Antiwar.com Blog

In his famed 2002 State of the Union ‘Axis of Evil’ speech, President Bush stated: “Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears, and show us the true scope of the task ahead…we have found diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities — detailed instructions for making chemical weapons … surveillance maps of American cities, and thorough descriptions of landmarks in America and throughout the world.”

However, according to a Boston Globe Story today:

A top nuclear-safety official has said he wasn’t aware that any American nuclear power plant diagrams were found in Afghanistan, despite a terrorist threat cited by President Bush in his State of the Union address two years ago. Edward McGaffigan Jr., a member of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, responding to an environmental group’s query, said this month that he testified in 2002 after the speech in at least one closed congressional hearing that he was not aware of any evidence that `diagrams of American nuclear power plants’ had been found in Afghanistan.

McGaffigan’s statement has led some groups to assert that Bush either misled the country or mishandled the intelligence about the threat, because the NRC would be expected to play a pivotal role in safeguarding America’s nuclear facilities. … read more

Beautiful: just as Anthony Gancarski jumps aboard the Bush train, Bill freaking O’Reilly hints at jumping off. For a guy who thinks himself the second coming of Vladimir Nabokov, he might not be that bright.

President Karzai certainly has pressing political reasons to control the exponentially increasing harvests of opium poppies which are supplying his opposition with the wealth necessary to maintain militias, purchase weaponry and threaten the stability of the country. But a new crisis is looming on the horizon which Afghanistan has not had to deal with in the past: drug addiction and a lack of treatment facilities.

Interestingly, the Taliban government was quite successful in stopping opium production during the last year or so of their rule, as this UK study shows. But with the overthrow of the Taliban, Afghanistan is now beginning to experience a public health crisis of drug addition, which may be compounded with a rise in AIDS/HIV and other diseases from shared needles.

Until recently, the use of heroin – a 20th Century invention which can only be made with specialist chemicals – was relatively rare in Afghanistan, largely because most of the processing was done outside the country. That has changed with the return of millions of refugees from neighbouring Pakistan and Iran. Many became regular heroin users there and they have brought the practice and the demand home with them. It is difficult to get accurate figures, but one estimate is that Kabul alone has at least 20,000 heroin addicts.

Just two years after the fall of the Taleban – who banned opium poppy cultivation – the country’s illegal drugs trade has grown so big many believe it now threatens Afghanistan’s stability. Last year, the trade generated $2.3bn in revenue for traffickers, almost as much as the country received in aid.
… read more

One of the best critiques I have read of the media and how they helped lead us into war. From the New York Review of Books’ feature story, “Now They Tell Us” by Michael Massing.

If nothing else, the Iraq saga should cause journalists to examine the breadth of their sources. “One question worth asking,” John Walcott of Knight Ridder says, “is whether we in journalism have become too reliant on high-level officials instead of cultivating less glamorous people in the bowels of the bureaucracy. “In the case of Iraq, he added, the political appointees “really closed ranks. So if you relied exclusively on traditional news sources—assistant secretaries and above—you would not have heard things we heard.” What Walcott calls “the blue collar” employees of the agencies—the working analysts or former analysts—were drawn on extensively by Knight Ridder, but by few others.

The contrast between the press’s feistiness since the end of the war and its meekness before it highlights one of the most entrenched and disturbing features of American journalism: its pack mentality. Editors and reporters don’t like to diverge too sharply from what everyone else is writing. When a president is popular and a consensus prevails, journalists shrink from challenging him. Even now, papers like the Times and the Post seem loath to give prominent play to stories that make the administration look too bad. Thus, stories about the increasing numbers of dead and wounded in Iraq —both American and Iraqi—are usually consigned to page 10 or 12, where they won’t cause readers too much discomfort.

… read more

As weird as it seems in the current everybody-hates-us environment, back in the ‘90s political pundits argued that the US’s popularity demonstrated an American exception to balance of power theory. See, according to standard geopolitical theory nations should ally themselves in such a way as to thwart the most powerful interventionist state. Like the law of reversion to the mean, the balance of power tendency increases in strength as geopolitical power increases, making enemies of allies and causing empires to grab defeat from the jaws of victory. A classic example is the British army in North America, they defeated the French and Indians for (and with) their colonists, but having defeated their enemy, their ally, the colonists, no longer threatened, rebelled.

Other than to the minority of us who were alarmed (disgusted?, horrified?) by the Bush Doctrine precursor, the Kosovo intervention, the US’s growing power in the ‘90s seemed to give the USA a get-out-of-history-free card. Post-9/11 was a perfect time to reconsider: here’s an attack allegedly masterminded by an organization that was created during a US-backed victory in Afghanistan. Later, when Iraq “threatened” Saudi Arabia, al Qaeda offered to defend Saudi Arabia, but was rebuffed, since the US was already on duty. Who would have won if Saddam and al Qaeda fought? Who cares? According to a Cato Institute study, Iraq could have taken over Saudi Arabia and raised oil prices, and still it would have been cheaper than the Gulf War. Throw in the 9/11 attack, the second Gulf war, and (if we’re to believe McVeigh), maybe, the OC bombing and it’s a no-brainer: Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne rephrased the obvious, if counter-instinctual, foreign policy implied by the law of the balance of power and called their suggested policy “offshore balancing.”

