America and the Cold War (Part II)

(This is a continuation of a previous post ... Part I)

Besides drug lords, the US cultivated another ally during the Cold War: political Islam, which dreamed of setting up theocratic states based on Shariah law. The US saw it as a natural enemy of commie Russia and a buffer against popular secular nationalism in the third world that could turn into, heaven forbid, socialism. So the US built alliances with Islamists in Sukarno's Indonesia, Nasser's Egypt, and Bhutto's Pakistan. Hamas' rise was seen as a welcome distraction for the secular PLO, and was allegedly even aided by Israel.

But then came the Iranian revolution, where the mullahs opposed both the Russians and the Americans. This taught the US to "distinguish between two faces of political Islam: the revolutionary and the elitist. The revolutionary side saw the organization of Islamic social movements and mass participation as crucial to ushering in an independent Islamist state. In contrast, the elitist side distrusted popular participation; its notion of an Islamist state was one that would contain popular participation, not encourage it." Unlike Iran, Islamists in S. Arabia and Afghanistan were elitist (but had no political successes yet to speak of) and were better aligned with US Cold War objectives. To punish Iran, the US allied with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and openly supported its attack on Iran. The eight-year long Iran-Iraq war "saw the first post-Vietnam use of chemical weapons [by Saddam] ... and America was the source of both the weapons and the training needed to use them."

In '78, when a pro-Soviet regime took hold in Afghanistan, the US began investing in an alliance with neighboring Pakistan, where the army led by General Zia, an orthodox Muslim, had recently deposed and murdered Bhutto, the elected prime-minister. After '79, when Russian troops landed in Afghanistan to shore up the leftist regime, the proxy warriors of the US were the mujahideen. Aid to the mujahideen – rag-tag groups of Muslim conservatives without money or power – had begun even before the Soviet invasion. Reagan, rejecting containment or negotiation, went full-steam for a Soviet "roll back", determined to bleed them white and to hand them their own Vietnam. The CIA, with Reagan's assistant secretary of defense, Richard Perle, now began facilitating the real task at hand in Afghanistan: killing Russians. On the White House lawn in 1985, Reagan introduced the bearded leaders of the mujahideen to the US media: "These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers." One such mujahideen leader was Osama bin Laden.

Under Reagan, Pakistan became the third largest recipient of US aid, effectively buying Pakistani cooperation. The CIA allied with Pakistan's ISI to identify, recruit, and train the most radical anti-communist Islamists to fight the Soviets, flooding the region with weapons and training camps. The CIA looked for Muslim volunteers from all over the globe. A network of recruitment centers was established, linking key points in the Arab world. To increase their military effectiveness, the recruits were "ideologically charged with the spark of holy war and trained in guerrilla tactics, sabotage, and bombings." The recruits came from far and wide, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Indonesia. The US supplied these camps with military advisers, tacticians, and equipment such as the heat-seeking, anti-aircraft Stinger missiles. The recruitment drive was stepped up many times. Tens of thousands of Islamists graduated from these camps.

This mobilization of holy warriors in Afghanistan was largely funded by the US and carried out using "Islamic institutions, ranging from banks and charities to mosques and evangelical organizations." It gave the Islamists "not only the organization, the numbers, the skills, the reach, and the confidence but also a coherent objective." Here they learned the fine art of using "sophisticated fuses, timers, and explosives; automatic weapons with armor-piercing ammunition, remote-control devices for triggering mines and bombs" alongside "throat cutting and disemboweling – that the CIA incorporated in its training." Many of them received from the CIA a salary of $1,500 per month, a sum that even the best doctors and engineers in Kabul didn't make. The cream of the Islamist crop were flown to camps all over the US for further training (to Fort Bragg, Camp Pickett, High Rock Gun Club, Camp Perry, Harvey Point, etc.) and then shipped back to Afghanistan. An infrastructure of terrorism, integrated with the most sophisticated know-how, was soon in place.

