Month: December 2004

Ralph Raico writes:

On Monday, the indefatigable, indispensable Justin Raimondo gave us a column titled, The Fallacy of 39: Why is every petty tyrant dubbed the new Hitler?

That is a very good question. Here is a possible answer.

For many millions of Americans, the first figure in 20th-century European history who comes to mind, often the only one, is Adolf Hitler.

Taking my own college students, not the best in the country but not the worst, and probably better informed than the average citizen: these state-schooled kids are mostly not even sure who exactly Churchill was. But Hitler they know, and what they know about him is that he was a very bad man. Which, needless to say, he was.

Given the general ignorance, it is not surprising that, to justify their own hegemonic designs, the contemptible opportunists who pose as our leaders invoke Hitlerian opponents at every turn.

Oh, so many Hitlers! Now the Iranian mullahcracy, a while ago Hussein and Milosevic, before them Cedras in Haiti, Aidid in Somalia, Noriega in Panama, and it goes on, and it will go on and on. After all, our leaders’ power feeds on the people’s boundless cluelessness, doesn’t it? I hereby propose a test to judge whether a future designated enemy of the Washington power elite is or is not a real Hitler.

He will rule over a population comparable to 80 million Germans. He will be able to conquer more of Europe than Napoleon, and even to set out, foolishly, fatally, on the conquest of Russia. Unless a future adversary more or less fits this description, the lying D.C. warmongers should just shut up about all their Hitlers popping up around the world. But don’t hold your breath.

How can anyone be unmoved by the images of devastation? With the billions of dollars spent on deliberate destruction (wars), we should be motivated to counter with our individual help to the victims of this natural disaster.

I have been most impressed with the work of Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres). They have been focusing on some of the areas most devastated by the 9.2 earthquake, like Sumatra, where the island actually moved 100 feet, destroying virtually every structure on it.

Their website is swamped, but you can call 1-888-392-0392 to make a contribution. I urge you to do so.

It looks like their server overload is causing some web visitors to be offloaded to Network Solutions’ Earthquake Relief page, which doesn’t include DWB. Please ignore this and call 1-888-392-0392 directly.

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Count the columns, John Nichols insists, but the result has been certified–that’s 109 down, one to go and he’ll have made it through the year without using the word “Israel.”

An earlier countdown entry contained a gratuitous reference to Yasir Arafat, but after smoking a joint I decided it was fortuitously gratuitous. With Arafat gone, “to whom will we give the job of the demonic villain?” Israeli writer Meron Benvenisti asks. “We need a scapegoat on whom to cast the blame for everything, and to clear our consciences.” Elie Wiesel will be lost without one.

Religious studies prof Ira Chernus thought that the 60s had taught us to appreciate the fact that we probably won’t be able to answer the “most important” question about 9/11, did the Bush administration know about the attacks and not stop them, or maybe even orchestrate them? He was surprised to learn that many “leftists” (I think he means “progressives”) had a good vs. evil world view as simple-minded as Bush’s.

According to the Commission Report (p. 149), Khalid Sheikh Mohammed met Bin Ladin in “mid-1996” and made the proposal that “eventually would become the 9/11 operation.” In August, Bin Ladin declared war against the U.S. in his first public fatwa.

After the Oslo II accords were sign in September, 1995, Edward Said implored “liberals” to be aware that the peace “process has made matters far worse” for the “vast majority” of Palestinians. They are “demoralized,” they “may have lost hope” (The Nation 10/16/95).

A New York Times story on December 1, 1995, was headlined, “Iraq Sanctions Kill Children, U.N. Reports,” 567,000 of them. On April, 11, 1996, Israel unleashed “Operation Grapes of Wrath,” bombing an Arab capital (Beirut) for the first time in ten years. A week later, it bombed a UN compound in Qana, killing over 100 women and children. On 60 Minutes, May 12, 1996, Madeleine Albright said, yes, “keeping Saddam in his box” was worth the sacrifice of half a million Iraqi children.

Hijacker Mohamed Atta’s will was dated April 11, 1996, the day Israel unleashed Grapes. Bin Ladin’s first fatwa was issued while “the horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory.” Whereas Leslie Stahl rounded down the 567,000 sanctions figure, Bin Ladin rounded it up. No matter the actual figure, the impact was devastating. As an Iraqi student said, “sanctions really killed our dreams — not my personal dreams only, but those of my Iraqi people, all of us.”

The “1998 bombings of Sudan and Afghanistan created bin Laden as a symbol…and led to a sharp increase in support, recruitment, and financing for al-Qaeda,” according to Jason Burke. “It was in late 1998 or early 1999” that Bin Ladin gave “the green light” for the 9/11 operation, the Commission Report indicates (p. 149).

