Counting on Ignorance

Once again, a top Bush Administration official is counting on the average American’s ignorance of recent history to make an assertion that would be laughable were it not such a direct affront to the truth. While visiting a “secret” US military facility in Tajikistan, Donald Rumsfeld blamed the resurgence of Afghan opium production on the Taliban:

“”Anytime there is that much money floating around and you have people like the Taliban, it gives them an opportunity to fund their efforts in various ways,” said the Secretary of Defense.

Of course, the Taliban government ended opium cultivation in Afghanistan in 2000, at the request of the US and UN and at the cost of impoverishing countless Afghan farmers. As those who read my reports from the war zone in 2001 know, it was the return of the Northern Alliance government–which led to the current U.S.-backed Karzai puppet regime–that prompted the current spike in drug production and smuggling across Central Asia.

Told You So

Over and over.

Excerpts:

It’s not as if we don’t have a history. When the paras moved into Camp Price just outside Gereshk in May and their commander had his first meeting with local officials, it took the Afghans just 10 minutes to bring up the battle of Maiwand. One of the worst defeats ever suffered by the British Army in which more than 1,000 men were slaughtered by the side of the Helmand River, the battle may have happened in 1880 but Afghans in Helmand talk about it as if it were yesterday and all claim that their forefathers were there.

If any further reminder were needed that one gets involved in Afghanistan at one’s peril, the Kabul headquarters of the Nato-led peacekeeping force is on the site of the old British cantonment. Its entire strength fled from here in January 1842 after a tribal revolt against the British-imposed ruler.

Of the 16,000 soldiers, wives, children and camp followers who left, only one got away; the rest were massacred or taken prisoner by Ghilzai tribesmen. Only Dr William Brydon was deliberately left alive to tell the tale and warn people back home of the consequences of getting involved in Afghanistan.

In a country that has ended up as a graveyard for so many thousands of British soldiers, why don’t we learn from history?

This time the politicians tell us that we have gone to make peace, not war — to “secure the area so that development can take place and extend the reach of the Karzai government”. But we are woefully underequipped for either: already six British soldiers have lost their lives within 24 days, victims once more of the Ghilzai Pashtuns.

Last month saw 53 “TICs” — troops in contact, in other words under Taliban attack — and last week there were two nights during which all but one of the British bases and outposts in Helmand came under attack.

How did it all go so wrong? Why does a senior British military officer talk despairingly of “military and developmental anarchy”?

AFGHANISTAN was supposed to be the success story.

Sneak Peak at This Week’s Column

Here’s the first and last paragraph of this week’s column, which is scheduled to go online tonight.

GATES AND BUFFETT: 1000 TIMES WORSE THAN KEN LAY
Why Enron Chief Was Better Than “Philanthropists”
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Ken Lay–all thieves. Compared to the world’s two richest men, however, Lay was small potatoes. So why are we praising them, and kicking Lay while he’s down–six feet down?
[…]Consider a burglar who boosts your TV and then, thinking better of it, donates it to an orphanage. His act of generosity beats the alternative–keeping it for himself. But you’d probably prefer that he’d returned it to you, or better yet, never stolen it at all.

Signs I’m Doing Something Right

One of my cartoons is on the front page of Slate today.

And right-wing ersatz White House reporter/outed gay prostitute cum “Voice of the New Media” Jeff Gannon took a swing at me. With enemies like that, who needs friends?

Available for the First Time Online

I am frequently requested for digital versions of my 1995 essay for Might Magazine entitled “Quit Your Job, Work is a Sham.” Heretofore this seminal bit of Generation X arcana had existed only in print in two books, both out of print: my 1998 book REVENGE OF THE LATCHKEY KIDS and a Might anthology entitled “Shiny Adidas Trackshoes and the Death of Camp.” (Dave Eggers has always had trouble coming up with good titles.)

Now thanks to an obsessive blogger’s efforts at transcription, there’s an online version. For the record, Plant Seeds’ efforts are a flagrant copyright violation. Also for the record, I own the copyright and I hereby authorize this particular version because it’s so cool.

There are some typos and a lot of punctuation errors but in deference to the huge demand for this piece, I’m pointing you to it nevertheless.

Blind Auction

Time to try something new: the blindest of blind auctions. Up for bids: something that I assure you is very, very tasty: the complete original artwork, comprising 99 full comic pages, of the five graphic novellas in my forthcoming 304-page blockbuster SILK ROAD TO RUIN: IS CENTRAL ASIA THE NEW MIDDLE EAST? My publisher, not the flattering type, calls it the best work of my career.

Not only have I never done this before, I have never before sold a single page from any of my graphic novel format comics. As collectors of comic art know, complete collections of an entire book are almost NEVER sold off by cartoonists.

What, you wanna see the goods? It’s a BLIND auction, silly. Gotta have faith!

OK, so here are the terms:

Minimum Bid for 99 pages of comic art from SILK ROAD TO RUIN: $4,500

(My price for individual cartoons is normally $500 each.)

How to Bid: Send e-mail to chet@rall.com. Highest bid wins. All bids kept private.

Offer Expires: July 22, 2006 (a few days before the book hits stores)

Winning bidder required to pay immediately upon notification.

Minimum bid goes to $10,000 if I do this after July 22, 2006.

