change a policy of American intervention that led to the September 11, 2001 attacks. And most Americans, it would seem, are oblivious to this fact as well.

During the presidential campaign of 2007-2008, Ron Paul was the only candidate Scheuer endorsed because, as he said in the article “Stuck in the Cold [War] (McBama’s Nostalgia for the 20th Century):

“The difference between parties is just nuance. Republicans prefer to provide a strong, close-up whiff of gunpowder before coercively imposing their values on foreigners, while Democrats prefer raining anonymous death from 20,000 feet on foreigners, who – if they live – will have new values drilled into them. All are imperialism’s paladins . . . they are: aching to dictate their kind of freedom to various little brown brothers.”

This is the language of someone who has warned about the follies of the current policy. Since the current policy is what inflames would-be terrorists, there is no reason to believe that continuing it would reduce the incentive for terrorists to acquire a nuclear device. If a patient has a severe allergic reaction to penicillin, the cure is not more penicillin, especially if other prescriptions are available.

Just as many Americans probably still assume the Islamic terrorists hate us because we’re free, almost everyone in government assumes that since intervention has taken place since 9/11 that means the intervention has succeeded in defeating terrorism. Relying on the words of Osama bin Laden, instead of government propaganda, the recently retired Scheuer told “60 Minutes” in 2005 that

“No one should be surprised when Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States. I don’t believe in inevitability. But I think it’s pretty close to being inevitable.”

So what is the difference between this 2005 quote and the one that so aggravated Keith Olbermann?

Four years ago Scheuer called it pretty much an inevitability while recently he said that that inevitability is what it will take for American citizens to wake up to the gross dereliction of their leaders. That Scheuer is saying that he expects a nuclear detonation to come before Americans wake up to the government’s ineptitude is not the same thing as advising bin Laden to commit the atrocity itself, as if the terrorist’s desire to obtain a nuclear weapon was dependent upon any private citizen. In fact, it is more like a grieved parent coming to grips with the fact that their out-of-control drug-abusing child won’t realize they need help until the latter requires professional rehabilitation, despite all the previous efforts and warnings of the loving parent.

Now while Scheuer does advocate the use of waterboarding, a point at which I diverge, he is an American patriot, and anyone who simply skims through his body of writing will discover that the former CIA man only writes what he does out of a sincere devotion to his country. So when he says he has reason to believe that bin Ladin will send us that nuclear bomb, the good Scheuer hopes can come out of it is that the American people will finally demand to know why their leaders’ actions had not stopped the catastrophe they said the intervention was preventing.

For all the effort he puts into “The Worst Person in the World,” Keith Olbermann might want to take a break from his partisan hackery to investigate why a nuclear device might be detonated in the U.S. in the first place instead of shouting “traitor” at Scheuer and Beck while suggesting that their right to the freedom of speech should be abridged.
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*The third person Olbermann selected for his “Worst Person in the World” was suspended steroid user Manny Ramirez of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Along with Beck and Scheuer’s alleged proposal that Osama bin Laden should detonate a nuclear device is equivalent, in Olbermann’s mind, to rehabilitating baseball player Manny Ramirez’s refusal to spend enough money on luxuries for his temporary minor league teammates. Apparently not spending money on your minor league teammates is on par with suggesting a nuclear device needs to be detonated in your own country.
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Final note: Over at Left Coast Rebel, Tim has a piece up about Rand Paul and his potential run for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky. Check it out.

Iranian Pipsqueaks

On occasion, this blog has taken intellectual swipes and partisan shots at Mr. Clifford May, the director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a neoconservative think tank whose main objective seems to be drumming up an imaginary threat that the country of Iran poses not only to the West but the whole world. That is the topic of Mr. May’s essay for January 29, which readers may read for themselves here, while I take it upon myself to address his points.

In this particular bromide, Cliff May rambles about how terrible it is that the Iranian Revolution can celebrate its 30th anniversary this year. While that may not be something worth celebrating for anyone in our hemisphere, May’s piece is worth reading because in his rationale, one can find all the reasons for exactly why there does not need to be a war with Iran.

