Month: March 2005

Remember how the elections in Kyrgyzstan were supposed to have been “rigged”? That was the reason for the “Tulip Revolution,” or the “Pink Revolution,” or whatever is going on in one of the poorest and most isolated countries in the former Soviet Union. The “revolution” appears to have gone full circle, however, with the newly-installed “President,” Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who seized power in a violent coup, now recognizing the Parliament elected under allegedly fraudulent conditions.

In reality, however, Akaev was one of the more liberal leaders in the region, who was called “a true Jeffersonian democrat” by Clinton administration deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott in 1994. Of course, Talbott was the same person who thought the Kosvo “Liberation” Army — a band of narco-terrorists and thugs — was worthy of U.S. support.

In any event, the fickleness of the world-conquering Americans, and the suddenness with which the U.S. government moved in to overthrow the Kyrgyz regime, which it had previously backed with such rhetorical hyperbole, is documented by Craig R. Smith in the New York Times:

“The money earmarked for democracy programs in Kyrgyzstan totaled about $12 million last year. Hundreds of thousands more filters into pro-democracy programs in the country from other United States government-financed institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy. That does not include the money for the Freedom House printing press or Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Kyrgyz language service.”

The idea that the Krygyz events, which ended in confusion and mindless looting and violence — violence, I might add, that was initiated by the U.S.-funded “revolutionaries” — is part of a “democratic wave” sweeping across the former Soviet Union is finally coming in for some debunking. As Elinor Burkett — author of So Many Enemies, So Little Time, an account of her days teaching in Kyrgyzstan — writes in today’s New York Times:

“It’s a good story, but I’m afraid that plugging the political upheaval of this poor Central Asian nation into the paradigm du jour is akin to stuffing an elephant into a gorilla skin.”

The “democracy”-mongers, among them many of the same people who hail the “democratization” of Iraq at gunpoint, don’t care about the reality: they just like a good story. After all, they don’t have to live in Kyrgyzstan. But some people do have to live there, and they aren’t liking the “revolution” one bit. As Burkett writes:

“As the wealthy and ambitious jockey for power, the people of Bishkek are digging out and blaming the self-styled rebels from the south for the destruction of their city, heaping contempt on what they deem an illiterate peasantry.The long-standing divide between the two halves of the country – linked by a single, often impassable road over the mountains – has been ratcheted up. Few in Kyrgyzstan are basking in the glow of hope that lighted up Ukraine in December. As one friend in Bishkek said in a recent e-mail message to me: “This is not a democracy. This is just a crowd.”

I’m having such fun with those wacky craaaaazy zonked-out jokesters over at Frontpage — the neoconservative equivalent of Ken Kesey’s Prankster Bus — that I can hardly stand it. First it’s the screaming headline on Horowitz’s blog this morning — “Saddam Hussein website comes to the defense of Juan Cole and Justin Raimondo and attacks us“!, since changed to “Pro-Saddam Hussein website comes to the defense of Juan Cole and Justin Raimondo and attacks us”! — and now it’s a hallucinatory entry by Steven Plaut, a professor of business at the University of Haifa, on their “Moonbat Central” weblog that shows how the moonbats have taken over the sanitorium:

“In Frontpage Magazine we commented today on the intimate web of collaboration and mutual endorsements between Professor Juan Cole and Dennis “Justin” Raimondo. Raimondo then went and posted a series of characteristically hysterical libelous rants in the Go Postal section of the FPM web page under a false name until an attentive reader “outed” him from his closet.”

Plaut must be smoking some pretty strong Haifa hash to really believe what he is writing. Does he think I have nothing better to do than futz around on Frontpage’s dopey bulletin board, where nut-jobs named “Donal” and “Morganfrost” hurl obscene invective at each other? Besides that, you have to go through this long process of registering and logging-in, just in order to jump into Horowitz’s snake-pit. Hardly worth it. What I’d like to know is through what mysterious process did this anonymous “reader” “out” me — what did he (she?) use, a dowsing rod?

Get real, Plaut, and put down the crack pipe. You’ve already embarrassed yourself and your nutso employer by making up silly quotes and putting them in Juan Coles’s mouth.