Winning buyer is required to cooperate with museums and galleries wishing to borrow artwork for exhibitions.

Copyrights remain with me.

My apologies to people who love my work but can’t afford this admittedly expensive offer. Tasty Ted Rall ephemera at affordable goods to follow at some point in the future.

Publisher’s Weekly, or more precisely Publisher’s Weekly Comics Week, has published an interview with me about my upcoming book SILK ROAD TO RUIN: IS CENTRAL ASIA THE NEW MIDDLE EAST? (NBM Publishing, 304 pp., $22.95 Hardback, August 2006).

Some highlights:

Ted Rall’s Central Asian Adventure
By Sarah Feightner

Syndicated cartoonist and columnist Ted Rall has made a career out of a take-no-prisoners brand of political satire, taking shots from the extreme left wing at such controversial targets as the 9/11 widows and Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book legend Art Spiegelman. With his new book, Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?, coming in August from NBM, Rall hopes to convince readers to care about everyday life and politics in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and a handful of former Soviet republics that the average U.S. citizen probably couldn’t find on a map.

“This will either be a disaster, or the smartest thing I’ve ever done,” Rall says with a grin.

Four years in the making and launching with a 10,000-copy hardcover first printing, this new work of comics nonfiction picks up where his acclaimed 2002 war memoir To Afghanistan and Back (NBM) left off, mixing Rall’s political commentary with a comic travelogue pieced together from numerous trips to the region between 1999 and 2002. Silk Road to Ruin is an eye-opening and unexpectedly funny introduction to Central Asia. Each section explores the political and cultural landscape of one of “The Stans,” as Rall flies, drives or bribes his way across the border. Highlights include a tour of Third World cuisine, oil pipeline politics and the ultraviolent regional sport buzkashii—”the bloodiest and most anarchic sport currently played by the human race”—in which men on horseback duke it out, sometimes to the death, over the body of a dead goat.

“It’s very much the book that I wanted to write instead of To Afghanistan and Back,” says Rall. “I wanted to show that this war in Afghanistan was part of a much bigger thing that 9/11 triggered but really wasn’t the cause of it.”

[…]

While there may be more qualified scholars, better artists and more balanced political commentators out there than Rall, no one else has put together an introduction to Central Asia with as much accessibility, humor and guts as Silk Road to Ruin.

And it’s hard to match Rall’s enthusiasm for the subject. “I want to popularize Central Asia,” he says. “I want to do for Central Asia what Julia Child did for cooking.”

Booklist Reviews ATTITUDE 3

The influential book publishing industry magazine BOOKLIST has reviewed ATTITUDE 3: THE NEW SUBVERSIVE ONLINE CARTOONISTS:

Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists. Ed. by Ted Rall. Aug. 2006. 128p. illus. NBM, paper, $13.95 (1-56163-465-4). 741.5.
The third set of Rall’s profiles of cartoonists he dubs subversive focuses on artists plying their trade online. Mostly unable to break into alternative weeklies, these new cartoonists use the Internet as their venue. A few get paid for simultaneous print appearances, but most self-publish, which allows them the freedom to be more radical than their dead-tree counterparts. Steven L. Cloud’s webcomics consist solely of a dialogue between a head on a stick and a blank-faced snake. As Rall aptly notes, the visual style of Eric Millikin’s Fetus-X “crosses Edvard Munch with an incipient victim of high school suicide.” Unfortunately, lack of editorial intermediation permits drawing styles including the primitive to the downright crude. The technology doesn’t even require real drawing ability. Several of the represented cartoonists rely on digital cutting and pasting, and Michael Zole’s strips just show two quarter-circles (“1” and “2”) conversing. But the standouts*Mark Fiore’s flash-animated political cartoons and Nicholas Gurewitch’s perversely gentle Perry Bible Fellowship*are unique and personal. **Gordon Flagg

Pick up this essential guide to some of the coolest new cartoonists around at your local bookstore or online.

Muslims 85% More Moral Than Western Leaders

Nearly five years after 9/11, add Great Britain to the list of Western Countries That Still Don’t Get It. Buried amid the pile of usual handwringing over “homegrown” Muslim terrorists in today’s New York Times is this:

An opinion survey published Tuesday in The Times of London, for instance, said 13 percent of British Muslims believed that the bombers should be viewed as “martyrs” and that 7 percent felt suicide attacks on civilians were justifiable.

Another recent survey by the Washington-based Pew Global Attitudes Project found that 15 percent of British Muslims believed violence against civilian targets could “sometimes” be justified.

We’re supposed to be shocked, right? All I could think about, after I read the above, was how shockingly low those numbers really are. Compare these two factoids:

First: 7 to 15 percent of British Muslims think it’s OK to murder civilians

Second: 100 percent of British prime ministers and American presidents think it’s OK to murder civilians

Why isn’t there an analogous article about that?

Mind Over Food Matter

In the course of doing research for my next trip to Central Asia, I came across this review, complete with photos, of the food served on Tajikistan Airlines. (Apparently this site reviews food on other carriers as well.) You hardly need my testimony to take issue with the rather generous assessment of these, um, “meals.” Just look at the photos!

My favorite quote: “Very not bad for an economy class.”

Second best: “Much better than expected, for a short flight over the mountains on a little 30 seat plane. Nicely done, Tajikistan Airlines!”

Compared to what?