The Shield of Achilles: Where do they find these "leading thinkers"?

"Death to America": Iranian military parade in Sep of last year (see bottom of this article for more details)

One reason I started this weblog was to counter misinformation in the media.

There is a article in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine, titled: "What America Must Do" (partially available online), in order to improve its reputation around the world. The article supposedly includes the "world’s leading thinkers", so I am finding it hard to understand how this guy, Reza Aslan, slipped in:

A few years ago, I was strolling through the Iranian city of Isfahan when I happened upon a group of teenagers sharing a picnic along the banks of the Zayandeh River. I sat with them for a cup of tea and a smoke from a water pipe perched in the middle of the circle. Catching my accented Persian, one of them asked where I lived.

“I live in America,” I replied.

The conversation suddenly came to a halt. A girl of 17 leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “What is it like to live in a theocratic state?”

That a young person living in the only country in the world in which the religious leaders are also the political authorities could believe, in all earnestness, that the United States has become a theocracy should be all the evidence Americans need that the socalled war on terror has corrupted America’s image abroad. From the moment U.S. President George W. Bush launched what he called “a crusade” against “evildoers,” there has been a growing sense, not just in the Muslim world but among even our closest allies, that U.S. foreign policy is being filtered through an unprecedented union of religious and political ideology.

So this misperception is President Bush's fault? Do we control the Iranian media or do the Mullahs? Somehow, I think the daily chants of "Death to America" in Iran contribute far more to the bad image the US suffers over there.

And how does he explain these statements by Iranian President Ahmadinejad in 2005?

that "The oppressive powers will disappear while the Iranian people will stay. Any power that is close to God will survive while the powers who are far from God will disappear like the pharaohs,"...

"Today, it is the United States, Britain and the Zionist regime which are doomed to disappear as they have moved far away from the teachings of God," he said in a speech in the western town of Javanroud.

"It is a divine promise."

Doesn't that sound like he's joining "religious and political ideology" just slightly more than President Bush is? His reference to the "pharaohs" here is also very intentional. The pharaoh of the Book of Exodus, who opposed Moses and refused God's commands, is one of the biggest symbols of the enemies of God (oOf course, you just can't miss the irony here that God's intention in that story was to free Israel and found their own nation - the same nation which Iran is now trying to destroy).

Incidentally, Mr. Aslan (bio here) who was born in Iran but immigrated to the United States, is another example of someone enjoying the freedoms of America, while using those same freedoms to attack the USA for its lack of freedom. It's a non-sequitor that only the fringe left could understand.

What kind of bothers me is that it's my job to actually defend &*$$#@!! people like this...

Additionally, in an online interview, discussing his article, he says:

Two days after September 11, the very first words that [President George W. Bush] used to talk about what we were going to do—unscripted and without any mediation from his advisors—was to refer to this war as a crusade. Immediately afterward, his advisors jumped all over themselves to say that’s not really what he meant. And since then, [Bush] has tried hard to not have that religiously polarizing rhetoric, though he told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in 2003 that God had told him to strike at al Qaeda.
...We are using the same rhetoric and the same religious rhetoric that bin Laden is using to promote his agenda.

Is he on drugs? So Bush accidentally lets slip the word "crusade" on one occasion, that is the same thing as Bin Laden's continuous and explicit calls for jihad? Additionally, the second claim, that Bush said "God had told him to strike at al Qaeda", is irresponsible. Not only was it denied by the White House, it was denied by Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, who was, according to Ha'aretz, the one who supposedly reported that quote in the first place! Even CommonDreams.org, one of the most Bush-hating sites on the Internet, was skeptical about it's authenticity.

About the photo above: The signs say in English: "Down with USA", "Down with Esrail" [sic], but in Arabic: "Death to America", "Death to Israel".

The photo was attributed to Hasan Sarbakhshian of the Associated Press. It was posted by Yahoo! News with over 1,000 recommendations, but was mysteriously pulled from their database.