The Shield of Achilles: Cole's spin on Basra spinning out of control

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Cole's spin on Basra spinning out of control

I'm very busy these days with school and several other issues, but I do have a minute to respond to dangerous nonsense such as this:

John McCain said he was surprised that Nuri al-Maliki would abruptly launch an operation against Basra. It seems to me that there are only two possibilities here.

Either McCain really did not know and did not anticipate the trouble in Basra, in which case he does not know much about Iraq and isn't better qualified to deal with it than anyone else.

Or, he and Cheney helped put al-Maliki up to the whole thing while he was there, and now is petrified that someone will hang the fiasco around his neck.

Essentially this is partisan political sniping disguised as lofty commentary. Hypocritically, Professor Cole chides McCain for not anticipating the latest Mahdi uprising, yet he himself didn't anticipate it either, even though he scrutinizes Middle East events on a regular basis, and, unlike McCain, markets himself as an expert on Middle Eastern affairs. Equally hypocritical but not surprisingly, Prof Cole fails to scold Barack Obama over the same thing (Cole has all but admitted his absolute adoration of the candidate).

But while the former statement is merely deceptive, the latter is inexcusable: there is absolutely zero proof of such an outlandish conspiracy theory. Again not surprisingly, Cole never tacks on such conspiracy theories to America's enemies, or to candidates that he favors.

He also writes a piece about the Basra uprising in Salon.com, whose hyper-leftism suits him well. Generally, I agree with most of the article, but it's interesting how he spins the uprising (like everything else) as a massive failure for Bush and Maliki, without even considering it as a failure of Sadr, who once again lost militia members, didn't make any long term gains, alienated the very government that he helped put in office, and set stability and democracy in the country several more steps back (see previous post on Sadr here).

Strange how people see only what they want to see... Yes, I realize I'm guilty of that sometimes too, but unlike Prof. Cole, I realize this and take active steps to correct it.

But I suppose he's not going to change, because he's happy with the status quo.

Bonus: One more thing to help illustrate the professor's character - I would post a letter on his blog pointing out the mistakes above, but the last two times I did that on a post of his where he was defending Iranian President Ahmadinejad's "peaceful" intentions, he blocked the comment from his site. It wasn't a mistake, because I tried to post it again with the same result. Fortunately I saved a copy. Here it is below:

Prof Cole,

You are very selective in your quotes here and are absolutely wrong about Ahmadinejad. When you consider the full context, Ahmadinejad's quote to "wipe Israel off the map" was accurate. See here if you don't believe me.

Moreover, Iran is STILL saying "wiped off the map". You can't claim they are being "mistranslated" because they are saying it in English! See here.

And what about this statement:
"God willing, in the near future we will witness the destruction of the corrupt occupier regime"

It's very hard to see this as just a peaceful call for "regime change" since the context was during his praise for Hizbollah's war with Israel in Lebanon last year.

Which leads me to another point. Why don't you also accuse Ahmadinejad of lying? In your quotes here he says "Iran has not attacked anybody" and "is not a threat to anybody". But somehow he is forgetting Iran's training and arming of terrorist organizations like Hizbollah, Iran's support of terrorist militias in Iraq, Iran's storming the US embassy in 1979, firing RPGs at passing ships in the Gulf in the 1980s, etc etc.