Saturday beginning at 4pm Eastern time on the Weekend Interview Show, I’ll be talking with Jim Powell, author of Wilson’s War: How Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin and World War II. In the second hour, the guests will be Elaine Cassel to discuss Ahmed Abu Ali, and Laurence M. Vance about his book, Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State.
Update: Show’s over, Archives.
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| L to R: Rafat, Dr. Salam and Raed |
Raed Jarrar, his family and girlfriend Niki began a project some five months ago to purchase and distribute medicines in Iraq. They thought that being Iraqi (except Niki, who’s Iranian), they’d know the best places to distribute the aid so that it did the most good. So, they began taking donations, buying medicines and medical supplies in Jordan and distributing them in Iraq. Raed documents everything they do with photos and scans of documents, so that he’s not only doing a good deed in a very aboveboard and accountable fashion, he also almost inadvertently creates a heartwarming story on his blog. So go here and scroll up through the story of the third batch of medicines and how it got to Iraq, or just go here and scroll down.
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| Raed: I tried to cover some of the medicines so that when my mom woke up she wouldn’t have a heart attack… | Raed’s Mom having a heart attack over the redecoration of her living room |
All the medicines in this, the third batch, were bought with only a little over ten thousand US dollars in donations. In all, Raed has received almost eighteen thousand dollars (US). Oddly, the donors seem to be mainly Canadian? How is that possible?
I think Raed and his friends and family have done a great job with this project.
Since a murderous, violent resistance movement (which antiwar people predicted) rules much of Iraq rather than the liberation cakewalk and democratic utopia (that prowar people predicted), an inevitable class of victims of the American invasion of Iraq has emerged (just as it always does, after an invasion.)
To the resistance, they’re collaborators and to the occupiers they’re living proof of failure. They want to get out of Iraq before the resistance kills them and their families for aiding the US occupation. The Americans in Iraq want them to shut up and go hide somewhere, so they won’t be embarrassed back home by the spectacle of Iraqis fleeing the US-recreation of the Garden of Eden in Mesopotamia. This woman sums up their predicament poignantly,
Alyaa hoped to find a haven in the United States but discovered the State Department isn’t resettling refugees from Iraq. She’s lost her faith in the country she once loved.
“We gave them our friendship,” Alyaa said during a recent interview at an Amman restaurant, wearing jeans and smoking cigarettes. “We gave them our hard work. And they don’t even help us to have a new life.” Is it so hard, she asked, “for America to give a visa to Iraqis to have a new life that they took from them?”
Iraqi refugees in mortal fear at home can’t get entry into United States
Jonathan Schwarz has a great interview with Chris Floyd posted. Just so you know what you’re missing if you don’t go over there and read this interview, here’s Chris Floyd on Matt Taibbi (who I vote for as the subject for Jonathan’s next interview, if he can’t get JD Guckert.)
There were lots of people from the paper [The Moscow Times]during that period who you see now all over the place. Carlotta Gall, who’s in Afghanistan now for the New York Times. I used to take her dictation when she’d call on her satellite phone from Chechnya. Anne Barnard, who’s in Baghdad for the Boston Globe. Frank Brown, my roommate in Moscow, who writes for Newsweek now. Matt Taibbi was there.
Taibbi was a great reporter, a big, honking goon of a guy who’d ride with the police and get down in the real Moscow dirt. He used to make fun of me because I wore this black shirt with a pink tie—I had about four changes of clothes altogether while I was there, living out of a couple of suitcases—so he started calling me “Cheap Trick,” because he thought I looked like one of the singers from that old band. Which I suppose tells you something about his musical tastes.
I’ve received some replies to my blog entry of April 3. Unfortunately, most of them rehash issues I’ve already addressed. I did provide a link to the pre-April 3 debate but I don’t blame people for not going back and reading all that before e-mailing in their criticism, questions, and mockery; it’s quick and easy to send an e-mail, while reading is time-consuming and brain-tiring. In this same spirit I’m going to refrain from replying to the rehashing e-mailers. I find myself unable, however, to refrain from replying briefly to an essay titled “Is Peak Oil a myth? Just so long as we can catch the goddamn monkey,” posted on the (apparently popular) Daily Kos blog by a self-described “Mom of 2, Ex-Yuppie, 3rd Generation Democrat, Engineer, MBA, Silly Goose” calling herself Lawnorder. Her first sentence introduces one of her (long) essay’s main themes:
“AntiWar.com editor Sam Koritz thinks Big Oil and imperialist neocons are fooling us all into believing the world’s supply of oil is ending and that the end of Oil would amount to such a big crisis.”
Nope. I never wrote that anyone was fooling anyone else into believing in peak oil theory (POT). Erroneous economic beliefs — from the lump of labor fallacy to the potty “lump of fuel” fallacy of our current debate — are the norm; no conspiracy required. (My guess is that much of this economic ignorance can be explained by natural selection: we intuit our ancestors’ world of warring tribes and privation.)
The strange thing is that, before writing her piece, Lawnorder actually did bother to go back into the archives and read my “Economics of Oil, Part 2” posting in which I answer a similar mistaken criticism from a reader named Joseph O’Ruandaidh, and in which I explicitly deny having claimed that any oil conspiracy exists. Lawnorder, in her Kos essay, prominently quotes O’Ruandaidh’s criticism but not my reply.
I just want to rebut again this misrepresentation of my argument: I have not claimed that there is a conspiracy of any sort involving oil. I’ll leave the rest of Lawnorder’s essay alone, except to point out that evidence for POT (the theory that oil production has peaked or is about to peak, and that this will cause a major world crisis) does not include ecological disaster on Easter Island, North Korean famine, global warming, or the fact that fuels are not free.
Does Michael Ledeen know that Jonah Goldberg is laughing at him?
