Month: August 2003

Azerbaijan, of course. They’re tilting dangerously toward monarchy, and that “poses a grave challenge to Western policy planning,” says the Weekly Standard.

From the Justice Department’s new website pushing the Patriot Act comes this list of supportive quotes from the likes of Daschle, Feinstein, Biden, Edwards, and Schumer (brief pause to spit after enunciating that last one). Note that all of the statements by these and other Democrats, most of whom have come to oppose the Patriot Act, are from October 2001, when our Congressmorons were rushing to pass a bill that none of them had actually read. Who knew that John Ashcroft–who lost his Senate seat to a corpse–was this politically astute?

Anyway, serves the invertebrate bastards right to have their words thrown back at them. They sold their souls (and, I fervently hope, their reelections) without checking the large print, much less the fine.

Jeez, you spend a coupla days in the wilderness without a computer, and you miss all the excitement. I’m referring, of course, to the latest eruption of tensions between Antiwar.com and Reason. Justin vented a bit on Wednesday, Nick Gillespie responded, and Justin made nice all without my getting to throw a single punch. Meanwhile, Jesse Walker and Julian Sanchez pled not guilty to warmongering (see comments under Gillespie’s post), Jim Henley threatened to expose this as-yet top secret blog, and Tim Cavanaugh got one more swipe in slightly after the bell.

By the way, the essay Tim is plugging actually makes oblique reference to my prewar salvo at Ron Bailey, “One Toke over the Line, Sweet Reason.” Shoulda given me props, Tim; this ceasefire is fragile enough without gratuitous ego-bruising.

Brendan O’Neill writes:

For all the claims about saboteurs bringing Iraq to its knees, it was the coalition’s war that devastated Iraq. As the war was coming to an end in late April, the International Committee of the Red Cross claimed that: ‘This country has collapsed. Nothing works – no phones, no electricity, no schools, no proper medical care, no transportation.’ (9) Towards the end of the war, 32 out of Baghdad’s 35 hospitals were forced to close, while the war’s impact on electricity meant that ‘pumping plants are often shut down, cutting off water for hours at a time’ (10). Yet according to yesterday’s Glasgow Herald, it is a ‘wave of sabotage’ that has ‘pour[ed] misery on Iraq’ (11).

Simply, the US deserves as much blame for the dire situation in Iraq as the “guerilla fighters” who are attempting to thwart the occupation.

Serbian news weekly “NIN,” dated August 14, 2003, comments on Prime Minister Zivkovic’s infamous troop offer:
“Given that government representatives first denied the reports from America, then methodically spun the tone of Zivkovic’s offer, and later hastily tried to legitimize it by a vote in the Council of Ministers and the Supreme Defense Council, one gets the impression that the offer of military aid to the US was not conceived before the visit to Washington, but made by the Prime Minister ad hoc, under the circumstances.”
NIN also addressed the recent purge of top Army generals, in light of their service in the 1999 Kosovo war… Continue reading “Serbia troop offer and officer purges”

From Rascia-Prizren Diocese Newsletter, August 14, 2003:

“Yesterday’s crime against the Serb children of the village of Gorazdevac near Pec has deeply shaken all Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija and throughout Serbia and left behind it a numbing pain and an awful feeling of helplessness. The brutality and cowardice of this terrorist act have cast a dark shadow over the entire previous UN mission and KFOR, who in the more than four years of their stay in Kosovo and Metohija have not even managed to protect the Serb population living in militarily protected enclaves, let alone to secure a normal life for all throughout the territory of the Province.
After all, this crime is not just some ‘isolated incident’ committed by anonymous extremists. The massacre of innocent children in Gorazdevac is first and foremost a shocking indicator of the real situation in Kosovo and Metohija that the majority of UNMIK and KFOR representatives, together with Albanian political leaders, are persistently attempting to hide from the global public in order to rationalize their own failures…
[b][/b] Continue reading “Kosovo priest: Murder at Gorazdevac Illustrates reality”