In '87 alone, the US military aid to the mujahideen amounted to $660 million. The US also muscled the Saudis into matching its Afghanistan aid dollar-for-dollar. Another chunk came from opium trading which the CIA encouraged de rigueur. Opium fetched five times the price of wheat and the mujahideen ordered the peasants to plant it, handing out opium quotas to all landowners and greatly expanding production. It was taken to literally hundreds of heroin processing centers at the border in Pakistan, where they were run under the aegis of the ISI. Until the US involvement in Afghanistan, there was no heroin production in these regions at all, but soon it became the largest producer of heroin in the world, amounting to a multi-billion dollar industry.

To create additional, frontline recruits, the ISI helped turn local madrassas into ideological training grounds that integrated the authority of Islamic teaching with guerrilla warfare. This fused religious fundamentalism with militant terrorism like never before. Because this innovation only helped the immediate US goal of killing Russians, the CIA turned a blind eye to the central teaching in these schools: Afghanistan was only the staging ground for a holy war that would grow into an international Islamist movement.

Well, not exactly a blind eye. In fact, in the 80s, the mujahideen ran an Educational Center for Afghanistan that had "children's books designed for it by University of Nebraska under a $50 million USAID grant ... A third-grade mathematics textbook asks: 'One group of mujahideen attack 50 Russian soldiers. In that attack 20 Russians are killed. How many Russians fled?' A fourth-grade textbook ups the ante: 'The speed of a Kalashnikov bullet is 800 meters per second. If a Russian is at a distance of 3200 meters from a mujahid, and that mujahid aims at the Russian's head, calculate how many seconds it will take for the bullet to strike the Russian in the forehead.' The program ended in 1994 but the books continued to circulate: 'US-sponsored textbooks, which exhort Afghan children to pluck out the eyes of their enemies and cut off their legs, are still widely available in Afghanistan and Pakistan, some in their original form.'"

By the war's end in the late 80s, Americans had used and abused Afghanistan thoroughly for their Cold War ends. They left behind a chaos where only Islamists could provide a measure of cohesion and stability. From this cesspool arose the Taliban. The chief economic product was still opium and heroin; the only schools still operating were the madrassas once funded by the US to mould recruits for the holy war against the Russians. The global recruiting and training infrastructure remained, as did the financial networks and Saudi aid. After the war, the ideologically charged mujahideen didn't just go home and become baby boomers. They had driven the Soviets out and their victory emboldened them to expand their militant jihad. "From this dynamic emerged the forces that carried out the operation we know as 9/11."

Clearly, the "unintended consequences of misinformed, cynical, and opportunistic actions can boomerang on their perpetrators". The same camps that provided money and training to the Islamists in state-of-the-art terrorism against the Soviets later came back to haunt the Americans. This is rather well understood today in think-tank circles (if not acknowledged for a variety of reasons). Ordinary Americans not only do not understand this, almost half of them still believe Saddam had a role in 9/11! Most, rather absurdly, look to the Qur'an to understand their enemy. But can the Bible alone explain to the Iraqis what the Americans have done to their country? Why should the converse be true?

An LA Times investigation in the 90s found that in the aftermath of the Afghan War, "the key leaders of every major terrorist attack, from NY to France to Saudi Arabia, inevitably turned out to have been veterans of the Afghan War". Why don't we see that the roots of transnational Islamic terrorism lie not so much in the Qur'an as in the conduct of the US in Afghanistan during the 80s? For their opportunistic politics, the society they wrecked, and the monster they created in Afghanistan, 9/11 was indeed a case of chickens coming home to roost. A textbook example of bad karma.

Further Reading:

Perhaps the best book written to date on the roots of modern Islamic terrorism is Good Muslim, Bad Muslim by Mahmood Mamdani. It infuriates and shocks with its facts, careful research, and lucid analysis. After reading it, you too may come to regard much of the discourse in the US on Islamic terrorism as sheer intellectual laziness steeped in prejudice and ignorance, which, unfortunately, even pervades most liberals. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in 20th century history, geopolitics, religion, and the prospect of peace in this world. As JM Coetzee puts it in his back cover endorsement, "Mamdani strips open the lies, stereotypes, and easy generalizations on which US policy toward the Muslim world is founded. Dismaying but essential reading."

(Note: All quotations in the article above come from Mamdani's book).

