16 September 2001
Uzbekistan
In his interview with Tim Russert, Dick Cheney just mentioned an Uzbeki group with ties to Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. I just finished some analysis on Uzbekistan, as I noted a few days ago. The organization he is referring to is the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (UMI), a group that has emerged from its 1998 founding to pose a significant threat to the governing regime in Uzbekistan, which is altogether chilling given that this has happened so rapidly DESPITE President Karimov's draconian, repressive police state. The shadowy group is headed by a charismatic, 32 year-old named Juma Namangani, who, interestingly enough, served as a SOVIET conscript in the war AGAINST Afghanistan.
That last element, of course, doesn't support the simplistic anarcho-libertarian (not to mention anti-interventionist Left) conventional wisdom that US meddling in the world (whether Central Eurasia or the Near East) is the root cause of radical Islamic fundamentalist agitation. But then again, most of those people couldn't even pass a map test on the countries of Central Eurasia (probably not even on the Near East), so it's difficult to take their unsystematic, uninformed ramblings about international politics or foreign policy very seriously.
[Posted @ 10:22 AM CST]
