small victories: the meskheti come to america
(note: this originally appeared in eTalkinghead.com on 30 Aug 04)

The Meskheti are one of those little good-news stories that so often slips through the cracks, but their plight underlines a comment made by the Secretary of Defense last year. Speaking to a group of none-too-receptive Europeans at a NATO conference in Munich last February, Rumsfeld, clearly exasperated by the discussion, blurted out, “I know in my heart and in my brain that America ain’t what’s wrong with the world.”

Ask one of the Meskhetian Turks that just arrived in Philadelphia what he thinks.

A largely anonymous oppressed ethnic group, the Meskheti receive little attention in the world press. After World War II, Stalin deported tens of thousands of Meskheti from his (and their) native Georgia to Uzbekistan. When the Soviet Union broke up, around 90,000 Meskheti were driven out of Uzbekistan in pogroms, and the largest group, over 10,000, settled in the Krasnodar region of Russia.

If the Meskhetians thought they had found a home in Russia, they were quickly disabused of the notion. The ethnic Cossack administration in Krasnodar, displeased with their presence, denied them citizenship and even residency permits, leaving the Meskheti in what Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ) called “a virtual no-man’s land,” unable to register cars, marriages, births, deaths, houses or businesses. The refugees were required to re-register as “guests” (an ironic term) every 45 days. They were constantly looking over their shoulders for thuggish ultranationalist Cossack paramilitaries, some of whom were rumored to be getting funding from the Krasnodar administration.

For its part, Russia insisted that Georgia, the Meskhetian homeland 60 years removed, should take them back, yet another in a long list of disputes between Moscow and Tbilisi. Its 1999 Council of Europe accession obligated Georgia to create conditions for the Meskhetis’ return, but Georgia, already bogged down by Abkhaz refugees and lacking incentive to assist another beleaguered ethnic group, dragged its feet.

Enter Uncle Sam and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The IOM and the State Department offered to let undocumented Meskhetians apply for legal residency, and eventually citizenship, in the United States. The conditions for inclusion were strict -- only those who had no legal status at all were considered -- even so, the IOM expects that up to 10,000 will register for resettlement by the end of August. They will be given medical screenings, cultural orientation, and assistance in meeting with US authorities -- including the Department of Homeland Security -- in anticipation of their arrival in the United States.

In truly American style, once the Meskhetians arrive in America they will get help, but not a free ride. While transport will be arranged for them by IOM to various parts of the U.S., they will be expected to pay back the cost. And charitable organizations in the United States will help them get housing and work, but after a short period they will be expected to build lives for themselves. They will be eligible for permanent residency status in one year, and citizenship in as little as four years.

Not all the Meskhetians are happy about the prospect of yet another resettlement. Some would prefer to return to their ancestral land in Georgia, but they are philosophical about the likelihood of that option. Many, however, are ready for their new lives in America. According to the Associated Press, one Meskheti leader told Russian television station NTV, "We are going to Philadelphia. Houses, jobs, the whole package is prepared for us. We don't need anything else." As of mid-August, 79 Meskheti had arrived in the United States since the program began in late June, according to an IOM press briefing.

Small victories like this are what career diplomats, overworked committee staff aides, NGO employees and development people live for. The victory wasn’t against Russia, the Krasnodar administration, or even Georgia. It was a defeat of sclerotic bureaucracy, small-mindedness, bigotry, and apathy.

How appropriate, then, that as the Statue of Liberty re-opens in New York Harbor, wretched refuse from yet another teeming shore arrives, yearning to breathe free. Like Irish, Italians, Vietnamese, Cubans, Afghans and others before them, the Meskheti come to the United States largely penniless and without friends or family to guide them, dependent on the kindness of strangers for their basic needs, but determined to start over and move forward.
Marc posted this at 30.8.04 | Permalink

Book Review -- Reckless Disregard: How Liberal Democrats Undercut Our Military, Endanger Our Soldiers, and Jeopardize Our Security
By Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson, USAF (Ret.)

Didja hear? Seems there was this group of guys that patrolled up and down rivers in Vietnam and, er, Cambodia (maybe) in the late 60s. They were on these little boats that were really fast – so fast that they called them “swift boats.” One of them was a guy named Lt. Kerry; he might have been a hero, but it’s not entirely clear because there are a group of folks that have differing views on what happened 35 years ago.

