Greetings from Camperdown (not that one, the cockroach one) ...

 

Rellie duties and backblocks sightseeing done, the pond is back at base, exhausted and in urgent need of some R and R.

But what did you do during those interminable moments in the car, wandering around the bleak and flat Victorian countryside?

The pond is glad you asked.

Much of the time was spent with podcasts, in particular a five parter (a sixth episode is due as a live event later in January), an LRB podcast, Aftershock: The War on Terror ...

Daniel Soar looked at the way that the United States responded to 9/11, and one strand given extended treatment was the continuity in presidential behaviour from that year to the present incumbent, from George W. Bush's adventurous imperial wars to King Donald's walking the same turf (the current Venezuela folly happened too late for the show, but it fits the thesis, and no doubt will be picked up in the January episode).

Soar isn't the greatest presenter, and the use of music is generally crass in the ominous school of cheap vibes, but he brought the receipts for an unremitting era of American imperialism.

Viewed this way, King Donald isn't an exception, but rather a natural progression, a development of all the strands that came before him - including but not limited to the creation of a surveillance state and the use of the global economic system to punish American enemies (and Obama and Biden walked the same path - see the podcast).

The show didn't go into all the various commentators who facilitated or enabled or otherwise stayed true to the assorted colonialist, imperialist missions, but the pond immediately felt the need to turn to the archives.

Take David Frum, for example, currently burbling away in The Atlantic in a non-Trumpist way. 

He was a speechwriter for the GWB administration, and in The Right Man he offered a glowing insider account of the Iraq war.

Frum took the credit for the creating the term "the axis of evil" (now celebrated as the axis of weevils), a line in the hall of shame that sits up there with the sexing up of a UK intelligence report which apparently had no authors (Alistair Campbell refuses to take the credit for the lies that prompted Tony Bleagh's shameless reversion to British empire days).

Bush lacked the vulgarity, the narcissism, the snake-oil selling effrontery of King Donald, the sheer gilt-gold gaudiness, but how on earth could Frum have a go at the new emperor, for just doing what Bush had done?

He tried ...

Trump’s Critics Are Falling Into an Obvious Trap
The capture of Nicolás Maduro is a show of ambition that calls for an effective response. (*archive link) (titled in the archive version Trump’s Critics Should Not Go Wobbly Over Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro’s capture is setting off a predictable reaction).

Did you see that line?

 The progressive impulse to blame Trump for doing too much in Venezuela can obscure the reality that—for all the noise—Trump may not have done enough.

They can't help themselves. 

The main problem with King Donald, it seems, is that he might not be an effective maintainer of the empire...

And never forget the likes of David Brooks and Bill Kristol.

The pond chanced upon a memory of those two rogues in a Mother Jones' newsletter by David Corn back in March 2023... The Iraq War: A Personal Remembrance of Dissent

Corn allows himself a pat on the back at the end, but fair enough, he didn't join the rat pack enthusiastic mongers for war ...and that allows him a chance to dish on others ...

...A few weeks before the invasion, I was doing a radio appearance with another friend who was working for an important newspaper. (He’s now a prominent media figure who has been a passionate foe of Trumpism.) He confided that he was uncertain how to assess the Bush administration’s argument for war. But, he said, since New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was for it, he, too, supported the attack. At the time, Friedman had an odd stance. He believed a war would ignite progressive change throughout the Arab world, though he noted he was “troubled” that Bush was justifying the war by falsely alleging Saddam was allied with al Qaeda. “You don’t take the country to war on the wings of a lie,” Friedman insisted. Nonetheless, this important influencer backed the invasion. I was disheartened to see my friend, a smart fellow and usually an independent thinker, cede his opinion to Friedman. But like many in Washington, he decided that sticking with the herd provided adequate cover.
An aside: Two months into the war, Friedman asserted in an interview with Charlie Rose that the invasion was a necessary response to 9/11, despite the fact that Saddam had nothing to do with that attack: “We needed to go over there basically and take out a very big stick, right in the heart of that world, and burst that [terrorism] bubble. And there was only one way to do it…What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?…Well, suck on this.’”
Suck on this? That was the level of thought that fueled backing for the war.

Friedman's always been something of a loon, but there was also Bill ...

