Month: May 2005

Drudge is running a report about an exchange between the only White House correspondent who matters – Helen Thomas – and White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. It goes like this;

Q The other day — in fact, this week, you said that we, the United States, is in Afghanistan and Iraq by invitation. Would you like to correct that incredible distortion of American history —

MR. McCLELLAN: No, we are — that’s where we currently —

Q — in view of your credibility is already mired? How can you say that?

MR. McCLELLAN: Helen, I think everyone in this room knows that you’re taking that comment out of context. There are two democratically-elected governments in Iraq and —

Q Were we invited into Iraq?

MR. McCLELLAN: There are two democratically-elected governments now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we are there at their invitation. They are sovereign governments, and we are there today —

Q You mean if they had asked us out, that we would have left?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, Helen, I’m talking about today. We are there at their invitation. They are sovereign governments — Q I’m talking about today, too.

MR. McCLELLAN: — and we are doing all we can to train and equip their security forces so that they can provide for their own security as they move forward on a free and democratic future. Q Did we invade those countries?

MR. McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Steve. (Emphasis gleefully added by me)

Yes, Steve, go ahead. Please bail me out of this disaster. I shouldn’t have to answer unpleasant questions like this.
Anyone who has to resort to using a phrase like “I think everyone in this room knows” is full of crap. Imagine if the entire press corps weren’t a passel of gutless power worshippers — imagine they all had the sack to tell the Emperor that he was buck naked — now that would be fun, unless your name is Scott McClellan.
PS. Somebody tell Drudge that his title tags on that page contain erroneous information, in that it is no longer 2004…

Due to some personal obligations, there won’t be a Balkan Express this week. Look for a new article next Thursday.

Justin Raimondo appeared again on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! Wednesday morning. He discussed the Larry Franklin/AIPAC affair.

The show segment is now available archived on the Democracy Now! Website.

The show will also be on today:
Direct-TV, channel 375, from 11am-12noon and 6-7pm (Eastern time) and
Dish Network, channel 9415, 8-9AM, 12-1PM, 7-8PM and 12-1AM (Eastern time)

“What no one seemed to notice. . . was the ever widening gap. . .between the government and the people. . . And it became always wider. . . the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway . . . (it) gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about . . .and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated . . . by the machinations of the ‘national enemies,’ without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. . .

Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’. . . must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. . . .Each act. . . is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow.

You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone. . . you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ . . .But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. . . .You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father. . . could never have imagined.” :

From Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free, The Germans, 1938-45 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)

Thanks to Tom Feeley

Ah, Afghanistan. The good war. The poster child for regime change.

Well, looks like the poster child is a bad seed. From the NYT:

Since beginning work last month, the country’s Central Poppy Eradication Force, an American-trained group, has destroyed less than 250 acres, according to the two American officials. Its original goal was to eradicate 37,000 acres, but that target has recently been reduced to 17,000 acres. With the poppy harvest already under way, the actual eradication levels will probably be far lower, the American officials said.

Via Jacob Sullum, who adds,

A serious attempt to reverse the situation would cause severe economic dislocation, alienate farmers, ignite widespread protests, and compromise the war on terrorism.

Mr. Sullum must be overlooking the brilliant plan put forward by Glenn Reynolds last year:

While I’m (sort of) on this topic, why doesn’t the United States address the Afghan opium trade by just buying the stuff up? Presumably, farmers would be just as happy to sell their poppies to us, and that would keep them off the market, as well as depriving bad guys of a revenue source. Am I missing something here?

Life is too short to do that question justice, but Reynolds’ ability to cram so much economic ignorance into so few words is truly impressive. Perverse incentives, anyone?

Sullum wants to end the War on Drugs, as do I. But given the Mom-baseball-apple-pie value of the drug war to American politicians – not to mention the bling-bling it provides to defense contractors, the pharmaceutical industry, and others at the public trough – I don’t see prohibition ending any time soon. Any hope that the poppy explosion in Afghanistan will “heighten the contradictions” of the drug war to a breaking point is naïve. Regime change in Kabul has – like most government interventions – only accelerated the dialectic of bad policy, with no end in sight: more of the alleged problem, more of the so-called solutions. More heroin on your street, more of your money for interdiction efforts and incarceration, more of your freedoms abridged, more profits for the most ruthless black marketeers, more wars for the world’s policeman, and the wheel goes ’round and ’round. But at least you’ll have something to take the edge off.

President Bush was asked whether the release of the photos of Saddam would incite violence:

Well, you asked me whether or not that would inspire people. You know, I don’t think a photo inspires murderers. I think they’re inspired by an ideology that is so barbaric and backwards that it’s hard for many in the Western world to comprehend how they think

Ken Layne at Sploid responds:

Good to know. When Newsweek briefly mentions well-established and widely reported tales of torture from Guantanomo Bay, the magazine needs to apologize to the White House and the world in general. When the right-wing Bush apologists at the New York Post incite Arab rage, it doesn’t matter because the Arabs are already so “backward and barbaric” that here in the Western World we can’t even comprehend it.

On top of Bush’s comments, we have more evidence of the incompetence of the US military leadership:

The Sun quoted U.S. military sources as saying they had handed over the pictures [of Saddam in his drawers] “in the hope of dealing a body blow to the resistance in Iraq”.

Ah! Making them angrier will convince them to accept “democracy.”