Military intervention

On March 29, more than twenty years after the United States commenced Operation Shock and Awe in Baghdad, the Senate made history by repealing the military force authorization that green-lit the operation. The bill, which also aims to kill a previous 1991 authorization for the use of military force, or AUMF, against Iraq during the Gulf War, now heads to the House of Representatives where it faces an uncertain future.  On the face of it, repealing both measures would seem like an ordinary event. Saddam Hussein, after all, has been dead for over sixteen years, hanged by an Iraqi court for a litany of crimes against his own people. His regime dissolved within three weeks of the 2003 invasion.

I’ve been thinking about where I was on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and my memories of the event are quite depressing. What have we learned? As a research fellow at the Cato Institute at that time, I was working with other analysts preparing research, authoring commentaries, publishing op-ed articles and giving interviews to the broadcast media, warning about the consequences of the coming American military conquest in the Middle East. It's not polite to toot one’s own horn, but we were right.

Justin Raimondo is dying. It’s October 2018 and I am headed to the ‘Raimondo Ranch’, in Sebastopol, northern California, to visit the home of the founder of Antiwar.com, the cult website that kept the faith in the early days of the net as Bill Clinton mindlessly bombed Yugoslavia, and George W. Bush leveled Iraq. No one cared, of course. And everyone else was wrong. Raimondo is a legend. The ‘ranch’ is no paleoconservative plantation. It’s a quaint shack with a garden that looks like it’s used to grow marijuana, but charmingly probably isn’t. The property will go to Yoshi, who Raimondo describes as his boyfriend, though in fact the pair are married.