Letters to the Editor
Baldie McEagle
Published Letters: 992 Editor's Choice: 3
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Friedman's hydrography
[Read the article: Tom Friedman's latest declaration of war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Friedman's "three rivers of rage" strike me as fundamentally misleading. Is it not obvious that they are all the same river? Does he think all these angry Arabs don't know enough to link them all in an instant? Or that Arab/Middle East newspapers don't make the connections for them?
And did none of his Arab cabdrivers (or whoever they were) mention Israel itself and US support for it as a source of rage? They must have been on their best behavior when he interviewed them. Nothing about THAT in the Cairo newspapers, oh no.
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Thomas Friedman and the phallic gaze
[Read the article: Tom Friedman's latest declaration of war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The phallic gaze (and thus, by extension, the phallic eye, I guess, and maybe the Gallic eye too, for all I know) is a gaze of desire, that renders its object an object of desire or lust and no more than that. I'm sure a google of feminist theory will yield more than that.
But bamage's interpretation is also right---Friedman is looking for a country he can focus on and fantasize about fucking in half. He'll never do it, of course, but he'll go through many boxes of Kleenex formulating the necessary "serious" proposals. As usual.
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@Hamlet
[Read the article: Tom Friedman's latest declaration of war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Nice bit of Chesterton there. Isn't he great? I don't believe there's anything he didn't see for exactly what it was. And that quote was from LONG before the rest of Europe became "disillusioned" by WWI.
When do we get the Great Disillusionment that we surely have coming to us?
Scoot: You're really stretching for this one. Come back tomorrow.
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Dim Scooter
[Read the article: Tom Friedman's latest declaration of war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What sort of "leverage" did he think Friedman was talking about? Notes passed under the table at a state dinner?
And how does he think Friedman's declaration that "we're not going to war with Iran" makes him anti-war? Is Friedman speaking for the White House?
Or is he speaking only for Mr & Mrs Friedman?
Finally, Friedman's whole message is that we shouldn't NEED to go to war with Iran. We only need to scare the crap out of them.
What part of that do you all think didn't scooter understand?
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SAVAK arithmetic
[Read the article: Tom Friedman's latest declaration of war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]From the great Wiki:
At its peak, the organization [SAVAK] had as many as 60,000 agents serving in its ranks. It has been estimated that by the time the agency was finally dismantled in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution, as many as one third of all Iranian men had some sort of connection to SAVAK by way of being informants or actual agents.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his family left Iran and escaped harm, but hundreds of former members of the overthrown monarchy and military met their end in firing squads, with critics complaining of "secrecy, vagueness of the charges, the absence of defense lawyers or juries", or the opportunity of the accused "to defend themselves." In later years these were followed in larger numbers by the erstwhile revolutionary allies of Khomeini's movement -- Marxists and socialists, mostly university students -- who opposed the theocratic regime.
In the 1988 massacre of Iranian prisoners, following the People's Mujahedin of Iran operation Forough-e Javidan against the Islamic Republic, Khomeini issued an order to judicial officials to judge every Iranian political prisoner and kill those who would not repent anti-regime activities. Estimates of the number executed vary from 1,400 to 30,000.
This last figure appears to be a typo:
One anonymous ex-prisoner places the death toll in the `thousands.` Another eyewitness puts in between 5000 and 6000 - 1000 from the left and the rest from the Mojahedin. Yet another estimates it in the `thousands`, with Gohar Dasht [prison] alone having as many as 1500. A recent study using scattered information from the provinces places the figure at 12,000. Amnesty International estimates that the national total is more than 2500 and describes the vast majority of the victims as `prisoners of conscience` as they had not been charged with actual deeds or plans of deeds against the state.
It is estimated that most of the executed were either high school or college students or fresh graduates, and over 10% were women.
Is this what Spambot was referring to? If so, he was off by an order of magnitude or two. However, to be fair, SAVAK agents appear not to have been represented. They would have been killed or would have fled before 1988; this passage seems to indicate that there were no other massacres to compare with 1988. However, enough Iranians emigrated to have easily included all of SAVAK:
Many Shia Iranians have also left the country. While the revolution has made Iran more strict Islamically, an estimated "two to four million entrepreneurs, professionals, technicians, and skilled craftspeople (and their capital)" have emigrated to other countries.
Encarta:
The population of Iran was estimated at 65,397,521 in 2007. This figure is more than double the 1975 population of 33,379,000.
So up to 10 million men may have been forced to inform to SAVAK---a situation resembling that of East Germany. Out of these compromised but innocent people + the 60,000 SAVAK agents + purged leftists and including the initial executions + the later purges + the 1988 massacre + executions during the intervening years, the Revolution may have executed as many as 5,000-10,000 people, or .001% of informers or .0003 of all Iranian men.
A bloody history, to be sure. But keep in mind the country had been invaded by Iraq and had been at war for nearly 10 years, and suffered serious guerrilla attacks during that time. Iran's whole history since 1950 has been tragic, and it's largely the fault of US meddling. The US has been far more effective at killing innocent people in Iraq, with totals dead approaching 1 million and the displaced in the several millions.
I wonder what the Robot's point was anyway.
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Because it's irrelevant
[Read the article: Tom Friedman's latest declaration of war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn -- How about explaining why you failed to include the following quotation from Friedman's column:
"We’re not going to war with Iran, nor should we."
Are these the words of a war-mongerer?
Yes. It's a COLD WAR Friedman wants. Did you miss that?