Michael J. Totten: World Ends Tomorrow! Film at Eleven.

August 21, 2006

World Ends Tomorrow! Film at Eleven.

There’s a lot of loose talk in the United States about tomorrow, August 22, Iran’s supposed Armageddon Day for Jerusalem. I wrote a short article about this over at Andrew Sullivan's Time magazine blog. August 22: Tuesday, Not Doomsday.

Posted by Michael J. Totten at August 21, 2006 06:14 AM

Comments

Could be August 22nd Iran time, which means we in NA may find out on Aug 21st.

Posted by: Paul MacPhail at August 21, 2006 07:17 AM

You probably shouldn't associate yourself too much with Andrew Sullivan. That guy has become a total kook.

Posted by: Stankleberry at August 21, 2006 08:17 AM

Iran is obviously developing nuclear weapons, but they are not there yet. So there is no reason for concern.

Posted by: Carlos-2 at August 21, 2006 08:18 AM

You probably shouldn't associate yourself too much with Andrew Sullivan. That guy has become a total kook.

First he was supposedly a right-wing nut. Now he's supposedly a left-wing nut. The funny part is that he has been more or less in the center all along.

Posted by: Michael J. Totten at August 21, 2006 08:28 AM

Did you read this crap from Mr. Sullivan?

I wonder if Lieberman's defeat, the resilience of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the emergence of a Hezbollah-style government in Iraq had any bearing on the decision by Bush and Blair to pre-empt the British police and order this alleged plot disabled.

Kook.

Posted by: Stankleberry at August 21, 2006 10:12 AM

Sullivan has never been in the center. He was a passionate supporter of intervention in Iraq, then became a passionate advocate of impeaching the president. (One subversive theory - which I'm not endorsing, just airing* - links his change of heart to the president's support of the Marriage Amendment.)

*weaselly phrasing courtesy of Mr Sullivan himself, in the course of spreading the more-or-less centrist idea that Cheney and Rumsfeld are intentionally getting as many people killed in Iraq as possible, the better to garner support for further wars unencumbered by nation-building afterwards.

Posted by: bgates at August 21, 2006 12:32 PM

Wow, I'm sure MJT will rush to take career advice from stankleberry, whose blog appears to be entirely comprised of traffic related ranting. Pretty highbrow stuff!
Keep up the good work MJT!

Posted by: L at August 21, 2006 12:58 PM

Michael: Not exactly going out on a limb predicting 8/22 will not be the end of the world or Israel.

IMHO: Sullivan is brilliant, honest but hyperbolic. As I said yesterday, he writes like his hair is on fire.

Posted by: Joe Marino at August 21, 2006 01:14 PM

Comment on Kurdistan articles. My boss at work gets all his political info from Rolling Stone and believes every word of it. In July their major political anti-Bush article was on Iraq. Matt (?) Taibi states to the effect that there is a rumor the reason why Americans are not murdered in Kurdistan is because the Peshmerga will kill ten civilians for every American killed (the article is at work, of course, so I can't quote it exactly.) Your comments?

Posted by: John Costello at August 21, 2006 04:00 PM

there is a rumor the reason why Americans are not murdered in Kurdistan is because the Peshmerga will kill ten civilians for every American killed

That is an absolutely disgusting lie. The Kurds love the Peshmerga. You should see the way civilians interact with them, all smiles and backslaps and hugs.

I have been to totalitarian countries and military dictatorships. Iraqi Kurdistan most definitely isn't one of them.

Posted by: Michael J. Totten at August 21, 2006 11:42 PM

First he was supposedly a right-wing nut. Now he's supposedly a left-wing nut. The funny part is that he has been more or less in the center all along.
-MJT

That's kind of the problem. He bills himself as a gay conservative, but he doesn't seem to understand that he's only conservative relative to other gays. Compared to the population as a whole, he's basically middle-of-the-road moderate (with some odd quirks, which I attribute to his British upbringing).

He seems to have taken Bush's position on gay marriage as a personal betrayal. I stopped reading him because this attitude had infected pretty much everything he was writing about politics.

Posted by: rosignol at August 22, 2006 12:26 AM

Matt (?) Taibi states to the effect that there is a rumor the reason why Americans are not murdered in Kurdistan is because the Peshmerga will kill ten civilians for every American killed

I used to read The Exile back in the day. Matt Taibbi is a talented writer, but he's also a crank. And possibly on crank. Trust me, he made that sh*t up.