First, May cannot stop talking about the dangers the Iranian regime presents to the West, i.e. Israel and the United States. But his article begins by reminding the readers that it has been 30 years since the U.S.-installed shah was deposed. Why, in 30 years of supposed wrangling with the U.S., have they made zero verifiable or substantial threats toward us (hostages held in their country and one mention by a figurehead president with no army, air force, or nuclear weapons, of wiping the United States off the map do not count as real threats)? 30 years of avoiding war with a supposed enemy is a success that borders on the Cold War success of not fighting Soviet Russia if one wants my opinion.

Next, the author attempts to drum up fear in the reader by telling them that the revolutionary leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, wanted to install a Muslim heaven-on-earth by organizing a jihad against the West because of their power, laws, freedoms, and decadence. The call went nowhere. Once the reviled shah was gone, there was nothing left to keep the revolutionary factions together and so, the jihad could not get off the ground.

Mr. May cites Iran’s proxies Hezbollah, Syria, and Hamas as evidence that the regime is dangerous. He obviously regards their financial banking of Hezbollah and Hamas as proof that they cannot be tolerated. Yet, both of those terrorist organization are fundamentally weak.

Israel, in 2006 in their war in Lebanon and their recent war in Gaza, utterly blew their opponents away. In the recent conflict, Israel inflicted casualties over 100-to-1 and in spite of that, we are supposed to believe that Iran is an existential threat. If that is what we are told is an “existential threat,” then we certainly have nothing to worry about regarding Iran’s ability to be a menace outside its own borders. Israel was the big military winner in both conflicts.

Then a staple of Mr. May’s writings comes forth: unless something is done (war, anyone?) then Iran will be able to attempt a genocide or nuclear attack on Israel. (On a brief tangent: another staple of May’s is that questioning the wisdom of these foreign ventures is irrational because if we don’t do what we’re doing now, then there won’t be journalists or historians in the future to second-guess these decision. Note the last line of his December 18, 2008 piece).

For Clifford May, a genocide is always right around the corner and unless something is done, poor, weak, little Israel will be facing its own existential threat. Well, in the cases of Lebanon and Gaza, Iran can provide only a paltry little sum of money to support their causes. What makes anyone think that a country without an air force or army can mount any sort of concerted attack on a country with a fast military in Israel with overwhelming firepower, as we have seen. He is right that Iran has a very few number of missiles, but that capability has been proven to be overblown.

But Clifford May stays on message right until the very end. His whole article leads up to advice for the new president who himself is sounding a lot like the old one on how the world “cannot allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. . . . And I will do everything that’s required to prevent it.” It is Mr. May’s advice that there needs to be a war in Iran. No, he does not come out and say those exact words, but he says that the new administration “still has time to limit its final death toll.”

If the war and occupation of Iraq proves anything, it is that even more deaths can result through a well-intentioned occupation than from the original regime that was deemed to evil to be allowed to exist. So he admits that yes, the regime in Iran is terrible, but military action would stop those deaths. News flash: Even more people die when there is military action, Clifford.

Also evident in the “there is still time” line is his presentation to us of a ticking time bomb scenario. Iran is fast on its way to having a nuclear bomb, he clamors. This alone is suspect. Approximations range from the National Intelligence Estimate which declared that Iran abandoned its nuclear program in 2003 but for people who want more rationale for war with the destitute nation, there are places like the International Institute for Strategic Studies that claims Iran could have the bomb by the end of this year.

There are still too many unknowns to make a case for war, but Clifford May and his ilk are determined to get another war.

In addition to preventing them from obtaining a nuclear weapon (which, at the very least, means intervening in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, something we would certainly object to), Mr. May encourages President Obama to make good on his desire to place an embargo on incoming oil to Iran as well as telling the new president to tell the Iranian people that their rulers are the reason for their misery. I may be some crazy, right-wing, antiwar loon, but I have a hunch that if an embargo is placed on an already starving Third World nation, it will only empower the rulers, especially when the people know for certain that some of their misery can be traced back to the Americans.

And there you have a brief commentary and dissection of the writing of Clifford May: neoconservative, warmonger, and rouser.

There are a lot of items of America’s foreign policy plate right now: working on a way to get out of Iraq sooner than 2011, the doubling of the number of American troops in Afghanistan, and launching air strikes into Pakistan. If we wish to avoid another unnecessary war, step number one should involve identifying countries that have made actual threats or strikes at us and ignoring people like Clifford May.