Another media outlet falls to the Plame storyline without so much as a whimper.
by Thomas Joscelyn
11/02/2005 12:00:00 AM
EVEN BEFORE THE INDICTMENT of Lewis "Scooter" Libby last week, many in the mainstream media had already settled on a simple storyline. Valerie Plame's identity was blown, the story goes, by administration officials seeking retribution against her husband, Joseph Wilson. Wilson is often portrayed as a brave "whistleblower," who had the courage to stand up to an administration that "lied" its way into war.
There is, perhaps, no better illustration of how entrenched this misleading storyline has become than this past Sunday's episode of 60 Minutes. In a segment fronted by correspondent Ed Bradley, a host of Wilsonian memes were broadcast without even the slightest bit of skepticism.
THE SEGMENT BEGAN with a misleading question: "Would someone in the government go that far, leak her [Valerie Plame's] name to the press, in retaliation for her husband's public criticism of the war in Iraq?" But, Wilson was not merely "criticizing" the war in Iraq, a democratic right that should be protected, as this opening question implied. His "critique" was pure fantasy, a tale woven around his own classified trip to Africa.
As has been shown countless times, no substantive part of Wilson's story was true. A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Report made this clear in July 2004 (see, for example, here and here.) To hear 60 Minutes tell it, you would never even know that this report existed. The Senate Intelligence Report was not mentioned and Bradley did not ask Wilson a single question about his bogus charges. Instead, for the umpteenth time, Wilson was allowed an unchallenged opportunity to tell his version of events.
By ignoring the numerous deficiencies in Wilson's account, Bradley ignored one of the more salient questions in this story: Why was a CIA officer, Wilson's wife, complicit in his lies? The Senate Intelligence Report makes it clear that Valerie Plame orchestrated Wilson's trip to Africa and attended at least part of his CIA debriefing. She was, therefore, most certainly in a position to know that her husband's accusations were false.
Why did she not stop him from spreading his falsehoods?
In fact, much of the media's coverage of the war in Iraq has been shaped by former and current CIA personalities with their own, not impartial, motives. Countless leaks and anonymous comments have shaped front-page stories over the last several years. An ever-growing bevy of former CIA officials have also gone public to state their cases against the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. (See, for example, here and here.)
The 60 Minutes piece did not give the viewer any sense that perhaps the entire Wilson-Plame affair was part of a turf battle between members of the CIA and the Bush administration. Instead, in addition to Wilson, Bradley turned to two former CIA officials and a Democratic congressman for their assessments of "how serious was the damage done by the leak." The witnesses offered no real evidence of any further collateral damage done by the leak, but instead dealt with hypothetical examples.
THE FIRST OF THE FORMER CIA OPERATIVES was Jim Marcinkowski, who is now an attorney in Royal Oak, Michigan and who, 60 Minutes tells us, "was a covert CIA agent spying in Central America" in the late 1980s. Marcinkowski's attention was drawn to the faux CIA front company, Brewster-Jennings & Associates, which Plame listed as her employer when she and her husband contributed $1,000 each to the Gore campaign in 1999. "There is a possibility that there were other agents that would use that same kind of a cover," he explained, "So they may have been using Brewster-Jennings just like her."
But how difficult would it have been for a foreign intelligence service to discover that Brewster-Jennings was really a CIA front company? As it turns out, it was not very difficult at all.
The company's existence was entirely fictional and the CIA did not do a very good job making it look real either. The lone piece of data that Washington Post could find on the company in 2003 was a listing in the Dun & Bradstreet database of company names. But the Post's reporters found that the company's telephone number was not in service and when they contacted the property manager for the address listed, they found that no company with that name was located there. Robert Novak, the reporter who originally reported Plame and her firm's real identities, also quickly became "convinced" that no such firm existed.
Fooling family members and friends is one thing, fooling foreign intelligence operatives is quite another. Good front companies have at least a nominal existence and are not fictions easily revealed by reporters.
Wilson called the leaking of his wife's name and her fictional employer's true purpose "abominable." He further explained, "But when he [Robert Novak] published her name, it was very easy to unravel everything about her, her entire cover. You live your cover. And so you live Brewster-Jennings. So, she would have had business cards that said Brewster-Jennings on them. So, that was just insult to injury."
But if Wilson and his wife were so concerned about her cover, and possibly the cover of other agents, being blown, then why did he publish an editorial in the New York Times discussing a classified intelligence-gathering mission he went on? Why did he then go on to make many media appearances peddling his own fictional version of his mission? Did Wilson think that foreign intelligence services would not do a little background work on him, his family, and all of their ostensible connections? Ed Bradley was not interested in answering any of these questions.
The 60 Minutes segment further argued that the leak "gives America's enemies clues about how the CIA operates." Marcinkowski explained, "[Valerie Plame] is the wife of an ambassador, for example. Now, since this happened, every wife of an ambassador is going to be suspected. Or they'll know there's a possibility that the wife of a U.S. ambassador is a CIA agent."
But, it is doubtful that this affair revealed any new information about the CIA's tactics. This country's enemies have long known that covert operatives are seeded in the ranks of embassies and other diplomatic offices around the world. This has been the standard operating procedure for intelligence services as long as nations have practiced the art of espionage. In fact, one of the main reasons the CIA did not have better and more human intelligence assets in the Taliban's Afghanistan and Saddam's Iraq was that there was no formal diplomatic presence in those countries from which to operate.
It is a safe bet, too, that the family members of U.S. diplomats and ambassadors, especially those who write fictional accounts about their classified intelligence-gathering missions in the world's most famous newspaper, are immediately suspected as well.
For further speculation on the effects of the Plame leak, Bradley turned to Democratic Congressman Rush Holt, who serves on the House Intelligence Committee:
Bradley asked the leading question, "Is it possible that someone overseas, someone is going to jail because of this?"
Holt replied, "Sure, it's possible."
Bradley then led a little further, "Is it possible that somebody lost their life?"
Holt replied, "It's possible. I don't know."
Thus, according to 60 Minutes, not only did the outing of Valerie Plame destroy her career--an act of retribution against a man who dared to criticize the war in Iraq--it also possibly led to other agents being imprisoned or even killed. Such speculation is certainly designed to leave the viewer even more enraged over this whole affair.