As one of its recommendations, the Report urges America to “offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law…” As opposed to Bin Ladin, “we can we can offer [Muslim] parents a vision that might give their children a better future” (p. 376).

Benvenisti says the Israelis need a demonic villain to clear their consciences. Does that mean they at least vaguely know that they should have something on their consciences? If so, they appear to be a step ahead of Chernus’ “leftists” and my John Nichols, “progressive bellwether.” Of course, Arafat didn’t “steal” the 2000 election like Bush did (John is the author of a hastily and shoddily put together “book” titled “Jews for Buchanan”).

Where was the brunt of the “anti-war” movement when the Clinton administration was making mincemeat of what was to be the Report’s recommendation? A “most important” unanswerable question is, had a significant fraction of the people who now find Bush’s Iraq invasion and occupation intolerable been awake and protesting in 1996-1998, would the “twin towers have crumbled?” And what wisdom do the 60s have to impart regarding unasked questions?

In 1996-1998, John wrote 483 columns for the Capital Times, two of them containing criticism of the sanctions and two criticism of Israeli policy. He can say he opposed them but he never made them an issue. Now he remembers the Clinton era as a “period of relative peace and prosperity,” and he’s got plenty of company in that regard.

There is tragedy here. Introspection has been swept away in a tidal wave of hatred and scorn, no lesson has been learned.

Various ideas for dealing with Sunni abstinence from the elections slated to be held in Iraq have been floated recently from everyone from the USG to the current Iraqi authorities and Osama bin Laden. The problem seems to flow from the fact that the Iraqi vote, instead of being regional, is national. If the elections were regional, those provinces which were unable to hold elections would be unrepresented until they were able to fill their slots, which would be a reasonable situation to manage. However, the elections are wide open instead, with each individual Iraqi voting for a list of candidates. Each list will be seated depending on the percentage of the vote it attracts – from Iraqis all over the world.

According to Edward Wong in the New York Times, the decision to allow exiled Iraqis to vote in the election, finalized in early November, exacerbated the tensions between the minority Sunnis and the majority Shi`a:

Iraqi electoral officials said Thursday they would allow millions of Iraqis outside the country to vote in the coming election. The decision, made after weeks of anguished debate, appeared certain to increase tensions among the minority Sunni Arabs here, because most Iraqi expatriates are believed to be Shiites.

“We’ve decided to allow Iraqis abroad to vote, and the mechanism will be worked out in the coming days,” said Adel al-Lami, a supervisor for the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, charged with organizing the country’s first democratic elections, scheduled for January. “The voting will take place in those countries with a large number of Iraqis.” Those 18 and older will be eligible, he added.

The United Nations and the United States had recommended strongly against allowing expatriate voting because such polling is notoriously difficult to organize and because the process is more prone to irregularities and charges of fraud. Such problems arising could threaten the legitimacy of the election, United Nations and American officials said.

But leading Shiite and Kurdish politicians, as well as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq, strongly supported expatriate voting. Carlos Valenzuela, the leader of the United Nations electoral advisory team, said the dangers had been made clear to them. “We’ve told them from point one that it’s a very risky business,” he said. “People don’t realize the potential implications of this. They’re huge – practical, logistical, political. And all this has to be done in the time frame allotted.”

Clearly, if the elections had been regional, with seats allotted to each province, the expatriate vote would have been impossible. So it seems that once again the Iraqi Governing Council, which drew up the election rules, being mostly exiles themselves, sought to include the exile vote, and that is why there is now no practical answer to the problem of the Sunni boycott, despite all the plans currently being suggested.

There are an estimated 15 million eligible voters in Iraq. There are an estimated 4 million expatriate Iraqis, mostly Shi`a, eligible to vote. Somebody did the math.

Maybe it doesn’t even matter if there’s an election inside Iraq at all.

The Daily Yomiuri, the leading newspaper in Japan, has chosen Antiwar.com as their favorite website of 2004.

They choose six favorites, and Antiwar.com is listed first:

For news and opinion related to conflicts around the world, Antiwar.com (www.antiwar.com) continues to lead year after year with the most comprehensive and interesting collection of information. Antiwar.com features both original content and links to news sources large and small, well known and obscure, local and international.

In doing so, Antiwar.com presents the kind of comprehensive picture of the world that practically no other newspaper, media outlet, or Web site can match. Whether you agree with its anti-imperialist stance or not, Antiwar.com should be on your list of news sources, especially if you are tired of the pattern of media consolidation and the endless narrowing of news coverage.