An interesting talk by one of today’s leading experts on the Middle East. The talk was given Friday at the New America Foundation. Based on Cole’s new book, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East.
PS: Anyone know how they got YouTube to run 71 minutes in a single video clip?
This weekend on Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo’s Behind the Headlines column “Home Front ‘Surge’: War Party’s Ad Campaign Will Boomerang,” concerns the Israel Lobby’s pushing of $15 million worth of propaganda ads to run on TV, shaming the Democrats for their supposedly weak Stay in Iraq Forever policy.
Is this ‘too little, too late’ for the War Party? Do the American people’s opinion’s even count?
Giuliani is Crazy, Unqualified
Doug Bandow, policy analyst and author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire, discusses the dangerous vision of Rudy “I was there that day” Giuliani as described in his recent Foreign Affairs article.
MP3 here. (20:51)
Doug Bandow is a Washington-based political writer and policy analyst and a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. He served as a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and as a senior policy analyst in the 1980 Reagan for President campaign.
He has been widely published in leading newspapers and periodicals and has appeared on numerous radio and television shows. He has written and edited several books, including Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire (Xulon Press), The Korean Conundrum: America’s Troubled Relations with North and South Korea (Palgrave/Macmillan, coauthor), Tripwire: Korea and U.S. Foreign Policy in a Changed World (Cato), Perpetuating Poverty: The World Bank, the IMF, and the Developing World (Cato, coeditor), and Military Manpower and Human Resources (National Defense University). His latest book is Foreign Follies (Xulon Press).
Government Persecutes Detroit 4 Defense Witness
Corbett Edge O’Meara, a defense attorney from Detroit, discusses the horrendous persecution of his client, Omar Shishani, for testifying for the defense in the bogus case of the “Detroit Sleeper Cell.”
MP3 here. (21:54)
Corbett Edge O’Meara is an attorney in Detroit.
I Was a CIA Assassin
Roland Haas, author of Enter the Past Tense: My Secret Life as a CIA Assassin, explains his murder of people for the State and how it nearly ruined his life too.
MP3 here. (38:50)
Roland Haas is a former CIA operative.
How’s that for timeliness?
This morning all the major media outlets were talking up Bush’s “distancing” himself from Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, while averring that he didn’t go as far as Senator Carl Levin, who openly called for the Iraqi sock-puppet’s replacement. Except the sock puppet is switching to another hand.
No sooner had U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, said the Maliki government’s performance was “extremely disappointing,” then Bush, pointedly refusing to endorse the Iraqi Prime Minister, expressed “a certain level of frustration with the leadership.” Â
Maliki, having just returned from a trip to Tehran, where he held hands with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is now in Syria, where he was quoted as saying:
“The Iraqi government was elected by the Iraqi people. Maybe this person who made a statement yesterday is upset by the nature of our visit to Syria. These statements do not concern us a lot. We will find many around the world who will support us in our endeavour.”
This is bound to give Maliki added street cred, and, ironically, help dispel his image as a weak leader. Or could that have been the idea all along?
I doubt it. Such an explanation is too clever by a bit more than half — after all, we’re talking about the US government here — and yet the end result is that this will strengthen Maliki’s beleaguered government, and perhaps even prevent it from losing its parliamentary majority.
As I said in my Monday column, it’s all about what Seymour Hersh calls “the redirection.” The new enemy is Iran, and that means the Shi’ite government we installed in power is now being treated as an Iranian proxy — or, at least, an ally of Tehran. Levin’s call for Maliki’s ouster, apparently on behalf of the Allawi lobby in Washington, is congruent with Hillary Clinton’s recent statement endorsing the alliance with Sunni insurgents in Anbar and Diyala provinces, and averring that “We have to be preparing to fight the new war.”
Ah yes, the new war. That’s what the people voted for in the last congressional elections — or is my memory playing tricks on me?
At any rate, I’ve blogged on this topic over at Taki’s Top Drawer, where an energetic discussion is taking place in the comments. Go on over there and join in the conversation.
