Month: September 2004

I think Matt Taibbi has a great idea here:

In the conformist atmosphere of the late 50s and early 60s, the individual was a threat. Like communist Russia, the system then was so weak that it was actually threatened by a single person standing up and saying, “This is bullshit!”

That is not the case anymore. This current American juggernaut is the mightiest empire the world has ever seen, and it is absolutely immune to the individual. Short of violent crime, it has assimilated the individual’s every conceivable political action into mainstream commercial activity. It fears only one thing: organization.

That’s why the one thing that would have really shaken Middle America last week wasn’t “creativity.” It was something else: uniforms. Three hundred thousand people banging bongos and dressed like extras in an Oliver Stone movie scares no one in America. But 300,000 people in slacks and white button-down shirts, marching mute and angry in the direction of Your Town, would have instantly necessitated a new cabinet-level domestic security agency.

Why? Because 300,000 people who are capable of showing the unity and discipline to dress alike are also capable of doing more than just march. Which is important, because marching, as we have seen in the last few years, has been rendered basically useless. Before the war, Washington and New York saw the largest protests this country has seen since the 60s—and this not only did not stop the war, it didn’t even motivate the opposition political party to nominate an antiwar candidate.

Read the rest. Any of you who marched in the huge yet futile anti-war protests pre-Iraq invasion will identify with Taibbi’s description of the various protester MO’s and costumes and the reality of being in a crowd of hundreds of thousand people making a statement that is totally ignored. I know libertarians debated whether it was even counterproductive to march with a bunch of fruitloops and commies and people carrying banners for a variety of pet causes that had nothing to do with opposition to the war. If nothing else, protests have to be focussed to have any effect. It would be interesting to see how many people would have the discipline to turn out to protest in uniform.

At Commondreams, Ira Chernus explains how the ’60s prepared us to live with the fact that we will never, ever know for sure who was behind the 9/11 attacks. Whoops, I had always thought the counterculture’s primary message was never, ever eat fried food.

Are we to blame the Saudis, the Israelis or the Bushies? Heather Wokusch warns it could be decades before the truth is finally revealed.

At Antiwar, Justin Raimondo points out the Saudi and Israeli theories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The salient point is that it’s three years later and 9/11 seems ever more shrouded in mystery.

Well, as the seasons they go ’round and ’round, while we’re waiting to see if Raimondo and others can prove Chernus wrong by lifting the fog, there’s plenty of time to consider the question which tends to go unasked, why did nineteen people want to inflict such horrible pain on us? The reasons were pretty clear three years before 9/11, at least to one Jennifer Loewenstein. The following letter was also printed in the Chicago Tribune under the title “A World’s View”:

FOREIGN POLICY IN ARAB NATIONS TIED TO EMBASSY BOMBINGS?
Madison Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin
Aug 14, 1998

Dear Editor: Americans have every reason to be horrified by the recent terror attacks against U.S. targets in Africa. Nevertheless, a failure to understand the sources of such violence will only hinder efforts to thwart it in the future.

Eight years to the day after the arrival of the U.S. 82nd Airborne division to Saudi Arabia, bombs exploded almost simultaneously at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Is this a coincidence?

Days after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the United States sought and obtained permission from Saudi King Fahd to station American troops there on the condition that they would leave once the threat of Iraqi aggression had ended. Nevertheless, a U.S. military presence continues to this day – to the dismay of many Saudis, including Crown Prince Abdullah.

Today, comfortable relationships between the United States and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and King Hussein of Jordan seem to be taken for granted by our government despite the sentiments of growing numbers of people within these (and other) countries. A careful examination of the reasons why anti-American feeling is on the rise should lead to changes in our foreign policy vis-a-vis these countries.

Apparently, however, where strategic and economic interests are at stake, respect for the integrity and the political climate of independent nations plays a very small role. The consequences of such nationally self-interested behavior could well be dire.

U.S. control over Arab oil, its unconditional alliance with the state of Israel coupled with the failure of the Clinton administration to intervene over the failed Oslo peace accords, crippling seven-year-old economic sanctions imposed upon Iraq – which have been particularly devastating to civilians – and the continued American military presence in Saudi Arabia all weaken friendly sentiments toward the United States, even – and most conspicuously – in our closest allies. If there is a Saudi connection to bombings in East Africa, the warning bells should be heeded in Washington.

Jennifer Loewenstein, Madison

It’s worth mentioning that in a Vanity Fair interview May 9, 2003, when asked what good has come out of the Iraq invasion, Paul Wolfowitz answered

“There are a lot of things that are different now, and one that has gone by almost unnoticed–but it’s huge–is that by complete mutual agreement between the U.S. and the Saudi government we can now remove almost all of our forces from Saudi Arabia. Their presence there over the last 12 years has been a source of enormous difficulty for a friendly government. It’s been a huge recruiting device for al Qaeda. In fact if you look at bin Laden, one of his principle grievances was the presence of so-called crusader forces on the holy land, Mecca and Medina. I think just lifting that burden from the Saudis is itself going to open the door to other positive things.”

Unfortunately, the interviewer didn’t ask if that positive was perhaps just a little bit offset by the prospect of keeping tens or hundred of thousands of troops in Iraq for as many as ten years“, its taking as many as 10 years to crush the insurgency.

