Antiwar.com Blog

Media reports coming from Kosovo uniformly refer to what is going on as “inter-ethnic violence” or “clashes.” That is nothing but a transparent attempt to spin the situation and pin the blame anywhere but on the real culprits: Albanian mobs, organized and instigated by the KLA.
Since June 1999, Kosovo has not seen “clashes” or even “fighting,” but a systematic, one-sided persecution of Serbs, Turks, Roma, Goranci and generally all non-Albanians by the KLA-dominated Albanian regime, operating under UN/NATO protection. You need two sides for a fight of any kind; everything else is just a massacre. And ever since June 1999, there’s only been one side with the ability to do so – the KLA.
What is currently happening in the occupied province is a coordinated, premeditated pogrom. Continue reading “Pogrom, not “clashes””

Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Wednesday described the U.S. occupation of Iraq as “a fiasco” and suggested American voters should follow the example set by Spain and change their leadership by supporting Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts for president in November.

“I said during the campaign I hoped Spain and the Spaniards would be ahead of the Americans for once,” Zapatero said in an interview on Onda Cero radio. “First we win here, we change this government, and then the Americans will do it, if things continue as they are in Kerry’s favor.”

Here’s the rest…

Well. Probably that puts an end to this, anyway.

Terrorist attacks in Europe have been numerous and ongoing, but the sheer scale of Spain’s “3/11” and the concomittant carnage are new and shaking. Spain is frightened — and lashing out. Remember how badly the US needed to act, to do something, practically anything, after 9/11? Well, what’s happening is a re-direction of anger away from the ever-elusive actual terrorists to a more convenient target: here, the US.

A terrible countenance is emerging in Europe: it is that of a Europe gleeful in its anti-Americanism, guised as anti-Bushism at present — Madrid has provided the catalyst. For those of us opposed to US intervention abroad, but who deeply care about our country, this augers very poorly for the state of the world: the US historically hasn’t responded well to isolation, but over-engages as if in compensation; Spain and Britain and other US allies will suffer as they regress to a time of consolidation with the elderly attitudes of an aging European intellectual elite, who truly do not care about the common citizen or their economic plights, or respect their ability to make decisions. In the past four years, Spain has been making strides toward increased economic growth, cultural revitalization, and improved internal security vis-a-vis ETA — but that is gone now — in the time it takes to cast a reactive ballot. So — another unintended consequence of the US war on Iraq is that of disrupting the somewhat emerging era of greater freedoms in Europe — and precipitated by the US itself lashing out at the wrong party, Iraq, instead of focusing on the terrorists who imminently caused our 9/11.

With love to George, Dick, Donald, Paul and Doug
From Osama and the gang.

Billmon is on a roll….

How refreshing. A politician displaying consistency and adherence to principle. In response to pressure from Bush ” not to yield to pressure from al Qaeda by pulling their troops from the coalition occupying the turbulent country,” Zapatero responds:

“I will listen to Mr Bush but my position is very clear and very firm,” Zapatero told Onda Cero radio. “The occupation is a fiasco. There have been almost more deaths after the war than during the war.”
[…]
“My position is the same. I have explained it throughout the election campaign,” he said. “The occupying forces have not allowed the United Nations to take control of the situation.”
[…]
“Fighting terrorism with bombs, with operations of ‘shock and awe’, with missiles, that does not combat terrorism it only generates more radicalism,” the 43-year-old Socialist leader said.

“The way to fight terrorism is with the rule of law, with international legislation, with intelligence services,” he said. “This is what the international community should be talking about.”

Applause.

In my last post I mentioned Michael Scott Doran’s article “The Saudi Paradox.” For a more complex, though not necessarily contradictory view of the Saudi power struggle there’s Robert Baer’s Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.

Baer, who was a CIA case officer in the Mideast and Central Asia for decades, opposed the invasion of Iraq, and he wants to drop the drug war, end industrial espionage against the EU and disband the CIA. He opposes messianic universalist democratism but unfortunately has retained his support for military interventionism in principle. Regardless, his tales of astonishing government corruption and ineptitude could cause a reasonable person to question the whole militarist project. Despite the book’s regrettable title, Baer is no knee-jerk Saudi-basher; he praises the nominal rulers of the country, particularly Crown Prince ‘Abdallah, and he criticizes the US and Israeli governments’ roles in fomenting the jihad movement. Baer is also refreshingly nonpartisan; for example, after criticizing “the oilmen who now occupy the White House” he writes, “not that I want to let the Clinton people off the hook, or the first Bush team, or the Reaganites, Carterites, Fordites, or Nixonites: Screwing up Saudi Arabia might be the most successful bipartisan undertaking of the last half century.”

Here’s my Cliff Notes version of Baer’s view of the creation of the international jihad movement:

The goal of the US military /intelligence /espionage complex was to defeat the Soviet Union (rather than, say, to protect Americans). That dualistic worldview led to US opposition to secular Arab nationalism, which was viewed as compatible with Soviet socialism, and support for Zionism, monarchial despotism, and Sunni theocracy, which were not. The victory of Israel – “a tiny state based on religious cohesiveness” – over Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in 1967 discredited secular Arab nationalism and began to shift the balance of power away from the corrupt, hedonistic monarchs, and in favor of the theocrats. The CIA and Saudi intelligence used government-controlled charities (for plausible deniability) to funnel billions of dollars of aid to the most radical mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan – the most expensive covert op in history. International jihad groups were organized and funded: next stop the Balkans, Chechnya, and New York. King Fahd’s stroke in 1995 was a turning point, which led to a near-coup by one of his wives in cahoots with his favorite son, Azouzi, and led to a still-unresolved power struggle among corrupt princes, the theocratic establishment, the conservative reformist Crown Prince ‘Abdullah, and rebel theocrats – in various combinations of alliances. The stakes are high: Baer claims, for instance, that Azouzi received one bribe in the mind-boggling amount of $900,000,000.

The US military when stationed in Saudi Arabia was viewed as a guarantor of the Saudi royal family – an obstacle to irregular succession or regime change. The terrorist attacks against US civilians were perpetrated by Sunni militants yet in response the Bushies targeted a bogus “axis” of Arab nationalists, Communists, and Shi’ites – that is, opponents of militant Sunnism. Sleeping with the Devil helps us understand why.