Month: June 2003

David Neiwert just published the final installment of the “Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism” series. Sorry about the self-link; he doesn’t have a table of contents anywhere. But he says there’s a PDF coming soon.

Anyhow, this installment is fascinating material on the connection between religion and fascism, made all the more important and relevant by the recent Rudolph arrest. And, yes, it’s interesting when considering Islamic terrorism as well. Key coinage: “fascimentalism.”

It’s not time to vote yet. Maybe soon. Who knows?

It’s a pretty tricky issue. The problem is that if elections are held now, you’re going to get either Islamic extremists or Baathist remnants in power. In many ways, Jay Bremer is right. The long-term goal of a democratic country would be poorly served by holding elections right this minute.

This is not, however, news. Most anti-war people noted this problem many months ago. The problem is not that Bremer is putting off elections, it’s that he doesn’t have any clear plan on how to get to them — as predicted. Unfortunately, saying “So what will we do when we win?” was apparently a sign of anti-Americanism.

I think it’s pretty reasonable to ask for a plan at this stage of the game. It’s not as if we’re asking for military secrets. Rather, we’re interested in the question of reconstruction. Surely a wider understanding of how to reconstruct a severely damaged country (damage mostly done by Saddam, just to be clear) would be good for the world?

P.S.: We can’t look at the Afghanistan model, cause it isn’t working. So says the notably left-wing commie pinko symp loonie liberal group known as the Council on Foreign Relations.

Charlie Stross draws comparisons between the museum losses in Baghdad and hypothetical losses of equal scale in London.

Imagine London bombed. The V&A trashed, the Tower of London and the Crown Jewels looted, the British Library complex on Euston Road burned (along with all those annoying old bits of paper like the original draft of Magna Carta, the Gutenberg Bible, and so on), the Natural History Museum used as a defensive fortification and shelled. (Goodbye, Apollo 10.)

Teresa Nielsen Hayden also has an excellent summary of where we are right now, generously supplemented by commentary on the Free Republic crowd and Andrew Sullivan.

Campaign season has apparently officially started. Ari Fleischer spent more time answering questions about Bush’s campaign yesterday than he spent on anything else, including this little gem:

Q Secondly, on fundraising. Governor Dean has said that it’s a threat to democracy for any one presidential candidate to have two or three times more money to get his or her message out than any other candidate. Regardless of how much money the President plans to raise, does he see any merit whatsoever in that argument?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well again, I think the amount of money that candidates raise in our democracy is a reflection of the amount of support they have around the country. So the President is proud to have the support of the American people, and the American people will ultimately be the ones who decide how much funding goes to any Democrat or any Republican.

I love typing that. I’m gonna type it again: “I think the amount of money that candidates raise in our democracy is a reflection of the amount of support they have around the country.”

The more money you raise, the more support you have. If you’re supported by a lot of poor people, but not many rich people — well, support from poor people just doesn’t count as much.

You don’t get to know who we arrested.

The Justice Department might be correct; revealing the names of those detained post-9/11 could be helpful to Al-Qaeda. Assuming, that is, that Al-Qaeda is incapable of figuring out whether or not cell members were arrested on its own. Which is actually less snarky an assumption than it appears; the answer depends on the nature of the cell structure. On the other hand, with a properly defined cell structure, Al-Qaeda leadership wouldn’t necessarily know that a given detainee was an Al-Qaeda member either.

But I digress. Let’s assume that there is some degree of risk associated with releasing those names.

That’s not a sufficient argument to keep ‘em secret.

The problem is this. If you don’t reveal the names, then you remove one of the checks and balances from the judicial system. You don’t need to assume that the Justice Department is acting in bad faith for that to be a bad idea. It’s possible for humans to make mistakes. There were US citizens in detention in Guantanamo Bay for a little while, for example. If we hadn’t known about that, we couldn’t have objected and they wouldn’t have been moved as quickly if at all.

These matters need to be public for the safety of the accused. Keeping them secret is a risk too. In order to make a strong case for secrecy, you need to show that the risk created by revealing the names is greater than the risk created by keeping them secret. Considering the recent report from the Justice Department’s Inspector General, it’s more than reasonable to expect the case to be made strongly.

Bush is now claiming that questions about his justification for the invasion of Iraq are coming from “revisionist historians.” Saddam was a threat, and that’s that. Apparently he was the kind of threat who can be ousted in about two weeks flat — but maybe pointing that out is revisionist history. It’s probably also revisionist history to point out that Iraqis are killing more Americans per week now than they were in 2002.

Perhaps this would be a good time to refer once more to Robin Cook’s resignation speech. Again: “We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat.”

Not surprisingly, Bush is getting called on it. But you know, I think there’s a little more to Bush’s speech than just the desire to strike out at the smart people who’re picking on him. (That’s irony. I don’t actually think Bush was pouting at all; I think his choice of words was carefully made. Onward.)

I just searched for “revisionist historians” on Google. Top result: Revisionists.com, a site dedicated to explaining why the Holocaust wasn’t so bad after all. Not all of the top ten results are about Holocaust revisionism, but it’s sure a constant theme. I kinda don’t think that’s an accident.

Bush is deliberately implying that those who claim the Holocaust never happened and those who claim Bush misrepresented the reasons for attacking Iraq are in some way similar. This implication goes nicely with the argument that we invaded Iraq in order to restore civil rights. It’s a good thing that Saddam’s out of power, but we didn’t invade Iraq because of the mass graves; we invaded because they were a threat.

However, linking the mass graves of Iraq to the mass graves of Germany is great spin. And linking anti-war activists to Holocaust revisionists? That’s icing on the cake.