{"id":9986,"date":"2007-02-20T14:01:45","date_gmt":"2007-02-20T19:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9986.html"},"modified":"2007-02-20T14:01:45","modified_gmt":"2007-02-20T19:01:45","slug":"the-war-we-the-reality-based-community-didnt-notice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-war-we-the-reality-based-community-didnt-notice\/","title":{"rendered":"The war the reality-based community didn’t notice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds caused a bit of a stir when he recommended<\/a> that U.S. assassins infiltrate Iran and kill some of the country’s “mullahs and atomic scientists.” University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos took Reynolds to task for the idea.<\/p>\n

“Of course Iran is not at war with America,” Campos explained<\/a>, “but just as Reynolds spent years repeating Bush administration propaganda about Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, he’s now dutifully repeating the administration’s claims about supposed Iranian government involvement in Iraq’s civil war.”<\/p>\n

Reynolds responded quickly. Campos, Reynolds said<\/a>, “hurts his credibility up front by saying that Iran is not at war with us — when, in fact, it has been since 1979, with the deaths of many Americans, soldiers and otherwise, on its hands.”<\/p>\n

Now, I keep up fairly well on the news, and I don’t recall noticing a 28-year war against Iran. Indeed, Bush included Iran in his “axis of evil,” not because we’re at war with the country, but because it sounded good<\/a> in a speech. For that matter, Iranian officials reached out to U.S. officials with a diplomatic overture<\/a> in 2003, which the administration rebuffed, suggesting the “war” could be over now, if only the White House wanted it to be.<\/p>\n

But the best response<\/a> came from my friend, the Anonymous Liberal.<\/p>\n

[I]f we’ve been at war with Iran since 1979, then President Reagan, then-Vice President Bush, and the rest of the Reagan administration are necessarily guilty of high treason. During the Iran-Contra affair<\/a>, they illegally sold arms to Iran (via Israel), including thousands of BGM-71 TOW<\/a> (Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided) anti-tank missiles. Iran subsequently reverse-engineered<\/a> these missiles and now produces its own version, called the Toophan<\/a>, which Hezbollah reportedly used against Israeli tanks in the recent conflict in Lebanon. If we were “at war” with Iran at the time of these arms sales, is there any non-treasonous interpretation of this conduct?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Maybe the arms deals came during a brief cessation to our ongoing war?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week, Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds caused a bit of a stir when he recommended that U.S. assassins infiltrate Iran and kill some of the country’s “mullahs and atomic scientists.” University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos took Reynolds to task for the idea. “Of course Iran is not at war with America,” Campos explained, “but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9986\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}