Jihad Unspun - A Clear View On The US War On "Terrorism"

Jihad Unspun: Vote for Kerry, Then Push Him Around

The weekend edition of Jihad Unspun contains a piece by anti-warrior Chalmers Johnson. It is not hard to see what the pro-Qaeda boys like about Johnson's argument. A victory for his faction would be the end of resistance to Islamist groups seeking to dominate the Muslim world.

[L]et me nonetheless end by noting that the political system may not be capable of saving the Republic. It is hard to imagine that any president of either party could stand up to the powerful vested interests surrounding the Pentagon and the secret intelligence agencies....

I believe that if the Republic is to be saved it will be as a result of an upsurge of direct democracy.... The first victory of this movement came on March 14 with the election of Spanish prime minister Jose Zapatero. If democracy means anything at all, it means that public opinion matters. Zapatero understood that 80% of the Spanish people opposed Bush's war in Iraq, and he immediately withdrew all Spanish forces. It's a great pity that Kerry criticized Zapatero for this. We need to duplicate the Spanish victory in Tony Blair's Britain, Silvio Berlusconi's Italy, Junichiro Koizumi's Japan, and in our own country.

Jihad Unspun would also like to see a repeat of the Spanish elections in America. Still, this appears to be a rather halfhearted endorsement. 'Vote for Kerry... but it probably won't be enough... we'll really need 'direct democracy,' by which I mean rule by protest-march rather than by Constitutional processes.' Oddly, given that he wants to prefer 'direct democracy' to these legal processes, Johnson argues that his movement is about the "Constitution and the need to restore its integrity as the supreme law of the land."

Still, apart from his sense that Kerry (unlike Bush) could be intimidated by protest into withdrawing from Iraq, Johnson has some praise for the man himself. Along the way he also explains his opinion of the volunteer military.

Kerry's stand as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War is one of the most honorable aspects of his background. It is a tragedy that we have become so militaristic he must disown the courageous stand he took thirty-five years ago in order to be elected. This reflects one of the major differences between our military during the Vietnam War and our military today. Then it was a citizens' army. Members of the armed forces were a democratic check on militarism because they were not volunteers. They were naturally concerned about the purposes of the war, how it would end, and whether their government and officers were lying to them. Today we have a professional military. People who serve in it are volunteers with a vested interest in advancing their careers through armed conflict.

This is a bit illogical. Although servicemen can vote, the military does not elect the president. Indeed, as we saw in Florida 2000, in a contested election the ballots of deployed servicemen are highly likely to be discarded due to the uncertainty of their arriving with all the requisite stamps. Lawyers representing a candidate who suspects that the military will not favor him can move to have those ballots discarded, and expect to succeed.

The reason Kerry has to disown his VVAW stance in order to be considered is because of a change in the populace as a whole. It is true that Kerry feels that he has to step away from the VVAW, and his earlier remarks that American forces should only be deployed under UN command and with blue helmets. That reflects not a change in our military, but in our society.

UPDATE: Apparently the jihadis aren't the only ones lukewarm about Kerry. As the Rottie points out, the speaker here is one of Kerry's campaign co-chairs.