Wednesday, August 03, 2005



Must read

Juan Cole: Fisking the "War on Terror".

Posted by Idiot/Savant at 8/03/2005 03:47:00 PM

8 comments:

http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000894.html

 Posted by Anonymous : 8/03/2005 11:08:00 PM

Well - I think that Michael Totten's photographs summarise the situation far more than Mr Cole's propaganda ever could. I guess the moral of that pitiful little rant is "everything that is wrong with the Middle East should be laid at the door of America".
Prop dictators up - bad. Throw dictators out - bad. Ignore dictators - bad. And as for the Israel rant - I seem to remember Yasser Arafat being offered a Palestinian State not long ago, with Jerusalem - also a holy city to those dastardly Jews - being shared. Now, what did the old fascist do with all those millions given by the West to aid his people?

These sorts of anti-Imperialist rants belong in Pravda or the North Korean Press agency's releases. Bah.

 Posted by Anonymous : 8/04/2005 06:20:00 AM

Adrienne - did you know that a good sign an individual has introjected someone else's ideas (ie been 'brainwashed'), rather than coming to their own conclusions, is that they become irrationally angry when those ideas are confronted/challenged?

I observe that any time a narrative is presented that challenges the fable of Uncle Sam being other than a benignly motivated force for good in a nasty world, you immediately begin to froth.

You might want to look at that.

 Posted by Anonymous : 8/04/2005 10:38:00 AM

No, that'd be the Juan Cole who, as a professor of middle-east studies, with a thorough comprehension of middle-eastern history and who speaks fluent Arabic, correctly and accurately predicted the outcome of the US-led invasion.
In - it might be observed - startling contrast to the political planners of the operation.
Who also spends a huge amount of his personal time reading middle-eastern media to analyse and interpret political events and manoeuvrings for a wide readership. In stark contrast - it might be observed - to the .1-dimensional analysis of the MSM pundits.

Now, to science, the test of an accurate model is the ability to correctly predict future events.

I don't agree with everything he says, but he has probably more demonstrated credibility on the middle east than almost anyone on the planet.

Smear by association has no place here - stick to refuting his ideas.

 Posted by Anonymous : 8/04/2005 01:38:00 PM

Huskynut - you obviously don't follow many postings. Does this nasty little predilection to actually challange left-wing dogma make me 'brainwashed'? Gee - next thing, I'll be carted off to one of those Soviet style psych hospitals to cure this dangerous malady, this 'irrational' behaviour that so discomforts your sense of right.

However, seeing you're drawing the graph of standard deviations as to what constitutes 'irrationality' here, perhaps you could tell me what constitutes 'normalacy' for those like yourself. How should one deal with brutality and oppression? Ignore it like Europe did in the Balkans or France did in Rwanada? Huff and puff about sanctions, as has been done with Sudan? Is military intervention acceptable in sovereign nations such as the above or not? And if it is in the case of Rwanda, why is it not in Afghanistan or Iraq - both perpetrators of countless atrocities against their citizens?

I'll leave you with my dear friend Christopher Hitchens talking about Bosnia:

The European Union utterly failed Bosnia, which was in its very own "back yard." So did the United Nations. So did the Clinton-Gore administration, for as long as it regarded Milosevic as "containable" by the use of sanctions. Bosnia did not cease to be a killing field, and Serbia did not cease to be an aggressive dictatorship until the United States armed forces took a hand. The neoconservatives, to their great honor, mostly supported an effort to prevent genocide being inflicted on Muslims: an enterprise in which Israeli interests were not involved. Many liberal and socialist humanitarians took the same view. The argument about intervention and force changed forever as a result, except that many people did not notice. Just go and look up what the leaders of today's "anti-war" movement were saying then … too many civilian casualties (of all things!); the threat of a Vietnam-style "quagmire"; the lasting enmity of the Christian Orthodox world; above all the risk of a "longer war."

Exactly.

 Posted by Anonymous : 8/04/2005 03:17:00 PM

*heh heh*.. I really must give up trying to respond to blogs while working a day job.. both suffer.

Adrienne, if I'd been more diplomatic, I would've said - if one gives up the base assumption that the US is operating from a base of noble ideals (ie one accepts that it is no different than any of the other great powers of history), then one may easily come to very different conculsions about it's motives and actions.
Unfortunately there is a great mass of media which promotes the moral rectitude of the US, and it's an unpopular view to suggest that underneath the rhetoric, there's just the same power-based politics going on their as everywhere else.
I think it's that congitive dissonance and hypocrisy which causes the left to focus on the wrongdoings of the US.. it's not that they're any worse than other powers, it's just they've become not particularly better. And though China might proclaim their selflessness and virtues, it's not like many in the West actually believe them.. the regimes faults tend to be well-catalogued and aired.
*Of course* the US has done great and useful things in the past, and we should acknowledge them, just as we must also judge today's actions by today, not by any triumphs of the past.
There is simply no getting around the fact that Dubya et al have utterly squandered the tremendous reserves of goodwill the US had accumulated over decades, and that goodwill and trust is not ever going to be reaccumulated while the arrogant behaviour continues, and that it is something the world at large (and the 'left' in general) are not actually to blame for this state of affairs.

 Posted by Anonymous : 8/04/2005 05:25:00 PM

> it's an unpopular view to suggest that underneath the rhetoric, there's just the same power-based politics going on their as everywhere else.

I dont think so - everyone knows the US considers its own interests to be paramount - it just also considers others interests rather more than most other countries. these moral judgements are all relitive to your expectations anyway.

> and trust is not ever going to be reaccumulated while the arrogant behaviour continues

It will take longer to change the left's oppinion of hte USA that it will take for it to stop mattering. So really the US has no incentive to listen to you at all.

 Posted by Genius : 8/04/2005 08:14:00 PM

Either way, any human could feel the sick grief of that mother has she touched her dead baby. The pain of looking at that photo was stomach clenching.

 Posted by Muerk : 8/05/2005 01:45:00 AM

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