None of this is meant to excuse any alleged wrong-doing on Scooter Libby's part. Nor should the outing of any CIA operative be taken lightly. But, behind the 60 Minutes version of events lies a host of unanswered questions.
Posted by: Steve ||
11/02/2005 11:46 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[0 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
There's a problem with Dalrymple's explanation of what's going on in the mind of a suicide bomber: it doesn't fit the facts of those in places like Bali, Iraq, etc. I find it hard to believe that an Indonesian Muslim is hard-pressed to maintain a Muslim identity, given the way the government treats non-Muslims.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
11/02/2005 7:40 Comments ||
Top||
#2
I agree, RC. Dalrymple missed the mark here. He glossed over the recruiting and indoctrination aspects. Another factor that we have very little insight into (and may never have) is the role that family and tribe play in selecting suicide bombers, especially in the majority Islamic countries. Part of me thinks that the bombers are "given up" by their tribes and families. Maybe they are trouble makers or "weak sisters." At any rate they are not contributing to the tribe and are sacrificed to preserve the tribe.
#3
The other problem with his analysis is that it ignores the historical roots of the suicider in Muslim society, going all the way back to the Assassins.
#4
Self-hatred doesn't only arise from mispending one's youth caving in to debased western cultures. I think he's on to something with the mating of inner and outer jihad.
Posted by: James ||
11/02/2005 11:05 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Part of me thinks that the bombers are "given up" by their tribes and families. Maybe they are trouble makers or "weak sisters." At any rate they are not contributing to the tribe and are sacrificed to preserve the tribe.
!
I may have to open me Anthro books. I'll bet it's not the weak sisters tho, younger brothers trying to help out best they can? Hummmm.....
Every man
must plan and plan
to protect his clan
as best he can.
#6
You've hit the nail on the head. Thats precisely why the IDF demolishes 'mom and pop' residences after a bombing. Along with the termination of Saddams survivor assistance checks, if Amed and his family know the homeplace and toyota pickup are going to smashed by a D9 CAT, the incentive is diminished considerably. Old testiment writings were pretty specific about the treatment of battlefield survivors and tribal non-combatants. It wasn't pretty, but it reduced recidivism.
In September, federal prosecutors charged illegal alien Mahmoud Maawad, 29, with wire fraud and fraudulent use of a Social Security number. But their real worry was that the Egyptian student had just ordered $3,000 in aviation materials, including DVDs entitled âUps and Downs of Takeoffs and Landings,â âMental Math for Pilots,â and âMastering GPS Flying.â Shortly after this Julyâs London bombings, U.S. antiterrorism authorities arrested five Egyptian menâfour of them illegal immigrantsâin a Newark, New Jersey, apartment, which contained maps of the New York City subway system, train schedules, videos of city landmarks, and $8,000 in twenties and fifties. A few weeks earlier, in the sleepy town of Lodi, California, about two hours north of where I live, the FBI arrested Umer and Hamid Hayat (father and son) on immigration charges and for lying to federal agents about ties with Islamic terrorist groups in Pakistan. Officials allege that Hamid visited an al-Qaida camp in Pakistan during 2003 and 2004 for training in weapons, explosives, and hand-to-hand combat. Last autumn, authorities broke up a terrorist cell in Portland, Oregon, charging four with plotting to set up a terrorist training organization and with traveling to Afghanistan to aid al-Qaida and the Taliban.
Since September 11, the list of those arrested, and in a growing number of cases convicted, for Islamist terrorist activities in the U.S. has gotten longer and longer. Some arrestees have been U.S. citizens; more have been aliens, legal and illegal, living in out-of-the-way places on work or study visas. The list includes such abettors of evil as Mukhtar al-Bakri of Lackawanna, New York (ten years for providing support to al-Qaida), Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed of Brooklyn (45 years for providing support to al-Qaida and Hamas), and Ibrahim Admed Al-Hamdi of northern Virginia (15 years for firearm violations in connection with terrorist activities). The continued presence within our borders of so many who seek to destroy us suggests that we still havenât squarely faced the problem that Islamic radicalism poses to our domestic security.
In fact, sometimes we have seemed to encourage actively the spread of such radicalism on our shores. On Halloween night 2001âjust weeks after September 11 and with U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistanâfirebrand imams Abdul Alim Musa, Muhammad Asi, Abdel Razzag Al Raggad, and other Islamic radicals broadcast live from the National Press Club on C-SPAN2 a bold proclamation of empathy for the Taliban, hatred for Jews, and understanding for the murderers of 3,000 Americans. Asi, for example, spoke of the âgrand strike against New York and Washingtonâ and the âtwin evils in this world . . . the decision makers in Washington and the decision makers in Tel Aviv.â Not only did we allow such a broadcast to tens of thousandsâour government subsidized it.
Or consider the ease with which the now-deported Muhammed Adil Khan, a radical Islamic cleric associated with the two Lodi suspects, first arrived in America in the eighties, welcomed on a âreligious workerâ visa. Another Lodi extremist, Shabbir Ahmed, entered more recently on such a visaâdespite having led demonstrations in Pakistan shortly after September 11 that called for jihad against America. At his immigration hearing, Ahmed successfully pleaded that his past anti-American agitation âwas a requirement of all imams. If you donât [agitate], people turn against you. They sort of force you to say something.â
The Islamist seduction also includes disturbed souls here in the U.S. who belong to no formal terrorist group but who emulate jihadists after exposure to their ideas. Such was the suicidal 15-year-old who in January 2002 crashed a light plane into a Florida bank, leaving behind a note praising bin Ladin: âFirst of all, Osama bin Laden is absolutely justified in the terror he has caused on 9/11. He has brought a mighty nation to its knees. God bless him and the others who helped make September 11th happen.â Another example may be green-card-holding Eshem Mohamed Hadayet, the Egyptian gunman who three years ago shot up the El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airport, killing two innocents and wounding three. Jihadist literature certainly influenced beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad.