Comments

[Ruchira Paul]

I am not entirely sure but did the charges against Saddam that resulted in his hanging yesterday, involve only the Dujail killings or did the "Anfal" case involving the gassing of the Kurds also go to trial? I think it was only the former where no known chemical or biological weapons were involved. No wonder then they had to hang him with such indecent haste! If the Anfal incident had gone to court, Saddam and Chemical Ali would have produced the receipts for the poison gas purchased from their erstwhile patron, Uncle Sam.

This whole west vs Islam thing is so disgusting that one doesn't even know where to lay the blame any more. While my most piercing anger is directed towards the imperialist west (Britain, France and the US in particular), I cannot let the Islamists off the hook either. I don't want to launch a protracted debate on this complicated issue. But I have now come to believe that after a while, it is counterproductive to point fingers. The Islamic societies must do some self examination. Whether they want to be jerked around by the west or by their own vicious co-religionists. The only reason why India is even halfway on its way to a forward looking future is because it did not wallow or become hung up on past wrongs, of which there were many centuries worth of instances. (And let's not forget the attitude of the US towards India when India was aligned with the Soviet Bloc). And look at Vietnam which was literally ground to a pulp a mere thirty years ago. The same imperialist wrongs were rampant there too.

I hope and believe that if the Arabs (as also Sunni and Shia Islam) could at last learn to treat each other with respect and trust instead of being at each others throats, just to unite in their anger at the US and Israel, the mythical power of the Zionist - US alliance will be wholly neutralized.

[Shunya]

I believe you are right that the chemical attack case was not the one for which Saddam was convicted and executed. That was on the docket next and could well have raised some seriously awkward questions!

At a macro level, I agree with you that pointing fingers is fraught with difficulties. Let me talk about the problem I have with the debate on Islam in the US. Some of this is surely tangential to your comment. My response is wider because the topic calls for it. Feel free to tell me where you disagree.

It is claimed, with some justification, that recent decades have seen a sharp rise in Islamic conservatism worldwide, although many reliable indicators also point to the opposite conclusion. The indicators are quite mixed (ask any average Muslim woman in the Middle East). Still, the fact is that fundamentalist Muslims, like fundamentalist Christians, are at odds with a host of progressive ideals. There is nothing noble about deriving one’s faith from any single book. Worldviews derived in this way need to be resisted by progressive folks. Evangelicals are pro-life but support death penalties; awaiting the second coming of Jesus, they support Israel as a prelude to the Rapture, and believe this will happen in their lifetime. Mullahs want to restrict women's rights, institute dress codes, punish “immodesty”, and derive their civic-judicial laws from a book long made archaic by contemporary needs. Both have a problem with the amoral individualism they see as infecting society and family values.

These are clearly very conservative folks (or fundamentalist, due to their insistence on “fundamentals” of their religion), versions of which exist in all societies and their numbers wax and wane across time and place. Hinduism too has a deep strain of conservatism, manifest in the pervasive inequities of the caste system. But the key question really is: what is the relationship between religious fundamentalism and terrorism, particularly in the case of Islam? A lot of people tend to conflate the two. This is a mistake, and policies based on such analysis are bound to cause further problems. I argue this in my post.

I'll disagree with you in that Afghanistan and Pakistan were quite different from other Cold War theaters. A monster was created here - fundamentalists were systematically transformed into terrorists. Previous Cold War engagements (Vietnam, Nicaragua, ...) didn’t select for and cynically manipulate the religious passions of their proxy fighters. The US substantially created the al-Qaeda style transnational Islamic terrorism. This is almost entirely what has plagued India too (in Mumbai, Kashmir, Varanasi, etc.).

[Ruchira Paul]

I will answer in a more thoughtful way perhaps later because this issue cannot be addressed by easy slogans and cliches. I am extremely torn on this myself. A few isolated thoughts for now.

It is true that the military wing of Islamic terrorism is not the same as religious fundamentalism per se. But the former is made possible by the latter. And the fact that the US could not exploit this form of fueling insurgency in Vietnam, Nicaragua or now in Colombia is precisely because there was not the fertile ground of religious fundamentalism present to sow the poisonous seed.

I agree with you 100% that religious extremism, no matter from which BOOK it derives, has the same ugly face. I have said that time and again in my own articles; see here and here..

