The Belmont Club has remarked that the anti-war left will eventually be absorbed by the radical Islam it currently flirts with.
The Posse has found yet another example of this phenomenon, where Soviet sympathizers have found new friends in radical Islam.
Our exhibit is one Gwynne Dyer, who has given up preaching the virtues of coexistance with the Soviet Union and now supports a terrorist victory in Iraq.
Of course Dyer doesn't think the terrorist should win on the merits of their cause, indeed he is careful to couch himself as an internationalist and argues that an American defeat in Iraq is essential to bring about a "lawful international order" - run of course by that noted sink of corruption the United Nations.
Dyer's credentials as a leading theorist on war took a serious blow when Best of the Web Today exposed him as the "World's Laziest Columnist."
And faced with London's terrorist attacks, Dyer's response was to try to downplay them.
The question remains, though: is Dyer really the objective military scholar who simply sees further and deeper than the idiot neocons or is he a morally blind defeatist whose simply decided that radical Islam is the new ally of convenience?
Thanks to the miracle of Google, the Posse has determined that not only was Dyer wrong about how the Cold War would end, he was on the wrong side of it.
Here's an interview from 1989 - when the Soviet Union was in its death throes - and Dyer is urging Canadian withdrawal from NATO.
The howlers in this interview pretty much come non-stop. Here's a taste:
The beauty of SDI is that as a technological construct it is so implausible, it will probably fall of its own weight. It isn’t going to work, and eventually the Americans, being a people who like technology that works, will probably bite the bullet on SDI because it won’t even stop ballistic missiles. There is no way it can. There is never going to be a time when the cost of adding more missiles is greater than the cost of coping with more missiles through further refinements of SDI. Missiles aren’t expensive. Even if you believe they can get computers with ten-million line programs that will work right first time and all the other nonsense about the technological fantasies necessary to create any kind of SDI defence, the cost/benefit ratio between more Soviet missiles and more SDI technology is always going to favour the Soviets. That is a given of this and the next century’s technology. in the end Americans are sufficiently rational not to pour their entire national wealth down that particular rat hole, I think.[Emphasis added]
Dyer is chock full of spectacularly incorrect predictions:
In suggesting that Canada leave the alliance system, it is not with the hope that we go isolationist and somehow ride out a disaster. Instead, Canadian neutrality is an achievement that might prevent the system from going over the edge, that might begin to move the international system away from the focus on alliances, bi-polar confrontation, and all of that which is going to deliver us to the holocaust. [Emphasis added]
We haven't read Dyer's book, so we aren't sure how he deals with the resulting surge in terrorist attacks after Al Qaeda consolidates its grip on Iraq.
Perhaps, like the London bombings, they'll be just a "blip" in mortality rates to Dyer.
There are many paths to defeatism. Dyer has trodden at least two.
Comments