Some say, reassuringly, that Islamic extremism has little appeal to Americaâs growing Muslim population. America prides itself on being unlike Europe in its powers of assimilation. Thanks to the melting pot and a vigorous economy, this argument goes, we have no Marseilles-like Muslim ghettos or Rotterdam-style âdish cities,â blighted Islamic suburbs where assimilation remains rare and terrorist sympathies widespread even after generations of living in the West. We certainly donât have the difficulties in assimilating Muslims that England experiences. A chilling Daily Telegraph poll, for example, found that one in four British Muslims sympathized with the motives of Julyâs subway killers, about one in five voiced little loyalty toward Britain, and a third felt that Western culture was âdecadentâ and that they should help âto bring it to an end.â
Yet U.S. self-congratulation is premature. Before we condemn Britain as hopelessly retrograde, we need to recognize that we have no idea how much some American Muslims support jihadist causesâcomprehensive polls donât exist. Of the few surveys taken, the results arenât encouraging. The Hamilton College Muslim America poll of April 2003 revealed that 44 percent of U.S. Muslims had no opinion on whether Usama bin Ladin was involved with the September 11 attacks. Only one out of three blamed al-Qaida.
Top U.S. Muslim organizations and spokesmen are no more reassuring when it comes to condemning Islamic terror. True, the Council on American Islamic Relations finally took out a national advertisement this summer repudiating terrorism in the name of Islamâfour years after September 11. But examine the immediate reaction to the ad from San Antonio Express-News columnist Mansour El-Kikhia. âIt is a rejection of U.S. and British policies in the Middle East, not Islam, that has promoted terrorism against America,â El-Kikhia writes. âMore important, it was the British and the United States that drew first blood. The Middle East didnât come to America or go to America or go to Britain; rather, America and Britain went to the Middle East.â El-Kikhia ends his rant by implying that the United States has a history of warring on imaginary threats, so American Muslims should feel no imperative to distinguish themselves from those terrorizing in Islamâs name.
More coherentâbut, in its way, even more frighteningâwas âTime to Talk to al Qaeda,â a Boston Globe op-ed by Mohammad-Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou of Harvardâs Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research. Mohamedou assures us that bin Ladin is a reasonable adversary with whom we can reach accommodation. âAl Qaeda is an industrious, committed, and power-wielding organization waging a political, limited, and evasive war of attritionânot a religious, open-ended, apocalyptic one,â he explains. âOver the past year, it has struck private and public alliances, offered truces, affected elections, and gained an international stature beyond a mere security threat.â Few Americans would want us to agree to terms with terrorists who murdered 3,000 people in New York and who behead and blow up democratic reformers in Iraq and across the Middle East. Yet thatâs exactly what Mohamedou recommends. âAl Qaeda has been true to its word in announcing and implementing its strategy for over a decade,â he observes. âIt is likely to be true to its word in the future and cease hostilities against the United States, and indeed bring an end to the war it declared in 1996 and in 1998, in return for some degree of satisfaction regarding its grievancesââthe U.S. out of Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, Israel out of the West Bank, and no more support for Arab dictators.
If we really are in a war against Muslim terror, our enemies and those who support or appease them pose a quandary on the home front unlike anything we have faced in past struggles.
First, unlike in previous wars, securing the homeland is absolutely central to the outcome of this conflict. In the warâs overseas fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, no enemy possesses the conventional or other means to defeat the U.S. militarily. The only way America could lose abroad would be if it loses the will to fightâand that could only happen through a succession of terrorist attacks at home that petrified the citizenry, warped our political institutions, or disrupted the economy to such an extent that, Madrid-style, we granted concessions to radical Islamists. Terrorism is not the last desperate resort of this enemy; it is its first, deliberate attack. Domestic security becomes an even more essential concern because of the difficulties of deterring states that may have provided either money or sanctuary to Islamic terrorists in the pastâan Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, or Syriaâbut that deny culpability and deplore terrorism publicly, making it almost impossible for us to justify a conventional military response against them.
Second, technology has made it easier for small numbers of individualsâeven a single personâto inflict substantial damage on Americaâs social and economic fabric. While the amount of explosives that terrorists needed in the past to do substantial harm was completely unwieldy, these days a single dirty bomb strapped to a terroristâs body could shut down the New York Stock Exchange for months, because of radioactive contamination. A few bags of anthrax emptied into the Washington subway could wreak enormous social and economic havoc.
Third, in an age of instantaneous communications and global travel, two oceans provide America with precious little security against such weapons. Back in June 1942, submarines had to drop eight German saboteurs, outfitted with clumsy radio communications equipment, off the Florida and Long Island coasts. Today, hundreds of jihadists from a Pakistan or a Yemen could fly to Lodi or Portland in less than 24 hours and communicate in real time with whomever they wish worldwide. Past experience proves that they might be involved with radical agitation back home, enter the U.S. under religious exemptions, and overstay their visas with little scrutiny.
Heightening our vulnerability further, contemporary Americans do not appear as a distinct class, ethnic group, or race. A Middle Easterner casing a subway might stand out in racially homogeneous Sweden or Nigeria; he wouldnât be so easy to pick out in the multiracial U.S. And given the casualness of American fashion, a Wall Street banker running in Central Park in a jogging suit and sneakers might look identical to a suicide-vest-wearing Pakistani terrorist rushing to a subway station.
Without prior intelligence and infiltration of Islamist mosques and madrassas, it thus becomes very difficult to ensure our safety at the last line of defense: security checks at the crowded intersection, the mall, or the train station. Add politically correct bans on even rudimentary profiling (sex and age) and we wind up only burdening commuters and shoppers with such checks without any real gain in overall safety. The key, then, must be to keep suspects out rather than relying on tracking them down or preventing them from striking once they have blended into the general population.
From a national security standpoint, the prevention of another September 11 thus seems straightforwardâin theory. Suspend most legal immigration from Middle Eastern countries known to subsidize or tolerate terrorism. Review all current visas and search out and deport violators. Continue to audit carefully the arrivals of Middle Eastern nationals. Tighten the Canadian and Mexican borders. Extend existing statutes on inflammatory speech and hate crimes to include radical Islamic doctrines that routinely denigrate Americans, Jews, homosexuals, and women. Hand down long sentences to those convicted of promulgating Islamic hatred and plotting terrorism, with special attention given to Saudi-sponsored charities, madrassas, and mosques. Renew the Patriot Act, and create a public culture that associates radical Islamicism with fascism.