...in the fall of 2002 and winter of 2003, it was tough to counter the fearmongering, magical thinking, and unsophisticated analysis that drove the cheerleading for war. During the run-up to the invasion, I appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show with Bill Kristol, the godfather of the neoconservative movement and a leading advocate for clobbering Iraq. I pointed out that the WMD inspections in Iraq could be useful in preventing Saddam from reaching the “finish line” in developing nuclear weapons. Kristol responded by exclaiming, “He’s past that finish line! He’s past the finish line!” He was saying that Saddam already had his mitts on a nuclear weapon, bolstering the White House’s assertion that Saddam presented a nuclear threat to the United States.
But Saddam wasn’t past any “finish line.” There was no evidence he possessed nuclear weapons. The UN inspectors had so far found no sign of an Iraqi program to develop them. (Post-invasion reviews confirmed Saddam had not been running a nuclear weapons project.) But in those dreadful months before the invasion of Iraq, the proponents of for war could say anything—and get away with it. The day before we jousted on O’Reilly’s show, Kristol declared that a war in Iraq “could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East.” The pro-war propaganda received precious little scrutiny. Most of the media had abandoned one of the most crucial tools of our profession: skepticism.  (See the infamous case of New York Times reporter Judith Miller.)
There was also David Brooks, another fellow traveller who thinks a smarmy smile and a cheesy grin are enough to get him out of trouble, and allow for the forgiveness of past sins ...
At one point, I debated David Brooks, then of the Weekly Standard, over the necessity of launching a war against Iraq. He summed up his support for the endeavor by asking: Don’t you believe the people of Iraq desire democracy just as much as we do?
I was surprised by his naiveté. I was no expert on Iraq, but it was obvious to me that invading and possibly occupying a nation half a globe away could end up rather messy, and that a universal craving for democracy might not trump all else. It seemed to me that Brooks was relying on fairy tale analysis, projecting simplistic assumptions onto an extremely complicated situation. (Sunni, Shiite—how many advocates for war knew the difference?) Yet this was all Brooks needed to champion a war that would cost the lives of nearly 4,500 US troops, injure 32,000 service members, and add $3 trillion to the national credit card—and leave millions of Iraqi civilians displaced and more than 100,000 dead.

And don't get the pond, or Corn for that matter, started on Dick Cheney, who turned anti-Trump in his old age, as if he couldn't recognise a soul mate, a spiritual comrade in arms, a man who would do to Venezuela what Cheney did for Iraq.

Corn took a final swipe at the fellow travellers ...

...Back to my main point: One did not need to know more about Iraq than the war champions to be skeptical and question the crusade for war. The key reasons for the invasion were dubious, and the post-invasion plan seemed non-existent. Yet dissent was dismissed.
And many, many people died. Chaos and violence wracked the region for years, with effects that continue to this day. But did anyone pay a price for causing this catastrophe? Suffer a consequence? Bush and Cheney—after their allies swift-boated Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign—were reelected. These days, Bush paints pictures of American veterans, nice dogs, and world leaders. He is paid between $100,000 and $175,000 a speech. Rumsfeld and Powell are dead. Rice is a prestigious professor at Stanford University. Ari Fleischer, Bush’s White House press secretary who helped propagate the false case for war, became a (well-paid, I assume) consultant for professional football teams, golfer Tiger Woods, and others. He recently was working for the Saudi-backed LIV Golf Tour. Kristol remains a highly regarded pundit and a leading figure in Never-Trumpland. Brooks is…well, you know.

Yes, yes, we know, oh we know ...

And the pond reads Kristol in The Bulwark and quite enjoys his Never-Trumpism, and yet can never quite forget that his career has had all the elasticity of a lump of Jello.

Rachel Maddow shared a memory, archived here ...