My own sketchy knowledge of history and societal evolution tells me that mass movements rarely (if ever) drive cultural changes and pardigm shifts. Progressive movements are almost always brought about from the top down by the educated elite (the Bengal renaissance is an example I know much about) - masses have to follow. Despite Kemal Pasha, Lebanon and Iran of the 1960s, Egypt of Nasser, the Islamic world is now so transformed since Khomeini that the middle class and educated members too lean towards a strangely backward looking conservatism which strengthens the hands of the mullas. I have seen this change in the last twenty years among the Muslim women I know and I cannot put my finger on what caused this change of heart. My father in law is a fairly well known Urdu writer (very popular in Pakistan). The social circle of my in-laws consists of a large number of Muslim friends. They too have noted a change - an angry sense of victimhood which does not include a healthy dose of inward glance at the chaos within. I know these are anecdotal evidence but they are the microcosm of what blows up on the world stage and why there is not a vigorous opposition to the terrorists who have co-opted entire societies from Indonesia to Syria to Nigeria.

[Shunya]

I disagree that “terrorists have co-opted entire societies from Indonesia to Syria to Nigeria.” Had you said “Pakistan to Afghanistan to Iraq”, I’d have agreed. Indonesia, a large country of 200 million, sees 2-3 terrorist incidents a year (if that). Granted, that’s 2-3 incidents too many, but is it enough to make a dent in the life of an average Indonesian? It's a worrysome issue but the sky is not falling. About 5,000 times more die of malaria/AIDS each year. There is far more terrorism in India (with Pak/Afghan roots). Fundamentalists may have co-opted Indonesia more, but that’s very different from saying that terrorists have co-opted Indonesia. I again wish to emphasize the difference; the former does not automatically imply the latter, even in Islam; when the transition occurs, there is usually far more at work than the Qur’an; we simplify the phenomemon at our peril. As for Syria, it is one of the most secular countries in the Middle East. I spent two weeks traveling though it in 2001. I encountered decent, helpful people wherever I went, and I covered a lot of ground traveling alone. Point me to the reports of Islamic terrorism that you think has co-opted Syria.

Fundamentalism is an unpleasant force that waxes and wanes due to complex socio-economic-cultural factors. One should resist it to the best of one’s ability or inclination. You do it rather well on your blog and with your volunteer work (what better antidote than teaching?). The lack of a “healthy dose of inward glance at the chaos within” is indeed a problem in Islam. I see it in the US too, reflected in its media, the narrow spectrum of politics and dissent, the cheerleading for the invasion of Iraq (rewarding Bush with a second term), with 99% of senators voting for it. You speak of Muslim women you know turning conservative. I too have been shocked by many of my white colleagues turning into little bigots after 9/11. Like post-Khomeini Islam, I find the US too greatly transformed over the same period; where have all the American liberals gone? In some ways, this transformation may even be higher in the US.

Such is the human material though. I have often wondered why middleclass Hindus never did, and still don't, stand up en masse for the still sorry plight of the dalits, or why they were so soft on / unmoved by the post-Godhra pogroms orchestrated by their co-religionists in Gujarat, or why NRI Hindus write USD cheques to the RSS. Clearly, educated Muslims have no monopoly on the lack of courage and vision, but are they not doing something that their counterparts elsewhere are doing rather well?

[Ruchira Paul]

Oops! I regretted including Syria as soon as I hit "post." The problem there is more political. But if Hezbollah is aided and abetted in order to destabilize Lebanon and to scare Israel, it won't be very long before Syria too falls victim to religious discord just like Gaza and West Bank are now being brutalized by Hamas. Just as the US and Israel must contend with the what they have sown in the Muslim world.

You are right of course in your overall analysis of the right wing tilt in the US and in India (the support for Bush after 9/11 was highest in India following Israel and the US). In fact my blog was launched largely as a reaction to the US reactionaries. And you may have noted in the article I linked that I mentioned the terrible close mindedness of some US Indians. I also noted in another post that there is a disturbing and almost comical 180 degrees turn made by some so called "progressive" Indian Americans and American Jews when the discussion shifts to Muslims/Arabs in India/Israel. The largest numbers of cross-over of voters from the Democrat to Republican Party may have occurred in these two groups after 9/11.