What’s telling here is that Plaut’s opionion of his readers is so low he’s willing to spout nonsensical drivel that gives new meaning to the phrase made famous by Richard Hofstadter: the paranoid style in American politics.

Speaking of paranoia: The unmistakable insignia of mental disorder are all over Horowitz’s website: e.g., the “Discover the network” database that purports to have the inside story on insidious “subversives” (my regular readers will be thrilled to know that I’m a “leftist,” according to Horowitz’s witch-hunters — a fact bound to surprise my colleagues over at The American Conservative, where I’m a contributing editor.)

The rest of Plaut’s nutty blog entry is really a scream, if you like your humor heavily ironic. He urges his readers “to help our [sic] the Cole-Raimondo team in doing research and in developing their conspiracist theories” by mailing a sock to Antiwar.com headquarters and to the office of Professor Juan Cole, and helpfully provides our address. Isn’t that cute?

These guys aren’t the Merry Pranksters — they’re the Scary Paranoids.

Plaut rants on about “Joos” and “conspiracism” — suddenly the Sunday Herald, a respected Scottish daily, is a “Scottish conspiracist journal” — and avers that I’m “the godmother of a grand conspiracy theory.” That’s because all gay men are really women, you see, at least according to the Israeli branch of the Taliban.

Defending Kahanist terrorists, spewing bigoted venom, and telling lies — put a sock in it, Plaut, before you choke on your own bile.

I added a monthly donate option via Paypal to our donate page. As with our credit card option, you can choose any (positive) level of monthly pledge. Check it out.

Lew Rockwell has written the most thoughtful analysis of what is happening to America, and how libertarians should respond, that I have read since the days when Murray Rothbard was eviscerating statists on the right as well as the left. Here’s a taste: Continue reading “Bravo, Lew!”

This morning I went to my favorite website — I need humor in the early hours, and David Horowitz’s Frontpage never fails to deliver, albeit unintentionally — and was definitely not disappointed by the screaming headline above David Horowitz’s “blog”:

“Saddam Hussein website comes to the defense of Juan Cole and Justin Raimondo and attacks us“!

Hey, I thought, Saddam Hussein has a website? Wow! They sure are getting lenient in Iraqi prisons these days! But on reading further, it turns out that Saddam ain’t bloggin’ — it’s those Eye-talians!:

“A website devoted to attacking the American ‘occupation’ of Iraq and hosted improbably by Italians supporting Iraq’s incarcerated former dictator (it solemnly posts “special reports on the trial of President Saddam Hussein”) has sprung to the defense of Professor Juan Cole whose sympathies for America’s Islamist enemies has been subjected to withering scrutiny by FrontPage writer, Professor Steven Plaut.”

Watch out, dude: I wouldn’t mess with those Eye-talians! Those guys are friggin’ …. dangerous! What with all that pasta, and tomato sauce — not to mention pesto sauce. Nary a cheese-dog to be found — where will the anti-American subversion end? Luckily we have the “withering” analysis of Little Stevie Wondrous Plaut, who’s so pro-American that he packed his bags and moved to Israel where he spends his time denouncing the American peace initiative and defending the extremist-terrorist followers of the late Meir Kahane. Oh, so “withering”!

And there’s more, as Horowitz breathlessly relates:

“The Saddam site uruknet.info reposts Kurt Nimmo’s response to Plaut’s prior evisceration of Nimmo himself for similar raging sympathies for the enemy: ‘Steve ‘Pinnochio Plaut Is In Need of Seriouus [sic] Therapy.’ Nimmo has apparently been consulting Ahmad al-Qloushi’s professor in how to deal with arguments you can’t handle. Nimmo’s article begins ‘It is comforting to read articles by Juan Cole and Justin Raimondo…’ and descends into further inanity from there. Readers of FrontPage can enjoy and profit from Plaut’s latest Cole extravaganza in today’s issue.”

It really is a great compliment — which I’m sure the hateful Horowitz didn’t intend — to be grouped with Professor Cole of the University of Michigan, a scholar and head of the Middle East Studies Association. Cole’s nuanced analysis, leavened with his characteristic gentleness and plain old common sense, is a bit different from my own shall we say angular style, but it’s interesting how obsessed the War Party is with both of us. I humbly suggest that’s because we’re so effective, each in his own way: Antiwar.com has managed to build up a huge audience, and Professor Cole is regularly featured on such programs as PBS’s “News Hour” and cited in newspaper accounts of events in the Middle East.