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WILLIAM KRISTOL, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Whatever else you can say
about this war, let me just make my point, George Bush is not fighting this
like Vietnam. Whatever, we don't need to be fighting the whole history of
Vietnam.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Saddam, maybe, that's the danger.
KRISTOL: It`s not going to happen.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Let me take a call.
KRISTOL: It's not going to happen. This is going to be a two-month
war, not an eight-year war.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: This is going to be a two-month war, not an eight-year war.
He was talking about the war that did turn out to be an eight and a half
yearlong war in Iraq.
Now, Bill Kristol, the living, breathing symbol of wrong about
national security, Mr. Kristol has a fresh deal going. Now, his new
project is that he wants to stop the nomination of former Senator Chuck
Hagel as secretary of defense. President Obama today chose the Republican
from Nebraska for that job.
And despite having been fine with Mr. Hagel even as a possible vice
president for George W. Bush in 2000, Bill Kristol is now leading the
opposition to Chuck Hagel at defense. Bill Kristol, the same guy who said
Iraq would take two months, who said the only consequences of us bombing
Iran already would be good consequences, the man who thought up the Sarah
Palin vice presidency, the one man in America who can least be the arbiter
of what is reasonable in national security. That same one guy, Bill
Kristol, now bought ChuckHagel.com where you can go to learn that Bill
Kristol believes that Chuck Hagel is not a responsible option.
Oh, Senator Hagel, may you always be blessed with comically non-self-
aware enemies. It is not every nominee for secretary of defense whose foes
are their own punch lines.

And now he's in his anti-Trump phase, what could he possibly say that wouldn't sound comically non-self-aware?

Did any of them suffer any punishment? Corn again:

Am I bitter? Not at all… Okay, that’s a lie. Many of the Iraq war enthusiasts went on to have wonderful careers. Few publicly expressed any signs of remorse or being burdened by their colossal mistake. (Powell was an exception. For years, he appeared to be haunted by his role in the war.) Those who cautioned prudence and warned a war might not be such a swell idea were hardly hailed for getting it right. But history has rendered its verdict. Being correct—especially on a matter of war—can be its own reward. Journalists are supposed to serve the truth, not spread the spin. Too many did not heed this calling in that terrible time.

And now here we are with the Venezuela adventure.

It will take some extraordinary contortions for isolationists to suddenly turn gung ho, and enjoy the colonialism, celebrate the intervention.

And what will those interventionists do, the ones who cheered on the Iraq war and yearned for regime change?

Will they end up sounding like Brooks April 2004, pretending to be A More Humble Hawk? ( that's an archive link)

Brooks couldn't let go of the dream ...

Did you see that line? 

"...I still believe that in 20 years, no one will doubt that Bush did the right thing."

What could Brooks possibly scribble about Venezuela that wouldn't sound comically non-self-aware?

The pond isn't going to shed any tears for Maduro, an authoritarian of the first water, though possibly a runt up against a genuine authoritarian of real clout, such as Vlad the Sociopath or King Donald himself.

But acts of piracy and murder on the high seas, and regime change based on false premises haven't worked well in the past, and likely won't work well again.

There are some obvious motivations - when in trouble, imperialists like to bung on a war, and King Donald sticks to that rule ... (what were those pesky Epstein files again?) 

The ability to loot a country rich in oil must also count for something.

Meanwhile the swishing Switzer was first out of the gate yesterday in the lizard Oz, and being lazy, the pond decided to make him the entry point for a return to duty ... (the Lynch mob also responded to the call to arms, but lack of room means he'll be a celebratory late arvo posting, as the pond gets serious about its herpetology):

Of course the pond won't be really satisfied until the bromancer has a go, especially as the swishing Switzer introduced all kinds of caveats and uncertainties, to give himself an escape hatch further down the track ...

Already chomping at the bit to do over Cuba?

Perhaps Brazil as well?

Here we go, here we go ...

In the end, the swishing Switzer comes good with the dreaming:

There it is in the last gobbet, the dream of the impossible dream ...

...One of the enduring lessons of the Iraq war and other “forever wars” that Trump rightly criticised is that democracy is not an export commodity: it is a do-it-yourself enterprise that requires the right conditions and circumstances. That remains the case. But it is now fair to ask whether Venezuela might yet show that standing up to tyranny can succeed – and that democracy, once lost, can be reclaimed.

The disunited states, currently run by an emperor (with actual triumphal arch pending) is a democracy worth exporting?

The swishing Switzer could have shown some imagination ...

...it is now fair to ask whether the United States might yet show that standing up to tyranny and gold-gilt obsessed kings can succeed – and that democracy, once lost, can be reclaimed.

Fat chance. Now he's turned up on YouTube, which has displaced patriotism as the first refuge for the disreputable scoundrel ...

Onwards and upwards, and the pond hopes that this year, reptile studies can offer what was on view in the village of Tilba ... clairvoyance (seeing), clairsentience (feeling), clairaudience (hearing) and claircognizance (knowing)...

Readings will be available ...for clairherpetology ...

High on the curriculum ... stopped clock syndrome ...