Magpie

Saturday, November 29, 2003

Oooooh, shiny!

No, it's not a nebula or a galaxy. It's one day on the Internet.

Via New Scientist.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:06 PM | Get permalink

Don't say no one warned US.

While the post-war collapse of civil order in Iraq seemed to be a huge surprise to Dubya's administration, the NY Times reports that even pro-war Iraqi exiles warned Washington to expect the country to fall apart.

Instead of heeding these and other warnings, however, Dubya and his minions stuck to a rosy view of post-war Iraq that suited their need to convince the US public that the upcoming war would be a cakewalk. So the White House and Pentagon made no plans for an alternative administration to take power immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein, since they were sure that police and existing civil authorities would continue functioning. Events since then have shown how wrong this assumption was.

The exiles were among the most energetic cheerleaders for the war, and critics of the Bush administration have accused some of them of skewing the facts in the process. But more than a dozen of the leaders who have returned to Iraq said in interviews here that they had also warned about the chaos that could follow.

The fact that the administration embraced their encouragement to go to war but apparently discounted their warnings is an insight into the Pentagon's prewar planning.

"I told them, `Let there not be a political vacuum,' " said Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi author and college professor who said he had consulted with several senior administration officials and met twice with President Bush.

In many ways the war plan drove the postwar plan, senior military officials said. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the invasion force be kept as small as possible, prompting his commanders to build an attack plan based on speed and surprise. Any recommendations for sending more troops to maintain order afterward would probably have collided with the war plan, the officials said.

Besides, the plan for after the Iraqi government fell assumed that Iraqi troops and police officers would stay on the job — an assumption that proved wrong. "The political leadership bought its own spin," said one senior Defense Department official involved in the planning, in part because it "made selling the war easier." [...]

The common warnings of unrest from the exile leaders were partly drawn from Iraq's history.

Some made the point, for example, that looting had accompanied other leadership crises in Iraq. After the Persian Gulf war of 1991, looting was rampant in "liberated" areas, Iraqi officials said. "The pillaging and looting was unbelievable," said Barham Salih, premier of the southeastern part of the Kurdish-controlled region of Iraq.

The exile leaders were hardly a lone voice. Leaders of aid groups said they also warned about a lack of security in Iraq after the fall of the government. Kenneth H. Bacon, president of Refugees International and a former Pentagon spokesman, said, "It should have been expected."

In fact, it had been. The 1999 war-game exercise, which envisioned an American-led military overthrow of Mr. Hussein, "surfaced a lot of problems," said General Zinni, the former chief of the United States Central Command. But none perhaps as serious, he said, as the security void that would follow the collapse of Mr. Hussein's rule in Baghdad.

| | Posted by Magpie at 9:25 PM | Get permalink

That Medicare 'reform' law.

The prescription drug benefit portion of this new US law appears to be pretty worthless. The Economic Policy Institute has run some numbers, and they figure that half of the elderly population won't get a dime's worth of assistance from the much-ballyhooed new benefit.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:00 PM | Get permalink

Thursday, November 27, 2003

Ooooooh, shiny!

Moonshadow over Antarctica.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:40 PM | Get permalink

Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Ousting the president.

No, not Dubya. (Stop that wishful thinking!) Magpie means ex-president Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia.

The Globe & Mail has a very good story about how billionaire George Soros helped set the stage for Shevardnadze's ouster. Soros' Open Society Institute paid for Serbian Otpor activists to visit Georgia and teach opposition activists how Otpor used street demonstrations and other tactics to help get rid of Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic. Soros also helped fund the opposition the Rustavi-2 television station.

The details of how the movement against Shevardnadze was organized are fascinating.

The real kicker is at the end of the article, though:

Mr. Soros, whose large-scale currency market interventions have been blamed by some for the 1997 currency crisis in Southeast Asia, has said that his next goal is making sure U.S. President George W. Bush does not win re-election.

For more on Soros' encouragement of anti-Dubya forces in the US, see this earlier Magpie post.

| | Posted by Magpie at 12:01 AM | Get permalink

Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Not the usual Irish music story.

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project keeps tabs on hate groups and extremist activities throughout the US. Sadly, they're kept pretty busy, with over 700 groups currently being tracked.

One of the creepiest things they're currently seeing is how the neo-Nazi National Alliance is using the traditional music and culture of Ireland and other European countries to suck people into organized racist groups.

Peter Haworth could hardly believe it. Here he was, with his bandmates in Molly's Revenge, setting up last February to play traditional Celtic music to some 75 people gathered at "Euro-Fest 2003." He was fine-tuning the sound equipment when his wife rushed up with the news.

"She said, 'Do you know who they are?'" the folk musician recalled.

Haworth will never forget the scene that his wife, who had been setting up a table nearby to sell Molly's Revenge CDs, described. "You should have seen what they were selling there!" he said. "They had Mein Kampf and little baby blankets in blue and white with little swastikas all over them. It was horrible."

That wasn't all. Around the famous folk band was a virtual Nazifest. Women in knee-length skirts and Bavarian bustiers sold copies of ABC: Aryan Beginnings for Children, along with Talk Back, a publication of the White Student Alliance. At a nearby table, photos were on sale of two beautiful young blonde girls giving the Nazi salute. A fellow with a black T-shirt bearing a swastika strolled by; near him, another man's shirt urged "David Duke for Senate."

Over at the table of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, women's thongs with the Alliance symbol embroidered on the front, available in green, pink, yellow, white and red, were moving briskly.

The members of Molly's Revenge could certainly be forgiven for their ignorance. Nothing in the advertising for the event had suggested that it was being staged by people who believe that Jews and "race traitors" need killing. The venue was perfectly respectable Clunie Hall, in a city park. The National Alliance official who hired the band told Haworth the event was being put on by "a group of friends" into ethnic music.

"Maybe we could have left, but what would they have done?" the musician asked later. "We were scared. We had a signed contract to play. And you have to understand, one of our band members is Jewish. We were worried."

Around the country, white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups are staging events like the "Euro-Fest 2003" put on by the Sacramento unit of the Alliance, the group that first popularized the strategy in the late 1990s. Neo-Confederate groups have sent speakers and propagandists to events like the Scottish Highland Games, some 200 of which are held each year. Even thuggish Skinhead organizations like the Hammerskins are staging events that are meant to emphasize "Aryan" culture.

Although each group's strategy is different, the general idea is to draw in ethnic whites by celebrating various strands of European culture — from Celtic bands to Irish singers to Lithuanian cloggers — and, ultimately, to recruit them.

Are these tactics successful? The Intelligence Project can't say for sure, but they are obviously nervous that they might be:

It is not clear how effective the strategy of using "culture" to approach and entice ethnic whites is for the radical right. But what does seem clear is that up until recently, extremist recruiting tactics have targeted rebellious youths and people who already hold relatively similar views. Rarely has a strategy come to the fore that aims directly at everyday, working white people.... [If] Alliance workers have been able to sign up almost 10% of those who attend — then the technique must be judged a success.

Plainly, other groups have taken an interest. A number of neo-Confederates, including one-time League of the South director Grady McWhiney, have taken their own message — that the American South is fundamentally an "Anglo-Celtic" land — to the Scottish Highland Games that are popular around the United States.

That very unsophisticated and thuggish groups like the South Florida Aryan Alliance are trying to emulate the technique shows that to many, it appears to have great promise. Just this June, talk of a summer 2004 European heritage rally in Washington began.

| | Posted by Magpie at 10:23 PM | Get permalink