More violence in Uzbekistan
The US has offered to help Uzbekistan probe the attacks which have killed at least 42 people in the last three days.
American Secretary of State Colin Powell made the offer in a telephone call to his Uzbek counterpart.
I don't like people dying in attacks by militants just as much as the rest of you, but the reaction from the Bush administration is simply appalling. Uzbekistan's government holds 6000 political prisoners captive, a massive human rights violation in and of itself before factoring in the torture that many of those people go through, yet Colin, nor any of the other assholes from this administration, will say peep about this. But the minute there's violence, probably due to a repressive government run by dictator, excuse me, Uzbek president Islam Abdughanievich Karimov, we rush to his aid. How despicable. How absolutely fucking hypocritical that we support a ruthless dictator like Karimov when Bush invades Iraq and tries telling the world that he did it to remove a ruthless dictator.
And for anybody who's about to say that Karimov doesn't compare to Saddam, shut up. Both are guilty of massive human rights violations, and I remind you that we also supported Saddam back when he was committing crimes on the "small" scale that Karimov is currently guilty of. Both are ruthless dictators, but yet we fully support one.
To understand Uzbekistan more and why we support them, I highly suggest reading this article two or three times. You'll find out stuff like this:
Karimov's American supporters – yes, incredibly, he has them! – have been singing his praises for months, the most vocal being ex-leftist Stephen Schwartz, fired from the Voice of America for his nutty views, formerly with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and now, seemingly, a full-time publicist for one of the most un-democratic and flamboyantly repugnant regimes in the world. In his new role as attorney for the Karimov regime, Schwartz writes:
"Since September 11, the United States no longer accepts the claim that the free exercise of terrorist agitation, incitement, and organization outweighs the benefits of legal sanction. Here, the "fallacy of prior restraint" has been replaced by a reliance on the doctrines of "probable cause" and "preemption." That is, extremist rhetoric provides sufficient probable cause to take preemptive action to prevent bloodshed."
Karimov is justified in cracking down on Hizb-ut-Tahrir, interrogating and jailing Muslims who grow beards or wear the veil, closing mosques, and outlawing opposition political parties, because, as The Schwartz puts it,
"By their radicalism, groups like HT that do not presently carry out acts of violence nonetheless prepare an environment conducive to violence."
If the neocons can't quite yet implement this new principle of intellectual "prior restraint" in the U.S., Schwartz and his fellow neo-authoritarians are glad to see it being given a dry run in Uzbekistan. For the author of The Two Faces of Islam, a book that posits Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist sect as the epicenter of world evil, Uzbekistan, which bans all expressions of Wahhabism, is a kind of utopia. He has recently traveled there and now regales his readers with tales of Karimov's Orwellian domain as an 'aspiring democracy," a "transitional" society, and, anyway, he grandly announces, "Uzbekistan cannot afford to assure liberty for the enemies of liberty." Human rights advocates who criticize the modern-day Tamerlane are "naïve," says Schwartz: "In the struggle to liberate Islam from the grip of the Wahhabi-Saudi mafia, Karimov should have our backing."
He wants us to back this, and this, and this – not just with rhetoric, but with American tax dollars There is only one possible response to such a moral obscenity: Ugh!
Did I mention that the US plans on putting military bases in Uzbekistan, and Big Oil also has an interest in keeping friendly relations with murderous dictators who do our bidding? You really need to read the whole article and spend some quality time with the links it provides. Our support for Uzbekistan invalidates any moral reason Bush can muster for invading Iraq, but as you've already guessed, Bush can hardly be bothered to give a shit about the welfare of people within our borders or beyond.
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