European and American experiences both suggest that we can toughen our domestic security without violating constitutional custom. In Europeâs case, the examples are quite recent. The Netherlands is now handing down life sentences for Islamic killers, criminalizing the hate speech of the madrassas, curbing immigration from the Middle East, and deporting suspected Islamistsâin some cases, Islamists with Dutch passports. France has gone even further. A radical new antiterrorism package unveiled by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy has given the government the right to deport residents summarily and to strip radicals of their naturalized French citizenship. British prime minister Tony Blair in turn has introduced legislation that would criminalize association with radical Islamists and enable the government to deport suspected terrorist sympathizers swiftly. âLet no one be in any doubt that the rules of the game are changing,â Blair warned.
Here in the U.S., thereâs no need to go back for guidance on securing the homeland to Abraham Lincolnâs regrettable suspension of habeas corpus, Woodrow Wilsonâs questionable Sedition and Espionage acts that jailed hundreds during World War I for saying and writing things (even loosely) that officials felt helped the Central Powers, or Franklin Rooseveltâs military tribunals that tried, convicted, and executed German terrorist agents before they committed any damage. Instead, we should reexamine the cold war, when the threat of mutually assured destruction made conventional war between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies unlikely. The struggle against the Soviets and their minions thus became one of dirty operations, espionage, and terrorism.
In response to the communist threat, we blocked easy immigration from Soviet bloc countries. We did not demonize the citizens of Albania and Bulgaria, but we did not let them in, either. The United States generally tolerated membership in the Communist Party and expression of anti-American sentiments here at home, but we infiltrated hard-core Soviet-funded communist groups and jailed or deported their most dangerous operatives.
By analogy, just as no Czech citizens could easily fly to the U.S. from Prague in 1955, so should we be wary of travelers from Cairo or Riyadh. Critics will counter that Warsaw Pact governments were officially hostile to the U.S., while âalliedâ Egyptian, Pakistani, and Saudi authorities clamp down on terrorists. But this claim is dubious. Radical Islamists have thrived by following long-understood protocols of engagement: they do not attack the autocracies of the Middle East directly, and in return they receive from those autocracies virtual amnesty for targeting Westerners. When the Islamists break the rules and hit enclaves of foreigners inside Egypt or Saudi Arabia, the autocracies hound them for a bit. When they return to killing people on foreign soil, these dictatorships and monarchies again leave them in peace.
Four years after September 11, with the nature of our dilemma clearly before us, why do we still have terrorists operating freely in our midst? Why do we seem paralyzed over the proper course of action to prevent attacks from within?
Part of the problem is the legacy of our domestic history during wartime. Because most Americans view the U.S. internment of the Japanese during World War II as gratuitously punitive, unnecessary, and illegal, any proposal to monitor particular American subgroups today calls down swift denunciation as the moral equivalent of that internment. Moreover, though the McCarthy period was not, properly speaking, a witch huntâno witches haunted Salem, but plenty of communists sympathetic to the Soviet Union moved in and out of the U.S. government during the fiftiesâit matters little. The abuses by anti-communist watchdogs have become enshrined in our collective memory as something we must never repeat. It is now a staple of our history books that the House Un-American Activities Committee was almost more pernicious than 7,000 Soviet nuclear missiles pointed at the U.S. Consequently, we have since believed it better to err on the side of civil liberties than on the side of national security, should the two conflictâat least until September 11.
Our elite commitment to multiculturalism also hamstrings us from taking the needed security steps. For 30 years, our schools have pounded home the creed that all cultures are of equal meritâor, more accurately perhaps, that no culture is worse than the Westâs. Millions of Americans consequently arenât sure whether radical Islam is just another legitimate alternative to the dominant Western narrative. Typical of this mind-set, UCLA English professor Saree Makdisi, excusing the London subway terrorism, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that deliberately butchering commuters is no worse than accidentally killing civilians while targeting terrorists in a war zone. âAmerican and British media have devoted hours to wondering what would drive a seemingly normal young Muslim to destroy himself and others,â Makdisi said. âNo one has paused to ask what would cause a seemingly normal young Christian or Jew to strap himself into a warplane and drop bombs on a village, knowing full well his bombs will inevitably kill civilians (and, of course, soldiers).â
It is a tremendous historical irony that Americaâs liberal Left, embracing moral equivalence in this fashion, has all but refused to denounce the illiberal ideology of our enemiesâan ideology that supports polygamy, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, hatred of homosexuals, and patriarchy. Sometimes, the terrorists even win outright praise: perhaps the most popular filmmaker of election year 2004 was Michael Moore, who celebrated the suicide bombers and terrorists of Iraq as âminutemenâ akin to our own Founding Fathers.
If we are not sure as a nation that Islamists really are foes of Western values but instead see them as another persecuted group with legitimate gripes against us (occupied Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, colonialism, the Crusades), then it becomes increasingly hard to identify, let alone fight, the practitioners of Islamic fanaticism at home. Even the military bureaucracy seems to be having trouble naming the enemy: witness the rebranding by some Pentagon officials of âthe war on terrorismâ into the âglobal war against violent extremism.â While the original nomenclature was unsatisfactoryâwars arenât fought against a tactic but rather against those using itâthe new name is even less helpful. Our fight against jihadists is different from our struggle with recalcitrant Serbian nationalists or Kim Jong-ilâs crackpot extremism. We are at war with radical Islam, Islamic fascism, Islamismâthe âradical Islamic polemic,â in the words of Sarkozy. We should never lose sight of this fact. President Bushâs October speech describing our struggle against Islamic terrorâa first for the administrationâis an encouraging, if belated, sign.
Practical considerations also get in the way of securing the homeland. Any radical change in our immigration lawsâaffecting entry into the U.S., systematic deportation of illegal aliens, or scrutiny of visa holdersârequires comprehensive reform. And such transformation immediately raises the question of what to do with the 10 to 15 million illegal Mexican aliens residing here and with our vast, unsecured southern border. So far, sensitivity to Hispanic concerns, both here and in Mexico, coupled with employer lobbying, has precluded securing the border and insisting on legality for all new immigrants. Deporting illegal aliens from the Middle East will immediately lead to questions as to why we are not deporting millions of unlawful Mexican residentsâa political hot potato.