What’s that, you say? The important thing is that he served honorably in the Armed Forces? That America needs a strong president who knows firsthand what the military is all about? Someone that’s seen combat and been decorated? Someone like Bob Dole, perhaps, who still bears the scars of his war service? Or maybe George Herbert Walker Bush, who got a distinguished flying cross? That’s different, you say? Aren't we just belaboring the swift boat issue? Well, regrettably, yes.

Buzz Patterson does, in fact, further belabor the swift boat issue. He spends the second chapter of his book, Reckless Disregard, talking about John Kerry’s war record. Patterson recounts Kerry’s first purple heart in detail (a shrapnel wound in the arm that required neither anesthesia nor sutures), and points out that Kerry never missed a day of duty in the four months he was in Vietnam.

Yes, four months. You’d think from the press coverage that Kerry was there from the Tonkin Gulf resolution to the Saigon airlift, but it really was only from December ’68 to March ’69. Odd, that, since the average tour of duty in Vietnam was 12 months. And many little nuggets from Patterson’s book that would be of use to conservative bloggers have been lost in the psuedo-journalistic melee surrounding the swift boat vets’ book.

All in all, though, Patterson only spends perhaps a dozen pages talking about the swift boat controversy. This is probably more than it merits, but let’s not quibble over details.

Rather than devoting the entire book to Vietnam War minutiae, Patterson makes a larger point, and that point is this: those who are now carping about combating terrorism, projecting military power, winning wars, and generally setting about fixing national security were the same ones who spent a fair amount of the intervening period between Nixon and Bush II wrecking it.

Patterson spends a good bit of his book skewering Kerry, and it’s no coincidence that the book went to press in time for publishing at the height of the campaign season. This is probably as much for commercial reasons as anything else.

But Patterson also talks about the rest of the liberal rogues’ gallery: “Hanoi” Jane Fonda, Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, VP Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Tom Daschle, Jim McDermott, Tom Harkin, President Clinton, President Carter, et al. The book is replete with documented examples of actions by these and others that, he argues, ultimately made us weaker in the days leading up to 9/11. Some examples:

- During his term, Clinton cut 700,000 active duty military members and 293,000 reservists;

- President Clinton met only twice privately with CIA Director Woolsey;

- Between 1991-1996, Sen. Kerry proposed or voted in favor of legislation designed to cut military or intelligence spending by: 1991 - $3b; 1992 - $6b; 1993 - $8.8b; 1994 - $43b; 1995 - $6.5b; 1996 - $6.5b.

In short, Patterson provides lots of ammunition to the party faithful and those conservative members of the military (who, it could be reasonably argued, constitute a significant majority of the DoD) disgusted by left-leaning politics.

The downfall of Reckless Disregard is not in the message but the delivery. The text is peppered with various usages of the word “liberal” as an epithet, and Patterson frequently uses folksy wink-wink rhetoric to push points that could have been made more effectively by logic and figures alone. It is designed to be a paean to the conservative masses, but from the book title onward it will probably alienate any centrist who inadvertently picks it up.

Which is a shame, because Patterson makes some worthwhile arguments about the national ignorance-is-bliss attitude to security and defense of the 1990s (for which Republicans are certainly not immune from criticism) and America’s unwillingness to acknowledge that a grave danger was looming closer on the horizon than we imagined.

The most effective parts of the book are not when Patterson mines the conservative press for pithy quotes, but those in which he does some primary research. He tells of a flight crew’s personal encounter with Senator Kerry and his staff on a flight from Cambodia to Vietnam to Malaysia, in which Kerry manages to: insult the pilot, eat the crew’s lunch, complain about the heat (in southeast Asia!) and insist on taking off while the crew is checking a mechanical problem. In another part, Patterson tells the story of how President Clinton (Commander in Chief, let’s not forget) couldn’t tell the difference between an air force lieutenant and a major. He also tells how Senator Hillary Clinton visited Afghanistan and Baghdad and proceeded to tell the troops about her misgivings about the administration's force-projection policies -- remarks which were almost instantly broadcast by al-Jazeera. These anecdotes speak volumes about the attitudes of some members of the liberal policymaking community toward the military, and although they are to some extent peripheral, they do go to the center of Patterson's thesis.

In March of this year, an article appeared in NewsMax.com which made Patterson really mad. NewsMax, a right-leaning wire service/news aggregator, carried a story about (what else?) John Kerry in his Vietnam days; it was one of the earlier manifestations of the firestorm that would later become the “swift boat veterans…” brouhaha in fever pitch today.