Note: The Financial Times has called for a US/UK withdrawal from Iraq, with, “ideally,” the US “stating it has no intention of establishing bases” there.

If you aren’t reading James Wolcott’s blog, you’re missing elegant bullseyes like this.

Elections are about the future. Or so we’re constantly told.

But the future has barely made a guest appearance during this election campaign. And not the recent past of no WMDs, Abu Ghraib, and the failure to capture Osama Bin Laden. But in a hazy three-decades-old flashback in which John Kerry is/isn’t spending Christmas in Cambodia and George Bush is/isn’t showing up for National Guard duty. The entire scuffle between Kerry and Bush’s surrogates is stuck in the past and mired in the old, the political operatives and pundits picking through bureaucratic garbage for anything resembling forensic evidence of buried shame. To anyone under the age of forty, these controversies must seem as far-off as the quiz show scandal.

RT figures out Chechnya so you don’t have to.

Remember the Iraqi flag flap? Spencer Ackerman points out an interesting item on the Kurds’ resentment of the all-Arabic language interim Iraqi national council processes, as well as the fact that the old Saddam-era Iraqi flag is exclusively present at the council meetings, while the Israeli-ish new flag adopted by the first Puppet Council with its Kurd stripe is missing. All this violates the Transitional Administrative Law that the Kurds worked so hard to pass, but apparently the TAL died when it wasn’t approved by the UN Security Council.

As long as you’re at Spencer’s place, his next post is fairly amusing, being a long and involved analysis of a poll of Iraqis that basically demonstrates that Iraqis know what democracy is (Two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner) better than Americans. For example, Spencer highlights the following poll results: Asked which type of government would best secure their individual interests, almost 57 percent chose a “strong, central government,” contrasted with 26.7 percent support for “a government in Baghdad made up of representatives from different regions, tribes and sects.” […] Over 60 percent of Iraqis want elections without delay, and nearly 50 percent consider a delay of just one month to be “very unfavorable.” Uh, what was the breakdown of Iraqi ethnic groups again? Shiites are 60% of the population? Hmmmm…..

What if the Republican, far-right and warflogger chunk of the blogosphere were as interested in tracking down the mystery of the forged Niger uranium documents as they are in the Killian memos? On the subject of the memos, I think Steven Horwitz is wrong. What this means for his larger point about the blogosphere being a force for liberty, I’m not sure. I do think it’s a mistake to take the baying of the warfloggers seriously. Really, The Editors have the right attitude toward the crowd that screamed forgery.

The Angry Arab: “Powell: Key to Mideast progress is stripping Arafat’s power. Now Arafat is a certifiable and corrupt buffoon, but how stupid is this statement? Does Powell really think that an end to Arafat would bring about peace? As’ad, I don’t see the word “peace” anywhere in Powell’s statement. Has anything the Bushie Administration done indicated that it equates “progress” with “peace?”

Via Jim Henley, who got it from Hit & Run, here’s George Bush singing sunday bloody sunday.

Ah, zeynep has the links as well as an excellent post on how the CPA ordered the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Health Minister to stop counting Iraqis killed by the invaders. I was looking for that when I wrote this post. Also, see zeynep’s next post on a recent callous statement from the ghoul Rumsfeld.

UPDATE: Another excellent post on Rumsfeld’s comments here, by Arthur Silber.

Food for thought. That’s what you get for being in my referrers, Dan.

Some lovely photos of Compassionate Conservatives at Republican events.

UPDATE: Okie dokie, then.

On George W. Bush’s National Guard documents, scroll down to page 17, and you’ll find something askew that the big boys refuse to touch. What I want to know is: has our commander-in-chief had his cholera shots???? During the summer of ’68, when he was shooting up yellow fever, typhoid, tetanus, and plague, why did he not opt for the cholera? Our greatest bio-terror threat may be struggling through a bag of pretzels at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue even as you read this.

I understand the sentiment and the political message behind demonstrations like this, but every time I see a news account about Americans mourning the “grim milestone” of over a thousand dead in the Iraq War-of-Choice, I can’t help but resent the fact that no Americans mourned the 1,000th or even the 10,000th Iraqi killed in the invasion. Americans never even knew when the 1,000th Iraqi was killed because as Tommy Franks famously said, “We don’t do body counts.”

Oh, this is just wonderful.

Via Abu Aardvark, we read:

Two intense military insurgencies in Iraq, with the Sunnis and Shia, not enough for you? Do you agree that everyone wants to fight in Fallujah, but only real men want to go to Kirkuk? Do you think that if a spot of war is good for the soul, then even more must be even better? Do you think that the greater the violence, the more evidence that our policies are working? Then good news for you!

Al Hayat reports that Masoud Barzani, leader of the KDP, has chosen this calm and peaceful moment to re-open the question of the Kurdish identity of Kirkuk and has threatened to “wage a war to defend the Kurdish identity of the city.”

Kurdish Leader Ups The Ante Over Disputed Iraqi City

Iraq’s Kurds are ready to fight to preserve the identity of the ethnically-divided and oil-rich city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, one of their historical leaders told AFP Thursday.

“Kirkuk is the heart of Kurdistan and we ready to wage a war in order to preserve its identity and to sacrifice ourselves for what Iraqi Kurds have already achieved,” said Massud Barzani.

As I was saying…..