Yet immigration controlâas the Dutch and French have learnedâmay be the most powerful tool in the war against the jihadists. Not only does it help keep terrorists out, it also carries symbolic weight. In the Middle East, America is worshipped even as it is hatedâconstantly slurred even as it proves the Number One destination for thousands upon thousands of would-be immigrants from the Islamic world. Once we have deported the Islamists, and Middle Easterners and other Muslims find it much harder to enter the U.S. because of their governmentsâ tolerance for radical anti-Americanism, the message will resound all the more loudly in the Muslim world itself that terrorism is intolerable.
Such toughness opposes the current orthodoxy, which holds that curtailing immigration from the Arab and Muslim world will cost us a key opportunity to inculcate moderates and eventually send back emissaries of goodwill. Maybe; but so far, the profile of the Islamic terrorist is someone who has paid back our magnanimity with deadly contempt. Just as bin Ladin, Dr. Zawahiri, and the Pakistanis suspected of bombing the London subways were not poor, uneducated, or unfamiliar with the West, so too we find that those arrested for terrorist activities on our shores seem to hate us all the more because of our liberality.
Perhaps if the message does begin to be heard that America is as unpredictable as it is merciless toward the advocates and supporters of radical Islam, then the much praised but rarely heard moderates of the Muslim world will at last step forward and keep the few from ruining things for the many. Meantime, we should stop allowing illiberals into the United Statesâilliberals who either wish to undermine Western tolerance or wonât worry too much when others in their midst try.
According to The Sunday Telegraph, on this week's whirlwind tour of the Great Satan, the Prince of Wales "will try to persuade George W Bush and Americans of the merits of IslamâŠbecause he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since September 11". His Royal Highness apparently finds the Bush approach to Islam "too confrontational".
If the Prince wants to take a few examples of the non-confrontational approach with him to the White House, here's a couple pulled at random from the last week's news: the president of Iran called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". Kofi Annan expressed his "dismay".
Excellent. Struck the perfect non-confrontational tone. Were the Iranian nuclear programme a little more advanced and they'd actually wiped Israel off the map, the secretary-general might have felt obliged to be more confrontational and express his "deep concern".
In Sulawesi, Indonesia, three Christian girls walking home from school were beheaded.
"It is unclear what was behind the attack," reported the BBC, scrupulously non-confrontationally.
In the Australian state of Victoria, reports the Herald Sun, "police are being advised to treat Muslim domestic violence cases differently out of respect for Islamic traditions and habits". Tough luck for us infidel wife-beaters, but admirably non-confrontational Islam-wise.
Sadly, even a neocon warmonger can't get confrontational over every nickel 'n' dime emissary passing through the office, and the Administration has other problems at the moment. "Mr Bush's presidency is in deep trouble," declared Alec Russell in this space yesterday. "It is worth recalling that even at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal Mr Clinton's approval rating never dropped below 55 per cent, while Mr Bush's is now at 40."
Is it really worth recalling? Mr Clinton's approval rating stayed above 55 because he was careful not to do anything, at least on the non-pants-dropping aspects of his presidency, of which the electorate might disapprove. The oral sex was pretty much the only position he took that wasn't focus-grouped by Dick Morris beforehand - and, come to think of it, it wouldn't surprise me if it was and that's why he went ahead with it. ("Our polling suggests it would make you seem attractively flawed and human to susceptible soccer moms in swing states, Mr President.")
At any rate, above the waist, Mr Clinton governed as an "Eisenhower Republican" - ie, very non-confrontational. The president's distinguishing characteristics loomed paradoxically large over the era only because everything else he did was so small.
Mr Bush, on the other hand, wants to remake the Middle East, reform social security, legalise illegal immigrants, drill for oil in the Arctic wilderness, etc. Whatever the merits of these positions, they are confrontational. Even many of his supporters balk at two or more of the items on that list.
You could fill Yankee Stadium with the massed ranks of assistant secretaries of state and deputy national security advisers from his father's administration - and Reagan's and Ford's and Nixon's - who oppose the Bush Doctrine to blow apart the fetid stability of the Arab world. A radical repudiation of half a century of bipartisan policy on a critical component of the geopolitical scene ought to be controversial.
Posterity will decide whether Bush got that one right. By contrast, posterity will have a hard time recalling Mr Clinton at all, except as a novelty-act intermission between the Cold War and the new war. Would you rather be popular or would you rather be consequential? Popularity is a fine measure for celebrity, and even then it fades quicker than a DNA stain on an old cocktail dress.
Granted, President Bush has failed to use the bully pulpit. As I wrote in the Telegraph in September 2002: "A few weeks after the attacks, he had the highest approval ratings of any president in history. But he didn't do anything with them." And, although I was a bit off in my timing, Mr Bush was indeed eventually "right back where he was on September 10, 2001: the 50 per cent president, his approval ratings in the fifties, his 'negatives' high, the half of the country that didn't vote for him feeling no warmer toward him than if the day that 'changed the world' had never happened".
But, given that reality, it's worth pondering who it is who's dissatisfied with Bush. In November 2004, he won 51 per cent of the vote and John Kerry took 48 per cent. The five or 10 per cent who've temporarily wandered away (a poll yesterday had Bush at 45 per cent) are not "centrists" or "moderates" or "swing voters" or some other mythical category of squishes who want an end to what Alec Russell calls the Karl Rove "style of hardball politics".
The lesson of every contest from the 2000 election to the abandonment last week of Harriet Miers's Supreme Court nomination is that, as Michael Barone wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "Mr Bush can count on being firmly, and more or less unanimously, opposed by the Democrats, and he can succeed only when he has the strong support of the Republican base".
Just so. Bush is a polarising figure because these are polarising times. But, when the dust settles (metaphorically, I hope), his designation of Iran as part of an "axis of evil" will seem a shrewder judgment than that of the Euro-appeasers or the snob Islamophiles. Facing profound challenges, most political leaders in the western world have shirked confrontation on everything from Islamism to unaffordable social programmes - and their peoples will live with the consequences of that non-confrontation long after those leaders are gone.
#1
Yes, "cultural differences" should be reconciled.
There was a story about a Brit in India (may have been Wellington before his peerage). He was made aware of the plans of some of the locals to throw a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. He naturally indicted that this wasn't going to happen on his watch. The locals said 'but this is our custom, you have no right to interfere.' The Brit responded, "Well, go ahead then, but my custom is to hang people who burn women". The widow lived.
A perfect example of reconciling cultural differences.
"Tedious" doesn't begin to describe the new book by America's worst ex-president.
