Antiwar.com Blog

Move over, Ben Shapiro, here come the kids of Mt. Lake, MN, to explain how the Big Guy (God, not Ashcroft) was gonna take our freedom away if we didn’t invade Iraq. As K-Lo noted over at the Corner, these kids think about war’s big picture. Gosh, if war gave us the Panama canal and made the English language what it is today, just think of all the cool new stuff we’ll have by the time the Bush administration is over!

Wow, I really have to congratulate The American Spectator for its amazing overhaul. What with the non-stop Jed Babbin, it really looks like … well, National Review. Here, Mark Goldblatt does his best Rich Lowry impersonation:

What if there were a moment at which the American public became so appalled by the casualties and costs of the Iraqi occupation that President Bush felt compelled to bring the hammer down … a moment when C-Span was filled with hard-right demonstrators demanding that Bush subdue the terrorists by any means necessary, a moment when a revered Republican senator quoted Pulp Fiction director Quentin Tarantino, urging the president “to get medieval on their asses,” a moment when conservative pundits clamored for Bush to, say, level Tikrit to pacify Fallujah, or level them both to pacify Baghdad?

Certainly, the prospect of such a reverse-tipping point would create a new dynamic in the War on Terror. The terrorist cannot operate without a sympathetic local population to supply provisions, stash weapons and keep secrets — which is why he depends on the restraint of his enemy in the first place. But if his enemy is determined to come after him with disproportionate violence, regardless of the collateral damage, then those who aid and abet the terrorist will soon turn against him out of self-preservation.

Sam’s post on Turkmenistan made me think of this amusing article from the New York Times Magazine earlier this year. As Sam mentioned, we send this guy–who renamed the days of the week and months of the year after himself and his relatives– millions for democracy and the war on terror. I can already hear Christopher Hitchens and the liberventionists squawking about the need to topple Saparmurad Niyazov, though phonetic difficulties may at least keep Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity out of the debate.

US “Democracy” in Iraq:

Within the past month, I have seen more and more stories that mention Iraqis being arrested for making anti-US or pro-Saddam statements. Most of these news items have been buried in other stories or appear as captions on news photos.

Today’s UK Mirror has an article about US troops arresting and gagging an Iraqi man for “making anti-coalition statements.”

Regarding Jacob Hornberger’s excellent “U.S. Senators Are the Real Cowards” on Antiwar.com’s front page today, here are the Senate and House votes on the October 2002 war resolution, lest anyone forget President Bush’s bipartisan enablers. Pay special attention to Lieberman, Kerry, Edwards, and Daschle.

Turkmenistan’s president, Saparmurat Niyazov, former party chairman under the Soviets – the same party continues to dominate Turkmenistan’s politics today – has changed his name to Akbar Turkmenbashy, which means “Great Father of all Turkmen.” And his megalomania is not limited to his renaming the town of Krasnovodsk after himself. His portrait appears on the country’s currency, on bottles of vodka, on packets of tea. Everywhere we went, driving across Turkmenistan, Niyazov stared down on us from statues and from posters that read: ONE PEOPLE, ONE NATION, ONE TURKMENBASHY. …

Niyazov’s cult of personality was in evidence everywhere we looked. On Turkmen television, from the upper-right-hand corner of the screen, his face stared out at the viewer around the clock. It was only by way of significant pressure exerted by the international community that he was prevented from placing his face on his country’s flag. …

Entering Ashkhabad, one passes a line of twenty hotels, all of them brand new, all of them financed by money borrowed from the West, all of them empty. The country is bankrupt, the currency is collapsing, and Turkmenbashy is building monuments to the nation’s various bureaucracies, the Oil Ministry Hotel, the Agriculture Ministry Hotel…

The one good highway in the country – perfectly flat, asphalt, beautiful – is the road Turkmenbashy takes to work from one of the two palaces in which he lives. The country has a spectacular airport but little air traffic in or out, just twenty-five airplanes sitting there empty. Driving into town from the airport, one drives down a well-maintained road lined with fountains on either sided. The houses built along this route have no water when dignitaries drive by – which is when the fountains are turned on. And two blocks behind those houses, behind the faced they represent, the neighborhood is a slum, a Soviet-style disaster. …

In the middle of town, the visitir to Ashkabad comes upon a huge monument, a 246-foot arch, on top of which stands a solid gold statue of Turkmenbashy. The statue rotates, so that the great father of all Turkmen can maintain a perpetual vigil, surveying his entire domain, his arms always pointing to the sun.

Every member of the Turkmen legislature and of the Council of Ministers owns a Mercedes that was given to him by Turkmenbashy. None, however, has a Mercedes S600, which in Central Asia represents the top of the line. Only one such model has been allowed into the country: the car given by Mercedes=Benz of Germany to Turkmenbashy himself, as a kind of thank-you for all the foreign aid money the Turkmen president has funneled the company’s way. You and I provide Turkmenbashy (and by extension Mercedes) this money by way of our various taxes – all in the name of promoting democracy and in actual support of the politics of petrochemicals. This nation of five million people, under the thumb of an absolute dictator, is rich with deposits of natural gas. And we keep feeding this megalomaniac money in the hope that someday he will let us extract it.

– Adventure Capitalist by Jim Rogers