Saturday on the Weekend Interview Show I will be asking Juan Cole many questions about the situation in Iraq and in the second hour, I’ll be talking with Robert A. Pape about his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.
Saturday 4-6 pm eastern time.
Update: Show’s over, archives
As is common with such revolutions, the democratic free-market Orange revolution in Ukraine continues to show signs of having turned sour before it began. Anders Aslund writes, “Last year Ukraine enjoyed economic growth of 12 percent; in the first four months of this year, the growth rate plunged to 5 percent, while inflation has surged to 15 percent….”
Furthermore, “the property rights of thousands of enterprises are in limbo. In Kiev, rumors abound that oligarchs connected to the old regime are trying to sell their enterprises to Russian business executives and are preparing to escape the country. Naturally, executives are cutting off investment, and economic growth is screeching to a halt. To make matters worse, a new socialist minister of privatization has been appointed who opposes privatization in principle. She asked recently: ‘What is so bad about re-nationalization?’ Tymoshenko concurred in a recent newspaper interview: ‘The biggest enterprises, which can easily be efficiently managed, must not be privatized, and they can give the state as an owner wonderful profits.’ This sounds like state capitalism.”
State capitalism. Hmmm. Well what should we have expected? As Justin Raimondo said more than three months ago:
“The Ukrainians believe they can balance their budget by revisiting suspicious privatizations, seizing assets, and re-selling them to the highest bidder. Yushchenko was sold to Western journalists as well as his own electorate as a ‘free-market reformer,’ but this is hardly a ‘free market’ approach. Aside from destroying the sort of stability that business requires, it assumes the good will of government regulators – not a wise course, in any country – and encourages yet more corruption by making political pull, rather than entrepreneurial skill, the coin of the realm. Who will be ‘re-privatized,’ and who will be spared? It’s all up to the gang currently in power.” Continue reading “Orange Revolution Comes Full Circle”
I wrote “Smokescreen” in the early hours of July 13, so I could not have read, much less mentioned, an editorial that appeared later that morning in Newsday. Titled “Serbs finally look within,” the editorial manages to pull together just about every strand of Official Truth about Srebrenica, and can thus serve as an exemplar of mainstream opinion. It is somehow fitting that such an” honor” belongs to a paper that peddled the Pulitzer-winning atrocity propaganda of Roy Gutman, early in the Bosnian War. Continue reading “Official Truth in a nutshell”
Many don’t see the parallels: each was (is) a failed foreign policy. Few politicians, liberals, “conservatives” or pundits supported or opposed both. Except of course, Antiwar.com. Here are some choice quotes from many who were critical of the US intervention in Kosovo. My favorite:
Victory means exit strategy, and it’s important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.
~ George W. Bush, 1999 on the intervention in Kosovo
As Justin said, the possiblity has indeed been raised that the explosives used in the London came from the Balkans; the first rumor was that explosives were Serbian, but just as the accusations in the run-up to the Iraq invasion that Serbs “supplied Saddam”, this proved to be spurious.
According to one retired colonel of the Yugoslav army, the explosives used in London could have come from a factory in northern Montenegro – but these have been in possession of all sides in the 1991-95 wars, and some have even reached the KLA terrorists in Kosovo and Macedonia. One of the persons under investigation by the Brits lived with the mujahedin in northern Bosnia, who certainly had access to these explosives.
However, now that the London bombings cannot be pinned on Serbs, trust the legacy media to completely bury the Bosnian/Kosovo angle, and never so much as mention the possibility that Bosnian Muslims were anything but pure, innocent victims of evil Serb aggression. Certainly, claims that the ruling Muslim party has numerous connections with Islamic extremist groups and governments will either never be raised, or will be dismissed out of hand.
Four of the London bombers have been identified: they are Hasib Hussein, 19, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, “Rashid Facha, a British-born Pakistani in his twenties; and Jacksey Fiaz, about 35.”
Juan Cole tosses us this interesting lead from Al-Sharq al-Awsat:
“There are reports that the 4 bombers received al-Qaeda-type commando training, and that another 100 persons have been put under surveillance. Via the Times of London it says that the explosive used were “military” and may have come from the Balkans. [The bomb-maker may have run the cell and may be at large.]”
A Balkan connection, eh? Why am I not surprised?