The part of the piece which stuck in Patterson’s craw was this:

[Kerry] also seems ready to play the “chicken hawk” card against Republicans. He told George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s "This Week," “I don’t know what it is that all these Republicans who didn’t serve in Vietnam or fighting any war have against us who did.”

Patterson’s response:

“Well, sir, I’ll see your four months in Vietnam and raise you the twenty years I spent serving as an Air Force pilot flying in conflicts as far-ranging as Grenada, Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti.

“What I have against you, to be concise, is your post-Vietnam War treason, your complete and demonstrated lack of support for the U.S. military in your nineteen years in the Senate, and my expectation that you will return our national defense to the criminally ineffectual days of the Carter and Clinton administrations.”

Although this passage appears on page 153 -- three pages from the end -- this outburst captures the overall tone of Reckless Disregard, which is, not to put too fine a point on it, venomous. Given the way things are playing out in American politics today, maybe this isn’t surprising. But it is unfortunate.
Marc posted this at 27.8.04 | Permalink

the pressure cooker theory of hydraulic release

Charles "Often Wrong But Never in Doubt" Krauthammer has an excellent article in Townhall.com which explains to some extent why the democrats (and liberals more generally, even/especially those of the Nader school) have been so strident against President Bush. It goes to something I've long said, which is that liberals seem to believe that they know better what's good for the people than the people themselves. And they have so convinced themselves that they were robbed, robbed, of the last election, that they simply can not bear it. But they have had no opportunity to vent about this because of 9/11 and the war in Iraq -- until now. All of the resentment about 2000 has been dormant until the last year or so, and it is boiling to the surface, unleashing the collected fury of three-plus years of simmering discontent. According to Krauthammer,

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

In a way, it's rather impressive -- Michael Moore, Moby, Ted Kennedy, et al have gone off the deep end in their criticism (no doubt many other entertaining tricks will appear during the Republican convention), and they think they smell blood. What they may be smelling, however, is another dark whiff of defeat for their paternalistic and arrogant views.

Marc posted this at 27.8.04 | Permalink

forget dimona?

Following the shutting down of reformist newspaper websites (see more here), and the ridiculous debacle with the IAEA that I've written about before, and the most recent concern, the test-firing of the Shahab-3, the Iranian government is getting more bellicose by the day. Could this really be the same government that a group of US Congressmen wanted to visit not so terribly long ago?

"If Israel fires one missile at Booshehr atomic power plant, it should permanently forget about Dimona nuclear centre, where it produces and keeps its nuclear weapons, and Israel would be responsible for the terrifying consequence of this move", the acting Revolutionary Guards Commander General Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr warned. (more...)

Marc posted this at 26.8.04 | Permalink

john kerry, tax cutter

According to this article by the National Taxpayers' Union, John Kerry has flipped again (no great surprise). It seems that early in his legislative career he was actually in favor of tax cuts. His campaign today might argue that the budgetary situation at that time wasn't as dire as it is now, but the NTU points out that in fact the budget shortfall was actually worse then than now. The Kerry campaign now also conveniently ignores the fact that excessive taxes on the wealthy have been frequently proved to have a negative overall effect on the economy. But why bother with such trivial details when they get in the way of demagoguery?

Marc posted this at 25.8.04 | Permalink

thanks, glenn

More milestones in my writing career:
I got a (very brief) mention earlier this month in Instapundit. Still, a little press is better than no press at all.


Marc posted this at 24.8.04 | Permalink

juxtaposing (rather than dueling) headlines

I played this game a while back and found it fun. Let's roll again:

- Iran Official Admits to Aiding Zarqawi in Iraq, Al-Awsat Says (Bloomberg)

- Iranian nuclear demands stun Europeans (AP)

- Diplomacy sidelined as US targets Iran (The Guardian - UK)

Maybe things are finally headed in the right direction. But wait, here's Michael Ledeen to rain on our parade...

- The Discovery of Iran: Are you sitting down? Iran is a terrorist state. (National Review)

Marc posted this at 12.8.04 | Permalink

monitor this
(this piece originally appeared on eTalkinghead.com, 10 Aug 04)

The Europeans are coming! The Europeans are c... Wait a second here. When our democracy was in diapers, most of them were still living under monarchs, and were quickly headed in the direction of communist or fascist autocracies. We had finished our Civil War decades before most of them had come around to the mere idea of representative government. And it was America, after all, who allowed Western Europe to have a fighting chance at constitutional governance in the first place. After nearly 230 years, what does Europe have to teach us about democracy?

