Can you give a couple of examples of radically new perspectives?

From Juan Cole's blog today.

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Beeman to NYT: Hyping Iran Threat in Times of Diplomacy

William O. Beeman of the University of Minnesota shared with IC this letter to the editor of the New York Times:

From: William O. Beeman

Sent: Wed 8/8/2007 3:22 PM

To: letters@nytimes.com

Subject: U.S. Says Bomb Suppled by Iran Kills Troops in Iraq

To the Editor:

Re: "U.S. Says Bomb Suppled by Iran Kills Troops in Iraq" by Michael R. Gordon, August 8, 2007

It is increasingly suspicious that every time the United States has begun a diplomatic initiative with Iran--the latest on August 6, some United States military official in Iraq comes forward to accuse Iran of supplying weapons to attack U.S. troops. Perhaps it is coincidence, but the reporter rendering these accusations for the public seems always to be Michael R. Gordon. These military reports and the Times reportage seem timed to undermine these diplomatic talks. Following the historic May 28 talks between Iran and the United States in Baghdad, the Iranian government called for a second round of talks. As negotiations for this second round were underway General Kevin Bergner provided a briefing on precisely the issue of the IED's covered in the August 8 article by Mr. Gordon. Mr. Gordon's last reportage of General Kevin J. Bergner's account of these Iranian attacks ("U.S. Ties Iran to Deadly Iraq Attack" July 2, 2007) was a textbook case in hype. Mr. Gordon significantly enhanced General Bergner's already specious and exaggerated statements to make the Iranian government appear even more culpable than the evidence in the press conference would warrant. Although Mr. Gordon's August 8 reporting on Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno's account of essentially the same phenomenon does acknowledge that critics of the Bush administration assert that there is no proof of Iranian state involvement in supplying the IED devices, the article is riddled with innuendo accusatory of Iran, such as identifying "Iranian-backed cells" as if they existed as verified definable entities, and they had been proved to have ties to Iran. Mr. Gordon's piece appears on page 1 of the Times above the fold (as did his July 2 piece) thus increasing the hype factor. The Times should save its partisanship for the editorial pages, and not conscience it in its reporting.

Sincerely,

William O. Beeman Professor and Chair Department of Anthropology University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN 55455

President, Middle East Section, American Anthropological Association"

is extremely intelligent and very well educated. He is also an extremist bigot -- the David Duke of the Likudnik intelligentsia.

In his press conference today, the Deciderator-in-Chief basically proved beyond doubt the accuracy of Glenn's central claim in "A Tragic Legacy": That Dubya has an absolutist, Manichean Weltanschauung....

If you don't read the book, just listen to the last sixty seconds of the press conference.

Cheers,

Digby sent me to David Rees

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/short-takes-by-digby-here-are-few-links.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-rees/cormac-ignatieffs-the-r_b_59363.html

who sent me to Ignatieff himself...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/magazine/05iraq-t.html?ref=magazine

Quite a luxury for Ignatieff that he can offer his mea culpa so safely.

His third paragraph:

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

and from near the end of his essay:

We might test judgment by asking, on the issue of Iraq, who best anticipated how events turned out. But many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.

The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn’t believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.

I'd like to know how he assigns people to the two groups he describes here. I was pretty sure that Iraq would be a debacle, but I doubt I fit into either category, even though most people who know me (and how I feel about politics) would probably say I am an ideologue. [sigh] Present circumstances almost demand it.

The reason I was pretty sure about how things would turn out, though, was simply that I had read enough about GWB's past to know that from those beginnings would would be lucky to carve out a successful presidency, much less successfully prosecute a war. To repeat, if more people had read Molly Ivins' first book on GWB's political history, she would not have had to write the second one, which was so much more depressing that I could not even finish it...

So, I guess by these standards, I must be a non-intellectual ideologue who was merely "lucky" in my guesses? What about the rest of you?