Charlie Hebdo and the ‘Blowback’ Debate
The vicious murder of the editors and writers of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris has had an effect similar to the hysteria that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: demands that we invade Iraq (again!) and also Syria, as well as a campaign of vilification directed at anyone who dares question this dangerous nonsense.
What we might call the Charlie Hebdo Effect, in concert with the rise of the so-called Islamic State, has propped up the previously failinginterventionist consensus, mobilizing previously faltering neocons on the right and “liberal” interventionists on what passes for the left around the flag of the War Party.
You may ask: So what else is new? Yet there is something new-ish about the response of some of the more weak-kneed libertarians, who never did care much for the anti-interventionist critique of US foreign policy and have now come out of the closet, so to speak, training their fire not on the interventionists but on principled opponents of US militarism. Shikha Dalmia, writing in The Week, takes aim at Ron Paul: “Former congressman and erstwhile presidential candidate Ron Paul offers a completely off-base analysis of the root cause of the episode. It is blowback for Western foreign policy adventurism, the libertarian-leaning Texan claims.” Paul, Dalmia avers, isn’t “doing his avowed commitment to the cause of freedom any good.”
Leaving aside for the moment the absurd “libertarian-leaning” appellation – is she really challenging Paul’s libertarian credentials? – Dalmia goes on to write:
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