Back in the ‘80s, as most AWC readers know, the US government spent billions of dollars quasi-covertly funding international jihad in Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia and Yemen, respectively, provided the most and second-most foot soldiers. Saudi Arabia also provided US matching funds, and Pakistani intelligence (later creators of the Taliban) directed the training programs.

Last week UPI (“Revealed: the nationalities of Guantanamo”) released the “tentatively determined … nationalities” of 95% of the terror-war prisoners that the Pentagon is holding in Cuba. Most of the 619 alleged anti-American terrorists were seized in Afghanistan, but some were captured among the US’s Muslim allies in Bosnia, and elsewhere. 38 nationalities are represented. Interestingly, only 80 – or 13% – of the prisoners are Afghans. The top three nationalities represented – Saudis, Yemenis, and Pakistanis, in that order – exactly match the degree of involvement of those nations as US allies in the Afghan jihad. Of the 539 non-Afghans, 160 – or 30% – are Saudis, 85 are Yemenis, and 82 are Pakistanis. Those 3 groups make up more than half of the non-Afghan total, with citizens of other US allies comprising most of the rest. Meanwhile, President Bush’s “axis of evil” is represented by a single Iraqi.

Strange but true:

– Citizens of the US’s Afghan jihad allies make up over 300 times as many of the suspected anti-American terrorists than do citizens of the “axis” nations.

– There are as many white Australians and Bahraini royals in the Cuba clink as there are citizens of all of the “axis” nations combined.

– There are twelve times as many citizens of the freedom-loving US ally Kuwait locked up as there are Iraqis, Iranians and Koreans combined.

Can’t David Horowitz afford some fact-checkers? He’ll need a couple if he’s going to keep Anthony Gancarski in his stable. From Gancarski’s aforementioned tirade:

I couldn’t imagine Pat Buchanan throwing his support to the man who made it a feature of his stump speech pandering to the LGBT community to say “I refuse to be divided by sexual orientation.” Yet there Dean was, propped up by Buchanan’s magazine as the Democratic Goldwater. Of course, Buchanan ran on the same ticket in 2000 with the Marxist-racist loon, Lenora Fulani — equal parts Sister Souljah and Lyndon LaRouche — so I really shouldn’t have been surprised by the Dean gambit.

No, Pat Buchanan’s 2000 running mate was Ezola Foster, who has nothing in common with Lenora Fulani other than being a black woman. (They all look the same, eh Tony?) Lenora Fulani briefly endorsed Buchanan, then retracted her endorsement. It took me a grand total of 30 seconds to find those two links on Google, but why waste time on research when your apartment building is crawling with Paris and Nicole lookalikes? Party on, Garth!

I hold no grudge against Gancarski for his new alignment. People change their minds; it’s foolish to savage anyone for an honest shift in philosophy. But most people take years or even decades to reorder their entire worldview. One week? Perhaps the meltdown has been a long time coming. Gancarski’s faux-Hunter Thompson shtick might have led some to think passages such as the following sarcastic, but now I’m not so sure:

Official histories naturally are rife with omission. The 2003 SOTU address didn’t tell us if “Bush knew about 9/11,” and made no acknowledgement of the claim that US/Saudi ties are uncomfortably close. Such concerns don’t resonate with the masses, casually observant of politics, for whom this yearly speech is tailored. Bush speeches, though much maligned for certain linguistic crudities, appeal to those who understand intuitively that their material prosperity is inexorably linked to US full-spectrum dominance. That truth runs so deep no rational politician would voice it; nonetheless, it haunted the subtext of this year’s address.

So it was that we heard the word “war” eleven times by this scribe’s count, interwoven with nods to the “forward strategy for freedom” and other such linguistic constructs that justify American military involvement from Bali to Mombassa to Riyadh and beyond. Nothing was said about the looming economic and strategic threats posed by Eastern Hemisphere giants China and India…

What the hell? Or take Gancarski’s bizarre attack on Michael Ledeen for war profiteering. At first I thought Gancarski was making a poorly worded joke when he took an obviously humorous reference to Ledeen earning a “$25 million finder’s fee” for locating Osama bin Laden literally. Gancarski only made things worse when he attempted to clarify the issue:

The implication is damned clear from where I sit – Benito12 has been compensated amply for his words. Why would it be “his $25 million” unless he “earned” it?

Jeez Louise. Good luck, Frontpagemag!