Saturday, March 25, 2006

More anti-war hysteria on the Left

It's the sort of hed one would expect to see in the SF Bay Guardian or Carlos Petroni's ultra-left Frontlines: "American Coup D'Etat: Military Thinkers Discuss the Unthinkable." 

Except this is on the front page of the April edition of Harper's Magazine! Inside there's a transcript of a dialogue among a panel of military intellectuals: Andrew Bacevich, Brig. Gen. Charles Dunlap, Richard Kohn, Edward Luttwak, and moderator Bill Wasik, an editor at Harper's, who gathered the panelists to discuss the possibility of a military coup in the US. 

To their credit, the panelists all denigrate the likelihood of a military coup. So why waste the valuable pages of a serious monthly magazine on this bullshit? 

Lewis Lapham, longtime editor of Harper's, has been vociferously against the war in Iraq from the beginning, and the feature may reflect his bias. But the coup idea is a preposterous notion and yet another indication---along with the impeachment fantasy and Senator Feingold's censure idea---that the country's anti-war intellectuals are coming unglued. 

In any event, as the panelists point out, it's not a matter of the country's military becoming enamored of the idea of taking control of the US, but, rather the militarization of the minds of the country's civilian leadership that should be a more serious concern.

On the other hand, in the same edition Lapham himself has an excellent piece on the recent cartoon riots staged by the Islamic fascists: 
Here was a coordinated attack on the freedoms of thought and expression fundamental to the existence of a liberal society and the workings of democratic government, and where were the public voices willing to say so? On sabbatical or leave of absence, mumbling apologies, sending their regrets. 
Yes, and the same was true of the local media---with the honorable exceptions of the SF Chronicle and the online chat room, The Wall---as I pointed out in a recent post.

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