Jimmy Carter's 20th book is a tedious meditation about the appropriate uses of moral values in political life--as wisely and humbly exemplified by Himself--and of their misuses under the current Bush administration.
But tedious isn't quite the right word here, because it suggests mere boredom while Mr. Carter's prose manages to be irritating as well. Is there an English-language equivalent to the German Rechthaberei, which loosely translates as the state of thinking and behaving as if you're in the right and everyone else is in the wrong? Yet even such a term doesn't quite capture the sanctimony, the self-congratulation, the humorlessness, the convenient factual omissions and the passive-aggressive quirks that characterize our 39th president's aggressively passive world view. Mr. Carter is sui generis. He deserves his own word.
Everything about "Our Endangered Values" is wrong, beginning, obviously, with the title. The values Mr. Carter says are "ours" are certainly not mine and probably not yours and therefore, necessarily, not ours. In fact, it is not at all obvious that the things Mr. Carter speaks of even qualify as values, properly speaking, unless you believe that "economic justice" is a value, or you subscribe to Marxist liberation theology (Mr. Carter considers the Catholic priests who practiced this theology to be "heroes"), or you would like to pay your "personal respects" to Syria's dictator (never mind that he just had the prime minister of Lebanon assassinated), or you can think of nothing bad to say about Saddam Hussein except, perhaps, that he is "obnoxious."
Subtracting "Our" and "Values" from the title, then, the reader is left with "Endangered," the form of the verb here characteristically rendered in the former president's favorite voice. Who, or what, is doing the endangering? Mr. Carter's animating concern is the rise of fundamentalism in religion and politics, but don't suppose that this has anything to do with Islamic fundamentalism. What chiefly exercises Mr. Carter's indignation are neoconservatives, the Southern Baptist Convention and their allegedly converging and insidious influence on government. Together, Mr. Carter believes, they have contrived to set America loose "from the restraints of international organizations" like the United Nations and "global agreements" such as the Kyoto Protocol, apparently for the purpose of eradicating the separation of church and state and creating "a dominant American empire throughout the world."
This is an odd complaint, given the source. Mr. Carter admits that as president he worked "behind the scenes" with the head of the Southern Baptist Convention to develop a program called Bold Mission Thrust, "designed to expand the global evangelistic effort of Baptists." Weirdly, Mr. Carter offers this anecdote in the context of his ostensible opposition to the "melding of church and state," which, he gravely notes, "is of deep concern to those who have always relished their separation as one of our moral values."
As for neocons, Mr. Carter is nearly one himself, so obsessed does he claim to be with human rights. But much as he may hate the sin, he loves the sinner. Think of his view of various world figures from his White House years: Yugoslavia's Josip Tito ("a man who believes in human rights"); Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu ("our goals are the same"); the PLO's Yasser Arafat (a "misunderstood" figure for whom Mr. Carter once moonlighted as a speechwriter). And then there is Kim Il Sung ("vigorous," "intelligent"), whose relationship with Mr. Carter is reprised in this book.
"Responding to several years of invitations from North Korean president Kim Il Sung . . . Rosalynn and I went to Pyongyang and helped to secure an agreement from President Kim that North Korea would cease its nuclear program at Yongbyon and permit IAEA inspectors to return to the site." Leaving aside the interesting question of why that Dear Leader would be so solicitous of this one, what's chiefly notable about this sentence is that it is one of the few here that isn't demonstrably false or misleading in respect to U.S. dealings with the North.
In Mr. Carter's telling, the 1994 Yongbyon Agreed Framework--in which Pyongyang agreed to trade its nuclear-weapons program for oil shipments, security guarantees and the construction of two light-water reactors--was generally going according to plan, only to be gratuitously upended the moment the Bush administration arrived in Washington. "Shipments of the pledged fuel oil were terminated, along with construction of the alternate nuclear power plants," writes Mr. Carter.
In fact, North Korea violated the Agreed Framework almost from the moment it was signed by pursuing a secret, parallel weapons program. For its part, the Bush administration continued to honor the framework's commitments; in 2002, a State Department official even attended the groundbreaking for one of the promised reactors. Only later, when the U.S. presented the North with evidence of its cheating, and the North admitted to the cheating, did the fuel shipments and reactor construction stop.
There is more of this--personal slurs, particularly against U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, factual omissions (Mr. Carter accuses the Bush administration of making hardly any effort to reduce nuclear-weapons stockpiles but doesn't mention the 2002 Moscow Treaty, which involves the most dramatic nuclear cuts in history), trite sophistries ("a rising tide raises all yachts") and the invariable, habitual, irrepressible blaming of America first for everything from degrading the environment to alienating Syria. At a certain point it all begins to ooze and blur, in the way the speeches and doings of Al Sharpton or Michael Moore ooze and blur. Past a certain point, you just stop keeping track.
Mr. Carter, however, is no gold-plated race hustler or quack documentary maker. He is--as he constantly reminds us, as if our memories aren't still vivid--the 39th president of the United States and winner of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. Bill Clinton may have the heart of the Democratic Party, but Mr. Carter captures the Zeitgeist of the global left. "Our Endangered Values" is a distressing piece of work for many reasons, most of all because it cannot be safely ignored.
Jummuh, the guy who resuscitated James Buchannan's reputation.
There is good reason for thinking, however, that a critical source of contemporary radical Islamism lies not in the Middle East, but in Western Europe.
The identity problem is particularly severe for second- and third-generation children of immigrants. They grow up outside the traditional culture of their parents, but unlike most newcomers to the United States, few feel truly accepted by the surrounding society.
Osama bin Laden appears, offering young converts a universalistic, pure version of Islam that has been stripped of its local saints, customs and traditions. Radical Islamism tells them exactly who they are--respected members of a global Muslim umma to which they can belong despite their lives in lands of unbelief.
If this is in fact an accurate description of an important source of radicalism, several conclusions follow. First, the challenge that Islamism represents is not a strange and unfamiliar one. Rapid transition to modernity has long spawned radicalization; we have seen the exact same forms of alienation among those young people who in earlier generations became anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists or members of the Bader-Meinhof gang. The ideology changes but the underlying psychology does not.
