Desolation Row
The New York Times’s Iraq symposium is filled with neocons; disgraced administration stooges; fake liberals; non-liberal members of the reality-based community like Paul Eaton and Anthony Cordesman and Nate Fick; and Anne-Marie Slaughter. It actually publishes this self-parodic aside from Richard Perle:
When administration officials and members of Congress, with their diplomatic, intelligence and political advisers — whose knowledge of Iraq is often recent, shallow and wrong…
I have too much dignity to complete this joke.
Seriously, the Times couldn’t have asked Juan Cole, Marc Lynch, Nir Rosen, Paul Pillar, John Ikenberry, Riverbend, Trita Parsi, Chris Hedges, David Rieff — you get the idea. Over at Digby’s place, Tristero writes,
I am left wondering where are those who were right all along, who watched in shocked disgust as Bush vogued on that carrier in his codpiece, because even then, they knew nothing had been accomplished except the start of the worst foreign policy debacle in living memory (and that includes, yes, Vietnam) - where are the experts?
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May 4th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
This is an outrage. By my count, 5 of the 9 are war whores or incompetent or both. We should all write to Mr. Hoyt, the Public Editor, and express our disapproval.
May 5th, 2008 at 9:57 am
It is the same list of contributors as that useless five year retrospective they did a few months back, except they swapped out Robert Kagan for Fred. These retrospectives are too short to be informative and the panel is too biased to be useful. I don’t understand why it would be so hard to get two legitimate experts (Anthony Cordesman on the right & Juan Cole on the left, say) to do serious pieces instead of three tiny paragraphs that amount to rhetoric.
May 5th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
i clicked through to see what perle’s suggestion was and i had to laugh. he thinks we should stop telling the iraqis what they should be doing. i wonder where he was five years ago when all the bremer’s cpa did was work on projects that told iraqis how to do things, like setting up a stock market or rewriting the traffic laws. today it turns out that even bernie kerik was in on the fun:
Today, in the New York Daily News, Ricardo Sanchez discusses Rudy Giuliani’s mobbed-up pal and former police chief Bernie Kerik, who was inexplicably put in charge of training the Iraqi police in May 2003: “I would be hard-pressed to identify a major national-level success that his organization accomplished in that time,” Sanchez told The News….”His whole contribution was a waste of time and effort.”
….Sanchez said Kerik focused more on “conducting raids and liberating prostitutes” than training the Iraqis.
“They’d get tips and they’d go and actually raid a whorehouse,” Sanchez told The News.