Posted by: Stacy at August 22, 2006 05:56 AM

He seems to have taken Bush's position on gay marriage as a personal betrayal. I stopped reading him because this attitude had infected pretty much everything he was writing about politics.

Not Bush's position per se, but at least his tacit endorsement of the religious right's anti-marriage campaign. I haven't written the guy off (spotted him at the pro-Danish rally in DC this spring for example) but it did seem as if he changed course on some things following the gay-marriage controversy. That's purely my unscientific impression however. And unlike, say, Kos or Greg Djerejian, he didn't just jump the fence and start parroting the other side's shibboleths. He's been intellectually consistent throughout. He still supports the war, but thinks it's being waged incompetently and putting us at risk of defeat. That's very different from the actual defeatism on the left generally. The Conservative camp is supposed to be where we can talk about these things like adults. Lord (and Lieberman) knows, the "liberal" camp certainly isn't.

Posted by: Stacy at August 22, 2006 06:08 AM

I am sure there are more gays like Andrew Sullivan who are anti-Bush yet (were) pro-War On Iraq. Another prominent example is Dan Savage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Savage). They are more Libertarian than Conservative because in the US it is impossible to separate Conservative social policy from foreign policy. Like Lieberman and most Jews, the LGBT community are pretty aware of discrimination and they know that most Muslim countries lack it in spades.

Posted by: jjdynomite at August 22, 2006 11:58 AM

Wow, I'm sure MJT will rush to take career advice from stankleberry, whose blog appears to be entirely comprised of traffic related ranting. Pretty highbrow stuff!

HAHAHAHA, don't be jealous, sockpuppet "L". I bet you're a kook, too.

Posted by: Stankleberry at August 22, 2006 12:55 PM

sockpuppet "L".

I hope you aren't accusing me of posting L's comment. If you don't mean that, what do you mean by calling him/her/it a "sockpuppet?" Perhaps I'm unclear on the terminology.

Posted by: Michael J. Totten at August 22, 2006 01:34 PM

They are more Libertarian than Conservative because in the US it is impossible to separate Conservative social policy from foreign policy.

The only way that makes sense is if someone doesn't know much about what kind of foreign policy Libertarians favor... they're basically isolationist. Being pro-war pretty much means they (Sullivan, Savage, etc) don't agree with the official Libertarian position on Iraq, so I would hesitate to describe them as 'Libertarian'.

Posted by: rosignol at August 22, 2006 11:25 PM

I hope you aren't accusing me of posting L's comment. If you don't mean that, what do you mean by calling him/her/it a "sockpuppet?" Perhaps I'm unclear on the terminology.

No no, I wasn't accusing you. Sockpuppets usually post on other peoples' blogs, not their own.

Posted by: Stankleberry at August 23, 2006 07:57 AM

rosignol, maybe there are different types of Libertarians but the think tanks I associate with that philosophy are usually proponents of a very active foreign policy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Foundation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Enterprise_Institute

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraser_institute (Canada)

Cato is more isolationist, however:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_Institute

In Canada the Conservatives = Libertarian, and as we can see in Afghanistan they are pretty interventionist. Probably the influence of Ayn Rand Objectivism has steered more isolationist Libertarians into more of the NeoCon camp.

Posted by: jjdynomite at August 23, 2006 07:57 AM

I am sure there are more gays like Andrew Sullivan who are anti-Bush yet (were) pro-War On Iraq.

I'm one.

Posted by: popskull at August 23, 2006 07:19 PM

Heritage and AEI are conservative, Cato is libertarian. They work together on some things- both Conservatives and Libertarians like the idea of limited government, balanced budgets, fiscal sanity, and some other issues- and disagree on other issues, like drug legalization and some other social policy stuff.

From the Conservative POV, the nice thing about Libertarians is that they don't assume someone who disagrees with them is evil. So you can disagree with them on some things and cooperate with them on other things, and have a rational discussion about why X instead of Y or Z without it degenerating into insults and speculation about nefarious motives.

Anyway, back to foreign policy- with Libertarians, there's this thing called the 'Non-aggression principle'. Summary: the initiation of force is not legitimate. So libertarians consider pre-emptively sending soldiers to other countries to depose a government to be use of force, and therefore a violation of the non-aggression principle.

The result is that most American Libertarians are basically 'ignore them until they mess with us' isolationists.

Dunno about the Fraiser guys, their impact south of the border is pretty much nil.

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