Further, radical Islamism is as much a product of modernization and globalization as it is a religious phenomenon; it would not be nearly as intense if Muslims could not travel, surf the Web, or become otherwise disconnected from their culture. This means that "fixing" the Middle East by bringing modernization and democracy to countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia will not solve the terrorism problem, but may in the short run make the problem worse. Democracy and modernization in the Muslim world are desirable for their own sake, but we will continue to have a big problem with terrorism in Europe regardless of what happens there.
The real challenge for democracy lies in Europe, where the problem is an internal one of integrating large numbers of angry young Muslims and doing so in a way that does not provoke an even angrier backlash from right-wing populists. Two things need to happen: First, countries like Holland and Britain need to reverse the counterproductive multiculturalist policies that sheltered radicalism, and crack down on extremists. But second, they also need to reformulate their definitions of national identity to be more accepting of people from non-Western backgrounds.
Many Europeans assert that the American melting pot cannot be transported to European soil. Identity there remains rooted in blood, soil and ancient shared memory. This may be true, but if so, democracy in Europe will be in big trouble in the future as Muslims become an ever larger percentage of the population. And since Europe is today one of main battlegrounds of the war on terrorism, this reality will matter for the rest of us as well.
#1
I would echo RC's critique of the Dalrymple piece with regard to Fukuyama's editorial. Muslims are being radicalized in Morocco, Thailand, SA, Indonesia, etc., not only Europe. Both Dalrymple and Fukuyama are (consciously or unconsciously) trying to restrict the scope of the conflict by excluding Dar al Islam from their analysis. I agree that the lack of assimilationist mechanisms in European society tend to reinforce tribal and religious structures native the Dar al Islam. But that just proves the belief of most of us here at Rantburg -- that the root of the problem is Islam.
An additional argument against both Dalrymple and Fukuyama is that Britain, which does practice assimilation to a limited extent (the UK has Muslim MPs and CEOs -- unknown in the rest of Europe) has the same problems as France, Holland, and Sweden.
I think that one of the reasons that we here in the US have been lucky is that for a Muslim to come here, he must make a bigger phychological break than he would by emmigrating to Europe. After all, we are the great Satan, and have been at least since the time of Qutb and Nasser. To come here, a Muslim knows that he he going to the land of compound interest, licentiousness, and shirk. A Muslim coming here is making a strong statement that he is rejecting some or all of the Islamic world view. In contrast, moving to Europe simply means living among al muhajiroun.
In conclusion, I think that Dalrymple (who I have immense respect for) and Fukuyama are dodging the issue. Islam is the problem. Affirmative action in Europe will not solve the problem. Perhaps if the Euros had been humble enough to look to the American model of assimilation forty years ago when they first began importing guest workers, the Muslim problem would be manageable.
Islamic society will react violently as it undergoes its clash with modernity as every society before it (including ours) has. Europe has been drawn into that violence due to foolish immigation policy. The real question is whether in the end the Islamic reaction will be merely violent or suicidal (a Gotterdammerung) as I suspect it will be.
#2
There is good reason for thinking, however, that a critical source of contemporary radical Islamism lies not in the Middle East, but in Western Europe.
Odd. I seem to remember those "you must not be friends with the infidels and must commit to jihad" pamphlets in US mosques were paid for by the Saudis. Does Fukuyama think Saudi Arabia is part of Western Europe?
You're right, 11A5S, these "analysts" are blotting out the Muslim world while they're looking for explanations for the behavior of the Muslim world. It's not much different than the left's use of the Islamists as proxies for their cause de jure.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
11/02/2005 10:59 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Hey. None of these POLITICAL EXPERTS understand any RELIGION AT ALL because they are not religious and don't know any religious fanatics.
I understand the problem. As an engineer who spent my early childhood years on a mission field ... I know religion and I know these experts don't have a clue!
Just before 9-11 I remember discussing how Islam was going to be a huge huge problem with several executives on a long walk. (One was even the guy who invented the woodpecker and should know better has he experienced the weak relgion of Stalinism.) I only have encountered one executive that gets it. Teachers and schools don't comprehend so that can't teach it to the so-called experts.
They need to make themselves a bit more well rounded. Sort of take some fundementalist of any relgion to live with them for awhile. Then add a few other religions and observe like hell for 24/7.
Their eyes will be opened but their minds might not accept it since they will then understand the less generous positions of folks like myself and ".com" who are quite aware of the dangers.
They have definitely not been to a bye-bye or a airing of the gods, a sand dance, trances, extreme rituals, or any of the other aspects of extreme religion. The only way to understand a little is to be there - just don't join in an become a participant as that way leads down paths away from logic. View them closely but don't travel them.
#4
A case could be made that assimilation (or at least attempts to assimilate) is the problem. Germany until recently took the non-assimilation route and they have few of the problems of France, Holland and even the UK. If you need workers, bring them in as temporary guest workers, not as immigrants.
#5
Islamic society will react violently as it undergoes its clash with modernity as every society before it (including ours) has. Europe has been drawn into that violence due to foolish immigation policy. The real question is whether in the end the Islamic reaction will be merely violent or suicidal (a Gotterdammerung) as I suspect it will be.
The first two sentences are reiterations of points Fukuyama makes. But his point is:
1) the greatest threat to the Europeans is their unassimilated immigrants, not nutters coming from the ME to destroy them.
2) The Euros need to find some way to assimilate them to becoming Europeans first.
The unaddressed question is whether, if they could figure out the perfect assimilation program, the Europeans could implement it in time to avoid things falling apart at the seams. What's going on in Paris right now is not a sign for optomism.
What's going on in Paris looks a lot like the long hot summers of the mid '60s. A strategic decision was made by America to integrates blacks into our society. That was the right decision. I don't agree with every policy to implement it, but I wouldn't change the basic decision. Europe has not made any decision yet, nor is it clear it is even having a discussion. The handling of the Turkey EU application is the most blatant example. If Europe is limited to Christian Members of the Tribe, say so and implement the policy. If you're going to have guest workers and send them home, that's a policy too. But this let them show up and pretend they aren't there policy is nuts.
I have a bit of a hard time making the religious argument as we have had relatively little problem in the U. S. with Muslim immigrants. There's lots of reasons, but our model of assimilation, especially of children, seems to have been more effective in defanging the Islamonuts.