Having said that, there is something about the chaos in the Muslim world which makes me a little more worried than all the trends you mention. There is no difference in the brutalities fueled by the RSS fanatics, the Israeli ultra right and Bush's fundie Christian brigade. In fact, the last two may be even more dangerous because they have the military at their disposal. But in India, Israel and in the US, the vanishing liberal voice has not quite fully vanished. Even after the pathetic uber-patriotic fever that gripped the US after 9/11, at least 30% of Americans (me and many of my friends included) were vehemently opposed to the Iraq war - vocally. Similarly, the Israeli left still raises a rational voice and in India too I am sure there are such critics of the right wing. They were increasingly drowned out by the rabid right but they were there and the tide may be turning in the US. I haven't seen or heard many such voices from the Islamic world. There were a couple of excellent articles in major US newspapers by Arab dissenters (most were academics, now living in the US) right after 9/11, shining the light on the rot that has taken root in the middle east. They blamed both external and internal forces - but seemed lay the blame more squarely at the feet of the mulla driven cynical autocracies. But I haven't heard much since then.

My point here is that those of us who are ruled by liberal instincts in our political outlook, should not hesitate to criticize the dangerous tendencies in Islamic societies just because we feel that they have been "screwed" by the west. I am afraid that there is a tendency on the left to forgive transgressions of the "exploited underdog" and certain criticisms of beleaguered minorities are verboten. We tend to always point fingers at the powerful exploiters to explain away the wrongs perpetrated by the exploited. I do it too from time to time. But I now believe that it is a dangerous weakness. Why can we not criticize transgressions of the Third World, the Islamic World, the Jews, the Africans in a stand alone, objective way without bringing up the evils of colonialism, racism and other inequities? (You yourself had a previous post where you asked the question why the colonization of a huge country like India by Britain was possible in the first place) I am the last person to justify any of those practices (you ought to know that from what you have seen in my publicly expressed opinions) but I don't believe everything that plagues these societies is necessarily related to what others have done to them. I like Arundhati Roy very much. Recently, I saw somewhere a statement by her when she was asked why she is so vocal about Bush's imperialism and not the Islamists' flouting of human rights including their treatment of women. She laughingly said something to the effect that she knows that she would probably be stoned to death in some of those societies but her job right now is to criticize Bush. Why? Why should it be a zero sum game? Why can we not scream from the rooftop against both? I don't want to be stripped of my dignity or human rights by either the Bush administration or the Taliban. That is the question I have asked here. If we keep making excuses(it's not their fault)for the wrongs perpetrated by the wronged, we infantilize them and help making the slippery slope of societal degradation more slippery.

It is interesting that you mentioned my volunteer teaching. I am still involved in it here in Houston where I no longer teach G.E.D classes because in the suburban district where I live, there is not much demand for that. I now teach English as second language to immigrants - many from Asian countries. Some of my students have been Pakistanis. One of them, after nearly ten years in the US took a Hajj trip to Saudi Arabia. Upon her return, she took up wearing the Hijab, withdrew her young daughter from the public school and enrolled her in an Islamic school. No different from going to a Catholic or a Jewish school, you'd say. Perhaps. But I was very disappointed because the public schools in our district are very good. Interestingly enough, her son continues to attend the local public school. It may or may not mean anything, except she did continue to believe for a long time that the Jews brought down the Twin Towers in NYC on 9/11.

[Ruchira Paul]

One example of my inadvertent political prescience and the US-Taliban love fest prior to 9/11.

One of my very good friends in Houston used to work for Unocal which was involved in intimate negotiations with the Taliban in the hopes of obtaining the rights to the natural gas pipeline through Afghanistan. My friend told me hilarious stories about the lavish reception the Talibs received at Four Season and other five star hotels, courtesy Unocal. (The shrewd Afghans knew that they held the key to satisfying Unocal's greedy aspirations and behaved very badly with their hosts. That story, another time.)

