Regardless of whether or not the Bush administration will succeed in its plan to introduce democracy into Iraq through an armed invasion and years of chaotic violence, it now appears that the administration has succeeded in bringing to Iraq something the country has had very little of since the British were kicked out many long decades ago: white supremacists. As the New York Times reports this morning:
“We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad,” the [Southern Poverty Law Center] quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. “That's a problem.”
[…]
The report said that neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance, whose founder, William Pierce, wrote “The Turner Diaries,” the novel that was the inspiration and blueprint for Timothy J. McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, sought to enroll followers in the Army to get training for a race war.
The groups are being abetted, the report said, by pressure on recruiters, particularly for the Army, to meet quotas that are more difficult to reach because of the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq.
The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, “Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members.”
It's just another legacy of this war that will be plaguing us long after George W. Bush has left the White House to spend his days golfing, biking and playing video games.