That there is a ghetto of 500,000 muslims in Paris with no-go areas where police and EMS will not go is an indication that France has had a policy of non-assimilation. That the kids in these neighborhoods speak Arabic, not French, is a sign of non-assimilation.
It's sure not like America where the parents have to send the kids to name-your-ethnic-group school to make sure the kids can talk to the grand parents in the old country and then the kids react by making sure there is not a trace of the old country around when they raise the grand children.
I think the ability of America to assimilate is also a source of the hatred for America around the world. Because they are all tribally based, no other country, especially non-Anglosphere countries, assimilates nearly as well as does the U. S. Our ability to assimilate, to attract the smartest and most talented individuals from every country in the world is a threat to them and their culture. It means that sooner or later they will become Americans culturally if not legally. And it scares the hell out of them.
I believe a good point is being made that there is not an ummah here to be defeated, there are lot's of populations involved and each must be dealt with effectively. Combatting what is going on in Nigeria and Darful will be different than in Europe, than in Iran, than in Saudi Arabia, and on and on. That makes the problem much more complex and difficult to resolve, but we aren't going to kill every muslim in the world, so we, and especially the Europeans, need to prepare some more effective strategies. That's also why this will take decades. It simply will not be a quick and dirty win like WWII, which if one really thinks about it was a series of wars, started in 1870 and lasting till 1945 or 1989 depending on how you want to look at it.
#6
Assimilation is a white man's word, it means nothing. Initially they came across the big waters in large canoes, but few in number. They were peaceful at first and we tried to show them the way of our tribes but they refused. Many more came in many canoes. They worshiped strange Gods and thier women covered themselves as if in shame. Thier Captain violated my family and my daughter Pochahontas. The Captain had a roving eye, and frequently let his tomahawk do his thinking for him. Later they brought very dark skinned people in chains who listened to strange drums. They built a fort named James which had a big PX. They began running snatch missions and sometimes search and destroy foreys against my people. We tried everything, peace overatures, corn, deer meat, funny weed, nothing worked. They called us savages and were bent on our destruction as a people. They are many now and have created global warming. We are forgotten. Assimilation is a white man's word, it means nothing.
#7
The first two sentences are reiterations of points Fukuyama makes. But his point is:
1) the greatest threat to the Europeans is their unassimilated immigrants, not nutters coming from the ME to destroy them.
2) The Euros need to find some way to assimilate them to becoming Europeans first.
SS9401: Isn't a little cheesy to take one paragraph out of my screed, deprecate it, then use it as springboard for your own? Especially when Fukuyama never characterizes European immigation policy as foolish or ever quesions it at all?
This is a problem with Islam. The money is coming out of Saudi Arabia and the mullahs among the muhajiroun are either from SA or are being subsidized by it. The Quran and other Islamic writings are at least partially a record of how Arab immigrants living in the fragemented, Hellenized Levant, united, overthrew their masters and acquired an empire of their own. As such, it reads as a manual for taking over a fragmented, disfunctional society. That is why Islam remains relevant. This is a religous problem.
I agree with both you and Fukuyama that Europe is a decisive point in this war. But the enemy centers of gravity are the oil fields (material)and Mecca (spiritual). These cannot be ignored and must be neutralized, else the enemy will continue to gather strength.
I am especially suspect of Fukuyama's analysis since he has recently come out against the Iraq war. I see this article as an attempt to regionalize the conflict. We cannot ignore the Middle Eastern or Islamic dimension of this war. At the beginning of WWII, we said that we would defeat the Germans's first then the Japanese. In reality, we had to defeat them more or less at the same time. We cannot say that we are only going to win this war in Europe and ignore the rest of the world. I'm not accusing you of saying this, because obviously you're not. But if Fukuyama isn't saying this in this article, then this article along with the rest of his recent comments seem to say that he wants us out of the Islamic core. I cannot accept this. Such a course of action will result in a nuclear armed Islamist state sitting on a big chunk of the world's energy reserves. It would be a disater for the West.
#8
I apologize, Chief, for the beatly behavior of us white men. I happen to be in the area. Perhaps I can come and grovel in person?
Posted by: Prince Charles ||
11/02/2005 14:22 Comments ||
Top||
#9
Wasn't my intention to deprecate, only to point out that there's not that much distance between what you and Fukayama said wrt the first two points.
The final point you make, with which I and I believe FF disagree, is that the problem is inherent in Islam.
There is no doubt in my mind that Saudi wackos are taking advantage of the opportunity to recycle their petro dollars to undermine non-islamic regimes, and thereby the kill goose that lays all those golden eggs. Dumb and stupid.
I read FF as saying that our situation is akin to that in the fight against communism. There is no monolithic Islamism to fight just as there was no monolithic Comintern. While we in the west think that communism was defeated in 1989, and it may have been in the western intellegentsia, variants far less messianic, are still floating in China, North Korea, Cuba and Viet Nam. Each is being dealt with using a different strategy. And all will fall. But we didn't try to overthrow them all at once.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are both inimical powers in the Middle East. What FF is saying is that we should address each of them individually in the manner most likely to achieve our goals. The article did not go into the specifics on how he thought each should be dealt with. I agree we have a problem with countries posessing nuclear weapons and a willingness to use them.
but I am equally uneasy with Hugo wanting to go into the reprocessing business. And I am a lot more worried about to whom the ISI is passing out the keys to their weapons lockers.
Islam has a history that is easily taken over by militants who seek to achieve a political end as the political and religious are not nearly as separate in Islamic society, or in most preindustrialized societies as in the Anglosphere. But, Islam is here and is not going to go away. Our problem is not with Islam, though it becomes a lightning rod for them. And if our problem is with Islam, what should we do about it?
#10
Weird thread. Thanks for the input Powatanidal, I've never considered the tribal military aspects of this confilict before. But come to think of it these Sunni kinda remind me of old Pawnee cliches.
#11
Fukuyama et al want to put the Islamofascists on the coach and perform a social and pycho analysis. Crime is crime irrespective of "root cause."
No one is forcing these facists to migrate to a new country. And, unlike their old country, the new one doesn't impose upon them to adapt to the tyrany of religion, theocracy, or monarchy.
Force the fuckers out if they represent a national security threat. Yet that only relocates the problem, it doesn't resolve it.
Posted by: Captain America ||
11/02/2005 21:55 Comments ||
Top||
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