This has truly been a banner week or two: Antiwar.com has been attacked by all the right neocon nut-jobs! First it was the Trotskyite-turned-Sufi Stephen Schwartz, defender of Uzbekistan’s scary dictatorship — then it was State Department “libertarian” Tom Palmer, whose upcoming trip to Iraq on behalf of the newly-installed colonial government is no doubt going to prove a milestone for those who want to blend Shi’ite theocracy with the insights of Friedrich Hayek, and now the frothy-mouthed Horowitz/Plaut duo.

A wacko, a weirdo, and a couple of wing-dings: by their enemies shall ye know them. We must be doing something right….

The idea that the U.S. would ever engage in covert activities to bring down a government is so inconceivable to Nathan Hamm, of “registan.net,” that he’s shocked — shocked! — that anybody would take the memo purportedly by U.S. ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Stephen Young seriously. It’s an “obvious” forgery, he crows, with the Leisurely Professor (and the world’s leading advocate of State Department libertarianism) chiming in. But as I wrote in my column:

“It is difficult to see how the embassy can maintain this stance of high moral dudgeon in the context of its own actions: regardless of whether or not the memo is real, in whole or in part, they have made its declared provenance all too believable.”

The stupidity and arrogance of U.S. foreign policy is doubly underscored in the example of Kyrgyzstan, where the wide distribution of the Young memo is creating ill will and resentment against the U.S. as fast (or faster) than the distribution of dollars is creating compliant yes-men — and fueling the growing Islamist elements. As John Laughland points out in an excellent piece:

“The US has spent $746,000,000 in Kyrgyzstan since 1992, and that all our old friends – the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the International Foundation for Election Systems, Freedom House “and other American sponsored NGOs” are active in this small poor country. As the ambassador says, “The amount of money we spend in Kyrgyzstan per capita is far and away the highest rate of any of the Central Asian states … our partnership with Kyrgyzstan has made those assistance programs among the most effective of all those countries of the former Soviet Union.

“As it happens, the NGOs are particularly numerous in the Ferghana Valley, where the trouble started. The National Democratic Institute has offices in Jalalabad and Karasuu, a tiny town on the Uzbek border; USAID has an office in Osh; and so does the US Peace Corps.[5] USAID funds many things – click here for a summary – including blatantly biased media outlets like Internews.[6] The Eurasia Foundation, chaired by Martti Ahtisaari, Madeleine Albright, James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger, has offices in Bishkek and Osh.[7] (Its funders include Philip Morris, Yukos, Citigroup and of course the ever generous US taxpayer.[8]) Oddly enough, there is a similar plethora of NGOs across the border in the Uzbekistan part of the Ferghana valley, many of whom pursue political goals underneath the veneer of charitable work: the “Ferghana Valley Peace Building Project,” for instance, promotes both water and “a gender specific strategic action plan”.[9]

“Within the US embassy in Bishkek itself, the “Democracy Commission” finances media outlets including radio and TV stations.[10] Freedom House opened an office in Bishkek in November 2003, and it now prints sixty different journals and newspapers in Kyrgyzstan. (The Freedom House office in Tahskent is headed by a former US diplomat, Robert Freedman, whose last posting was in Ukraine.) Although Ambassador Young claims that US support for NGOs is non-political, the Assistant Secretaries of State Elizabeth Jones and Lorne Craner travelled to Bishhkek for the inauguration of the press, which was funded by the US State Department’s Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, as well as the Open Society Institute (George Soros) and the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. In fact, the printing press itself is legally operated by the “Media Support Center Foundation,” a body which is referred to as “a Kyrgyz NGO” but which is in fact chaired by US Senator John McCain, with former US National Security Adviser Anthony Lake on the board.”

Who do these people think they’re kidding? Now that the country is on the brink of civil war, with TWO rival parliaments and criminal elements rampaging through the capital, Bishkek, one might forgive the Kyrgyz people if they’re less impressed by their pending “liberation” than Glenn Reynolds and Nathan Hamm.