In December of 1999 when the Indian Airlines was hijacked to Kandahar, I wrote a letter to the Houston Chronicle (it was published) warning the US public that the coddling of the Taliban and turning a blind eye to their mischief in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India would come back to haunt the US some day. Less than two years later, my public prediction came true.

[Ruchira Paul]

And a very happy New Year to you.

[Shunya]

A Happy New Year to you too! It seems like it was only yesterday that I rang in 2006 on a beach shack in Mahabalipuram. Now it is already over. As someone reminded me recently, time is indeed the most precious commodity we have.

I’ll grant you that my post wasn’t meant to be “a comprehensive set of causes for the plight of Muslim societies”. I agree with your view that not "everything that plagues these societies is necessarily related to what others have done to them.” This view is sensible and wise, but it is also a truism bordering on cliché. Who in his right mind would represent the opposite? But I suspect you are reading this in my post. I’m not sure why. Either it's in the text, or you bring it along from elsewhere. One is of course right in criticizing wrongs and transgressions of all kinds, on all sides. But to pick on one transgression never means the rest are being condoned.

Polemical arguments exist in a context. In discussing geopolitics, one focuses on the moral wrongs of nations against each other. It's possible that I tend to focus on the wrongs of the powerful against the weak. In “a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people ... not to be on the side of executioners.” If I side with the underdogs, it’s not because I think the underdogs are angels. That would make a very crude polemicist (which I could be I suppose - time out for self-reflection)! Edward Said spent half his life critiquing Orientalism and US foreign policy, but it’s not that he thought the Orient is a perfect place; far from it.

While discussing politics within a nation, the stage and the actors change, and so does the analysis (the executioners and underdogs are different); the same is true when one discusses an economic policy or a social custom. When Said spoke to Egyptians or Palestinians, the nature of his analysis changed (remember his scathing critique of/ split with Arafat/PLO?). (Note that I have no desire to speak for Said or the Left. I'm merely using this example to illustrate my argument. I only represent myself. ;-)

One of my own personal limitations has to do with my frequent lack of moral clarity: I find that the lines are not always clear in the socio-cultural realm, with their complex histories; the complicity is more convoluted, esp. in matters like faith. What one can react to with greater clarity is the willful abuse of authority, power, and public trust.

Imagine another similar debate, but on the “war on drugs”. This might illustrate what your central point sounds like to me. Most good-hearted souls in the US start with the assumption (duly amplified by their media) that there “came about” evil drug lords in Colombia (the cartels), who, through a chain of vicious gangs and drug dealers, ship this noxious substance to our kids. The problem is out there, due to evil drug lords. We have to stamp out the supply, by military force if necessary. When I point out that, no, the origins of the modern international drug trade are to be found in Cold War politics. That it was systematically encouraged by the US, that they knew these dangerous drugs were destined for America (but benefited their proxy warriors), that the drug problem in the US is a bit like chickens coming home to roost. A person, say K, might point out that this is all well and good, but the Left also has a tendency to overlook the problems inherent in Colombian society, which was already a coca-leaf chewing and getting-high culture, that the US planted their poisonous seed in an already fertile soil (coca culture), that there was already some local drug production and trade, that many on the Left are soft on criticizing the venality and corruption that underlie the drug trade. K might then ask why the Cocaine cartels didn't happen in Ecuador, say, or Costa Rica? (I'm sure you get the drift.)

A good point you raise is whether there is a large enough and vocal liberal minority in Islam, which you rightly say exists in the US and Israel. A better comparison would be with India, given their greater historical, cultural, and economic proximities (which I too have always felt in my travels through six Arab/Middle Eastern countries). Is there a large enough liberal, self-critical, reformist vocal minority in India right now? You might rely on your familiarity with India to say yes, but an average non-Indian may not know this at all, for very similar reasons that we may not know this about many Islamic countries. Certainly the number of top-notch (non-Indian) Muslim scholars and intellectuals in the US will give the Indians a run for their money. What the media bubbles up as news may also be responsible for shaping our perceptions. Language barriers and the lack of a free press in many Islamic countries don't help either. Do you know if there is a corresponding vocal, activist, liberal minority in China, or what the nature of the debate there is today? I am pretty ignorant of it myself.