Having done the odd bit of election monitoring myself, it occurs to me that welcoming the OSCE with open arms is probably the best thing we can do for the cause of democracy around the world in the long run, if that's truly what America is all about. The process of election monitoring taught me more about representative government than every civics class I ever took and every election I ever voted in, combined. Still, the observers will probably just learn what Churchill told us -- "democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried." But that's not why the OSCE should send as many monitors as possible.

First, a little about what election monitoring is and isn't.

What it is: Election monitors do just that -- they monitor. It's a highly technocratic undertaking, far less about political beliefs than just process, process, process. And if there's one group of people that are better at over-regulating and hyper-processizing than we Americans, it has to be the Europeans. Monitors watch registration activities (usually starting several weeks before the polls open), they watch people lining up in front of the precincts, they look at the ballot box seals, they watch people walking to the voting booth, they watch the ballot being dropped into the box, and they watch the counting process at the end of the day. They typically go to several precincts to get a snapshot of how the process works (or doesn't). It's all very grass roots, earthy, and, generally, dull. But it's monitored. And at the end of the whole circus, they write up a giant report full of sincere and earnest conclusions about how the process (there's that word again) could be improved.

What it isn't: The advice election monitors get from the very beginning sounds eerily like Star Trek's Prime Directive -- don't interfere with this alien culture. They're not to do exit polling, they're not supposed to point out inconsistencies, nor can they provide helpful hints. They don't right wrongs, they don't fix problems, they don't put out a "feedback to the OSCE" suggestion box. They're there to watch. Occasionally an overzealous observer tries to intervene in some particularly egregious issue, but generally the monitors pride themselves on being wrapped up in the sheer tedium of it all.

So, notwithstanding our little Florida debacle in 2000 (which, most observers agree, proved that the system, however imperfect and in need of fine-tuning, ultimately worked as intended by the framers), we've got this process down pat, right? What good is a 237-page postmortem of the election -- written by a bunch of European technocrats who probably aren't favorably disposed to the United States in the first place -- going to do for us?

In fact, it probably won't have any discernable effect at all. The OSCE election report will, regardless of the eventual winner of the election, probably be lost in the cacophony of the election reporting results. It will be an A19 item in the New York Times and possibly a small feature story in the Christian Science Monitor. It'll be trotted out occasionally by members of European socialist governments to remind America that we're not so perfect as we think. Why participate in this charade at all?

Because there's a larger issue at stake. For a variety of reasons which began well before even the Clinton administration, America's credibility on the world stage is in the toilette. And when truly anti-democratic regimes are asked to submit to election monitoring, it doesn't take an career ambassdor to come up with a persuasive argument against it: just ask sweetly, "has the United States has ever had election monitors?" Because if the mighty US of A doesn't have to open itself up to criticism from without, why should anyone else? It's a hard question to answer, because the honest response would be, "we don't need our elections monitored because we've been practicing this for a long time and know what we're doing." But try telling that to Kim Jong Il, Mohammed Khatami, Pervez Musharraf, Alexander Lukashenka, or any of the long list of heads of state whose elections are crying out for a little monitoring.

It's a simple issue of double standards, and American foreign policy has never been internally consistent. If we're not prepared to embrace a little healthy and relatively well-intentioned criticism, how will we be able to press the cause of free elections elsewhere? And, frankly, how can we expect to start to close the credibility gap if we don't?

As another American recently said, "bring 'em on."

Marc posted this at 12.8.04 | Permalink

i'll take 'shameless self-promotion' for $500, alex

My latest article appears in the pages of Reason magazine this month. It's called "Chatroom Revolutionaries." Not my first choice of title, but not bad either. Ironically, one of the sites that I mentioned in the article, activistchat.com, has decided to make it a headline article.

Marc posted this at 6.8.04 | Permalink

those wacky rads

Those radical leftists sure are a creative lot. Take a look at this:

NORNCPOSTERS.ORG

One wonders how many copyright violations are on this page.

For an interesting depressed liberal viewpoint on why not to go to NYC to protest those BAAAAD Republicans, see RNC protests just another party for elite white kids?

Are you white, living in a suburb with parents who make sure you are never homeless? Have you spent as much money on trendy new clothing for the RNC as it would cost to fly a poor person to the protests? Is your trip to the RNC self-serving, or do you really care about the issues of poverty or homelessness? And how are these white people with money going to the RNC going to address the issues of poverty? Well, maybe this one time, you could put a homeless person first and give them your plane ticket to NYC!

Marc posted this at 3.8.04 | Permalink