Calling Juan Cole a "fierce critic of the world" made me laugh -- it should be "fierce critic of the war."

Great post as usual.

Amazing, it's "perfectly reasonable" to lie, be inaccurate, ignorant or misleading if you're John McCain.

Will someone please ask John McCain if Ken Pollack was correct in describing John McCain's specific false statements as "perfectly reasonable?"

I want to hear John McCain says it's "perfectly reasonable" not to be accurate or truthful.

Although there is a superficial balance to the Times story on McCain's "sloppiness" (as if his conflation of the varying sources of threat in Iraq with Al Queda, there is still evident bias. Just as one example, I would note that while Kenneth Pollack is simply identified as a "research director at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution," the very next paragraph of the Times story pointedly notes, in connection with Juan Cole's rebuttal of Pollack's position that Mr. Cole is "a fierce critic of the war." Shouldn't Mr. Pollock have been identified as a fierce proponent of both the war and the Surge?

Anybody who describes the Brooking Institute as 'neo-conservative' doesn't deserve the time of day.

Have you seen their national security-related publication list over the last five years? The only bigger waste of trees comes out of Heritage and the PNAC.

Please note that the NY Times identified Juan Cole as "a fierce critic of the war", but failed to identify Pollock as a supporter of the Bush war and policy. Oversight? Doubt it!

Sorry for cluttering up the thread.

What puzzles me most about McCain's constant invocation of "Al-Qaeda" isn't matched by an equal number of calls for Bin Laden's head.

Another oversight, or further evidence McCain can't lead the country?

- joojoos

- outlaws

- bads

- not us

- darkies

- anti-christ

- savages

- barbarians

- libruls

It's perfectly reasonable to conflate Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi insurgency because that makes it more likely the American public will support a war that otherwise has little justification.

That's what Pollack means. War is necessary for his public position, consequences be damned.

My choice of shorthand is to call warmongers, bigots, racists, homophobes, torturers, hypocrites, American Taliban evangelicals, and liars Republicans. It is so much easier than having to use critical thinking.

Wasn't it Wolfowitz who said that the reasons for the war they decided to use, terrorism and WMD, were chosen "because that's what we all agreed upon?" Several heads are apparently better than one when thinking up lies.

Using Al Queda as a catchall is nothing new; for years Bill O'Reilly has called Gitmo prisoners, torture victims, and everybody without an "R" after their name "Al Quedas." It seems to be another thing they all have agreed upon.

Low-level grunts both in the military and out have always dehumanized their perceived enemies with a "catch-all" term. Over the years we have had Charlie, chinks, gooks, wogs, nips, ragheads and whatever. Al Qaeda is unusual only because it is harder to say and type than any of the others.

Of course this phenomenon wasn't invented by anyone, but Bush and McCain use it pro-actively and retroactively to justify further military aggression. At the start of the Iraq war, I would bet that less than one in three Americans knew the difference between an Afghani and an Iraqi. Forget about the difference between Sunni or Shiite. To them they were all ragheads that needed to be cleaned out. Bush/Cheney hope to exploit the conservative yearning for simple "us vs. them" solutions once again to go into Iran, and McCain hopes to exploit it to get to the White House.

It does simplify. It's also an appalling over simplification. It offers just one enemy to defeat. It conflates all the schisms, factions, geography and history, thereby making it seem justified to hang in and pursue - for 100 years if necessary.

... [Al Qaeda as "catch-all"] is acceptable on the campaign trail, a place that "does not lend itself to long-winded explanations of what we really are facing ...

G_d forbid we allow the American people to know what we (and our troops) are really facing.

As I understand it - and I may be wrong, please correct me if so - but Juan Cole is the only American discussing this war who reads Arabic news accounts of the war in the original Arabic. Maybe Dr. Cole is just a man with a fierce appetite for the facts.

But if you read the Baghdad equivalents of the the NY Times, the NY Post and the Daily News, you'd feel fierce, too.

My choice of shorthand is to call warmongers, bigots, racists, homophobes, torturers, hypocrites, American Taliban evangelicals, and liars Republicans.

More accurate would be to refer to warmongering, bigoted, racist, homophobic, torturing, hypocritical, evangelical liars as neocons.

'Republican' may not carry the same negative connotations or properly convey the baggage or their barbarity. 'Neocon' does.

Glenn "Al Queda" Greenwald?

I was tremendously impressed with Leila Fadel, McClatchy's news bureau chief in Baghdad, on Bill Moyers last night. Video here, and I'll link my signature to it, as well:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04182008/watch.html

This is an old story. After 9/11, I remember a right wing talk radio host being told by a caller that the US could go anywhere by saying Bin Laden was there. And so it has been. What communism used to be, Bin Ladenism is now. (Of course the preferred term is Islamofacism. Just in case Bin Laden isn't really there.)

This is just another example of why American foreign relations and national security policy have been so utterly incoherent under Bush and the neocons.

I don't believe this is just PR/propaganda "shorthand" -- it's how these knuckleheads actually think.

Any critic of the Iraq war who's not a "fierce critic" isn't really a critic at all--consequently, "critic" or "well-informed critic" or some such would have been a better appellation for Juan Cole.

Speaking of good, accurate reporters, anyone who hasn't done so should check out Bill Moyers's interview with 26-year-old Leila Fadel of McClatchy on last night's Bill Moyers Journal. If any "experts"--or Republican presidential candidates--really wanted to know what's going on in Iraq, she and Cole make for good sources.

See http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html. It gives hope. Not all reporters are simple stenographers.