Juan Cole - Must Read - "We Don't Want Your Stinking War"

[seaglass]

You need to scroll down a bit - it begins with Cole addressing Hitchens attack on him, it is extremely powerful.

Some background: Hitchens published a screed against Cole by taking private, unfinished remarks on a discussion board out of context - calling Cole an apologist for the Iranian president.

From Cole...

"What is really going on here is an old trick of the warmongers. Which is that you equate hurtful statements of your enemy with an actual military threat, and make a weak and vulnerable enemy look like a strong, menacing foe. Then no one can complain when you pounce on the enemy and reduce his country to flames and rubble."

...

"All the warmongers in Washington, including Hitchens, if he falls into that camp, should get this through their heads. Americans are not fighting any more wars in the Middle East against toothless third rate powers. So sit down and shut up."

http://www.juancole.com/

[IndyOp]

1. Thanks for posting this - I love Juan Cole!

On Hitchens: "Christopher Hitchens owes me a big apology. I belong to a private email discussion group... has a strict rule that messages appearing there will not be forwarded off the list. Hitchens somehow hacked into the site, or joined and lurked, or had a crony pass him things. And he has now made my private email messages the subject of an attack on me in Slate. ...he should behave like a journalist, not like a hired gun for the far Right, smearing hapless targets of his ire. That isn't journalism. For some reason it drives the Right absolutely crazy that I keep this little web log, and so they keep trotting out these clowns in amateurish sniping attacks." I write so much with which the Far Right disagrees so vehemently. I publish it here. Why is it that they keep having to invent quotations and put them in my mouth.

Juan's latest report: British and Italians are on their way out; Brits handing over control of 'their towns' to Muqtada al-Sadr; Western occupation of southern Iraq will be gone, probably by the end of the year; so all that is left is the US garrisons in Baghdad and the Sunni Arab heartland. The US-installed governor of Anbar province, in the Sunni Arab west, was almost killed by a huge bombing of his convoy on Tuesday.

One reason I listen to Majority Report on AAR is that they have Juan on every week or so to tell us what the he** is happening in the Middle East.

Finally: Hitchens needs the Limbaugh treatment: REHAB!

:kick:

[seaglass]

2. Unfortunately the signal for AAR sucks around where I live, I

don't know why - so I don't listen to it much. But Juan Cole is a must read for me, I wish more people would read him.

It is disappointing what Hitchens has become, there really was one point when I liked him but it was so long ago that I can't even remember why.

Didn't you think the statements with the pictures towards the end of the article were unbelievably powerful? It just broke my heart.

[acmejack]

3. Stream it!

http://play.rbn.com/?url=airam/airam/live/live.rm (for real player)

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Wow - Juan Cole "ain't gonna take it any more!"

That's the first time I've seen him step out of the mode of gathering news reports, and scholarly analysis, and into a call for demonstrations against the immoral government.

We are not going to see any more US troops come home in body bags at Dover for the sake of some Cheney affiliate grabbing the petroleum in Iran's Ahvaz fields.

We are not going to have another 15,000 wounded vets flood onto our streets with spine damange and brain damage.
...
We are not going to kill 200,000 Iranians with aerial bombardments of Tabriz, Isfahan, Qom, Kerman, Shiraz and Mashahd.
...
I call on university students across America to begin holding antiwar rallies. The only way you can have a war on Iran is to draft the young people. It is you who are on the line. Demonstrate! Demonstrate against the very hint of war! Demonstrate in front of the warmongering "institutes" in Washington, DC! Demonstrate to end the one we've already got!

Much more, with heart-breaking pictures (not for the squeamish), on his blog - here's a permanent link. This really is a must read, people.

[mom cat]

6. It is a quite powerful piece and indeed, a must read!

[DinahMoeHum]

5. He says Ahmadinejad is merely a figurehead, with no real authority

(snip)
...Ahmadinejad is a non-entity. The Iranian "president" is mostly powerless. The commander of the armed forces is the Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei. Worrying about Ahmadinejad's antics is like worrying that the US military will act on the orders of the secretary of the interior. Ahmadinejad cannot declare war on anyone, or mobilize a military. So it doesn't matter what speeches he gives.
(snip)
So sit down and shut up, American Enterprise Institute, and Hudson Institute, and Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and American Heritage Institute, and this institue and that institute, and cable "news", and government "spokesmen", and all the pundit-ferrets you pay millions to make business for the American military-industrial complex and Big Oil.

We don't give a rat's ass what Ahmadinejad thinks about European history or what pissant speech the little shit gives.
(snip)

:thumbsup:

[Norquist Nemesis]

9. This is precisely what most people don't get and Bush etal fails

express (or rather he's more likely using it to his advantage). A couple of weeks ago, the word of the day in the press conference was "Regime Regime Regime". It was a noticeable change in rhetoric. Regime.

They will readily put the Iranian President's public remarks front and center knowing people put him at the same level of government power as Bush. It's simply not true!

[gratuitous]

7. Must read, indeed

Cole hands the drink-soaked, former Trotskyist popinjay his head on a silver charger, with an apple stuffed in the mouth. Hitchens is a dishonest little shit coasting through his declining years as alcohol claims more and more of his remaining brain cells.

[RedEarth]

8. Mercy....Juan is lettin it fly......

[warrens]

10. Why is Slate even employing Hitchens?

The old alky has totally lost his mind. It was gone a long time ago; his attack on Mother Theresa in the early 90s was just so far off the mark, it was laughable. Evidently, her crimes were that a lot of her patients died and that she stayed at nice hotels while fundraising. A ten-page diatribe was like hunting mosquitos with a cannon.

Juan is making one mistake, though. Hitchens is not a journalist. He's basically an uninformed, opinionated asshole who spews at whatever caught his attention this week.