Apologizing for Ahmadinejad
"Assume that the Iranians are within measurable distance of nuclear status. Appearances sometimes to the contrary, they are not mad—or not clinically insane in the way that Saddam Hussein was and Kim Jong-il is. The recent fuss about the obliteration of Israel is largely bullshit: Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for this has been intoned pedantically and routinely ever since he first uttered it, and it only got attention this year because of the new phenomenon of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the scrofulous engineer who acts the part of civilian president for his clerical bosses. These people (who once bought weapons from Israel via Oliver North in order to fight Saddam Hussein) are cynical and corrupt. They know as well as you do what would happen if they tried to nuke Israel or the United States. They want the bomb as insurance against invasion and as a weapon of strategic ambiguity to shore up their position in the region."
-Christopher Hitchens
Send Weldon Berger money, and read him on Cole/Hitchens. Nails it.
Money paragraph:
' Cole, on the other hand, has written that “I personally despise everything Ahmadinejad stands for” (April 23, 2006, published May 2); that Ahmadinejad “has been particularly stupid in his pronouncements on Israel” (December 30, 2005); that Ahmadinejad “stole the Iranian election” (October 27, 2005); that Ahmadinejad’s remarks on the Holocaust reflect a “wilfull ignorance on a Himalayan scale” (January 4, 2006); that “Ahmadinejad is a very bad character, with a long history of essentially fascist activity in suppressing points of view other than those of the hardline Khomeinists” (June 18, 2005).
So let’s review our apologist scorecard. Hitchens on Ahmadinejad: “scrofulous.” Cole on Ahmadinejad: “despicable, ignorant, thieving, stupid, fascist.” The one point on which they agree, or did as recently as March of this year when Hitchens indicted Ahmadinejad for lymphatic excess, is that Ahmadinejad and Iran pose no serious threat to Israel or the US, and that a US attack on Iran would be at least stupid and probably disastrous. '
posted by Juan Cole @ 5/08/2006 12:02:00 AM
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4 Comments:
Makes you wonder if it wasn't Andrew Sullivan "who deliberately set out to smear Cole and chose Hitchens as the most reliably useful idiot for the job"... doesn't it?
And it throws into great relief the difference between those characters who will strut and spout with one eye on the mirror, and on alternate sides of an argument... between those blaggards who use the science of speech more to blackmail and swindle than teach... and our own Juan Cole. Doesn't it?
This morning in the shower, this whole affair between the two of you (Cole & Hitchens) popped into my head for some reason, and then I remembered the Hitchen's article you quote above.
The oddest thing about the attack piece that came out last week, is that your disagreements about this character in Tehran are so minor, compared to the fundamental concepts on which you agree. Which, of course, begs the question, why write that out-of-left-field attack article in the first place?
I also thought that last week's mention of Hitchen's alcoholism was a bit ad hominem, but keeping in mind that Hitchen's already wrote an article against a possible invasion of Iran, perhaps his alcoholic is the only rational explanation for last week's outburst.
I'm certain that you and Hitch will have a lovely back and for for weeks to come.
Yet, why on earth did you post Professor Wade's comments that PsyOps was behind the Zarqawi memo?
I'm not sure how much weight you can place on an article that concludes with: "Just a thought."
Nor does it follow that Hitchens at one point agreed with you from what is written here. But, it does show that Hitchens was willing to shift his tone to trounce you. That makes his writing a little less than honest as he was willing to take this former bullshit and elevate it to serious threat. But, that seems to be an effort to juxtapose a straight-forward reading of Ahmadinejad as compared to your translation. Or, Hitchens may have re-evaluated his position.
But, you do have Hitchens in a tough spot with those two columns merely two months apart.
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