[Ruchira Paul]

Thanks Namit. As usual, I think we agree more than we disagree. Yes, I think my complaint about the lack of criticism of the "underdog" is contained more in my own anxiety (not a cliche) rather than anywhere explicitly within your post. But I do want the oppressed to start defining their own destinies. Getting mired in religious fervor will not help.

BTW, I am not one of those "good hearted souls" who ever bought into the evil drug cartel smoke screen. I don't know anything much about liberal voices in China. I think China (as also India) is focused laser like on the economic growth index. I am actually not very familiar with the current complexion of the Indian political conversation either. The little that I see in newspapers and on some of the Indian blogs, leads me to suspect that the liberal (and thoughtful) voices are few and far between. Far fewer than when I was growing up.

When you have time, please read my latest post about the indecency and savagery surrounding the execution of Saddam Hussein. The linked article (not related to the execution) by Elaine Scarry is an eye opener. Nandini, who recently discontinued her blog has also weighed in at my site. What is amazing is that once again, it has been left to bloggers to point out the sheer hypocrisy of the US enterprise. Not a word has been heard from our sanctimonious elected leaders. Ironically, the undignified behavior of the Bush administration made it possible for Saddam Hussein exit his life with more dignity than he had lived it.

[Shunya]

Saddam Hussein's hanging (I'm struggling to not call it lynching) disturbs me a great deal too. As the director of Human Rights Watch noted, “The test of a government’s commitment to human rights is measured by the way it treats its worst offenders.” I can't agree more with your final statement.

[Daniel]

It seems that no matter where I go when randomly surfing the web, I run into the same 'revisionist' Marxist/Racist propaganda regarding America's role in the modern world. Of course, simply writing this 'opinion' here marks me as a stupid, brainwashed, brain-dead, racist/fascist pig - as far as all you 'intellectually superior' types are concerned.

I'm not claiming that all of my county's 'meddling' in the cold-blooded brutality (euphemistically referred to as political and/or revolutionary struggles) of this world has been productive or even morally correct. But this seemingly endless disinformation... which condemns the 'West' in general, and the United States in particular, for virtually ALL the war, hate, and murder in this truly violent world - while absolving Communism and Communists of ANY responsibility for any of it - is thoroughly and utterly disgusting.

If America was ever to become totally self-sufficient (as we largely once were) and so powerful that 'we' could quite literally completely ignore the rest of the world... I'm certain the result would be an orgy of rape, pillage, and plunder across nearly the whole of the rest of this earth. Indeed there would be mass-murder, disease, and starvation on a scale never before seen in the annals of human history. Since most of this human suffering would occur (as it does actually occur now) without the presence of a 'journalist' or 'film crew' to document it - the sort of people who write such propaganda as is written here would neither want to know or actually even care one damn bit about it (as is, obviously, the case already).

Of course such 'esteemed internationalists' as this author would likely flee such world chaos - to some sanctuary like Switzerland (assuming the Swiss escaped the chaos). And once ensconced in some chateau or mountain villa there - would then hypocritically complain that America just fiddles while the rest of the world burns. I could be wrong about this last part though. Since many propagandists are actually on somebody else's payroll; this author might be just as likely to withdraw to some Third World 'paradise' - living quite well while continuing to write excuses for this world's merchants of death. Either way it would be a life of champagne and caviar... served on a tablecloth drenched in human blood.

So I'm actually supposed to believe that the people of this world could never learn to do anything sophisticated, criminal, treacherous, or evil... without first receiving 'secret' training, money, and assistance from the CIA? I guess before all those unwashed, smelly, drunk, musket-toting 'Christian' European rapists stormed across this world building their empires... the rest of the people of this Earth lived in an 'Eden' of peace and prosperity? I suppose if only the Jews in Israel would just 'disappear' (die)... all of the problems which plague the Islamic world would 'miraculously' be solved? All a 'revisionist' crock of psychobabble. There's not enough blood in all the humans on this earth to satisfy the not-so-cleverly concealed hatred possessing some people living in this world today. People whose 'views' are eerily similar to those expressed by the author of this propaganda.

Some of us do see you for what you appear to actually be.

[Rich]

What load of slanted crap this article is!