By Jonathan Steele It is absurd to demand that Tehran should have made concessions before sitting down with the Americans
It is 50 years since the greatest misquotation of the cold war. At a Kremlin reception for western ambassadors in 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced: "We will bury you." Those four words were seized on by American hawks as proof of aggressive Soviet intent.
Doves who pointed out that the full quotation gave a less threatening message were drowned out. Khrushchev had actually said: "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you." It was a harmless boast about socialism's eventual victory in the ideological competition with capitalism. He was not talking about war.
Now we face a similar propaganda distortion of remarks by Iran's president. Ask anyone in Washington, London or Tel Aviv if they can cite any phrase uttered by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the chances are high they will say he wants Israel "wiped off the map".
Again it is four short words, though the distortion is worse than in the Khrushchev case. The remarks are not out of context. They are wrong, pure and simple. Ahmadinejad never said them. Farsi speakers have pointed out that he was mistranslated. The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran's first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that "this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" just as the Shah's regime in Iran had vanished.
He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The "page of time" phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon. There was no implication that either Khomeini, when he first made the statement, or Ahmadinejad, in repeating it, felt it was imminent, or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about.
But the propaganda damage was done, and western hawks bracket the Iranian president with Hitler as though he wants to exterminate Jews. At the recent annual convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful lobby group, huge screens switched between pictures of Ahmadinejad making the false "wiping off the map" statement and a ranting Hitler.
Misquoting Ahmadinejad is worse than taking Khrushchev out of context for a second reason. Although the Soviet Union had a collective leadership, the pudgy Russian was the undoubted No 1 figure, particularly on foreign policy. The Iranian president is not. RTWT. Steele blathers on, renewing his socialist credentials. I'll bet his check clears, but he should waste no time getting to the bank
#1
And the devil took him to a Mountain, and shewed him the land underneath and said, If you Bow to ME, all of this you may have.... But what is it worth to gain the whole world but to lose your soul?
For those egar, for to check, http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/last_event/world_iran.html
#3
Right on Joe. Either way, even Krushchev's full quote could have been construed as threatening war. This guy's apologetic tone wrt the former commie leader is pathetic.
Well, the press is in full troop-bashing mode, with 90% of Iraq coverage now focused on Haditha. And almost to a word, the articles are written with the assumption U.S. Marines have committed an atrocity; this before any serious look has been taken at the evidence.
But there are problems with the narrative. First off, the doctor who certified the civilians as having been shot is, shall we say, not exactly objective. Secondly, the area is rather pro-insurgent, and witnesses may not be credible (remember the early reports of the Jenin "massacre?"). Third, given that the insurgents commit mass murders on a daily basis and understand propaganda, it's not unreasonable to think they might have committed the atrocity themselves, then staged the area to give the impression it was coalition troops that had been responsible.
Meanwhile, defense lawyers for the accused Marines are requesting drone footage, saying it will exonerate them. That doesn't sound like something they would do if they thought the evidence would show them committing atrocities.
Does this remind anyone else of the Duke lacrosse team rape case? Unreliable witness, exculpatory footage, a media that has already hung them...
At the very least, our troops deserve the benefit of the doubt until tried. Hard to believe Memorial Day was only a few days ago, and already the media is spitting on our soldiers.
Posted by: Mike ||
06/02/2006 14:49 ||
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#1
The Seditionist media have never stopped spitting on our Soilders. Except for a very few individual reporters the media is and has been in the camp of our foes. This just is a long awaited chance to accomplish with their propaganda what they can't get away with otherwise. The MSM do not support our troops or our counrty.
#2
Similar commentary from blogger Wretchard, in reaction to a story in the lefty rag The Nation:
One internal problem with the Nation's narrative, which will be invariant to any outcome of the investigation immediately jumps out. The assertion that it was all "willful, targeted brutality designed to send a message to Iraqis" is immediately contradicted by a recitation of how it was 'covered up' -- "the patently false story floated afterward, blaming the killings on roadside bombs, and Marine payoffs to survivors". Note to whoever is in charge of sending messages of terror to the Iraqis: terror is no good unless you publicize it; if you conceal your message with false stories, or blame roadside bombs and worst of all, if you pay money to survivors then you are missing the point. Any halfwit knows that the right way to sow terror is to leave corpses hanging from lampposts, skulls piled before the city gates or decapitate victims in a studio and distribute the video through Al Jazeera.
Posted by: Mike ||
06/02/2006 15:34 Comments ||
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#3
"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast."
#4
The "local atrocity blamed on the USMC" theory doesn't wash - the Marines initial report said they shot these people, or at least some of them. The question is why and how.
The points about the local witnesses and the doctor are real, and I hope the drone footage is exculpatory, but let's not try to make the Marines less involved then they claim to be themselves.
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
06/02/2006 17:12 Comments ||
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#7
US Troops Cleared in Iraqi Deaths
That's about Ishaqi, not Haditha.
Not that it has stopped ABC radio news from referring to "massacres" in the plural in their hourly reports.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
06/02/2006 17:42 Comments ||
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#8
What I find most interesting about this, is the report from one of the commanders, that in town meetings afterwards, nothing of this was ever mentioned.
And after reading some reports of these town meetings, these guys are vocal! You just know they would have brought this to the attention of the Marines.
(via sweetness-light blog)
You have probably heard by now that the doctor who examined the bodies of the civilians in Haditha after the alleged Marine rampage said they were shot in the chest and head and from close range.
You have probably also heard it reported that the death certificates of the deceased record that all the victims were shot...
...Dr. Wahid, the director of the local Haditha hospital, said the Marines brought 24 bodies to his hospital around midnight November 19. He told Time the Marines claimed the victims had been killed by shrapnel, "But it was obvious to us that there were no organs slashed by shrapnel. The bullet wounds were very apparent. Most of the victims were shot in the chest and the headfrom close range."
This quote has now become an essential element in most of the articles on Haditha...
#6
Ah, the plot thickens. Always best to reserve judgment. If all this turns out to be bogus, all the folks who condemned the Marines in the beginning should be lined up and beaten.
#8
Then again, even if all this turns out to be a setup, don't be surprised if the military under pressure from the PC DoD ignores that and jails them anyway. Hell, an Army dog handler today got reduction in rank, forfeiture of $600 a month pay for a year, etc. for allowing his dog to bark at a terrorist.
Hamas, in an effort to appear more pragmatic, has chosen two so-called "moderates" to fill positions in the new Palestinian government. But what makes these individuals "pragmatic" is the fact that they are willing to negotiate with Israel in the short term, while still engaging in violence against Israel and seeking its destruction in the long term. So while Hamas is currently attempting to present itself as a pragmatic organization, has no intention of renouncing violence.
This double policy is very much in keeping with Hamas's goals at what is a strategic turning point. The organization need not abandon its original objectives nor relinquish its jihad. At the same time, it is necessary to "talk to the devil" (Israel) so the people don't go hungry and so that hospitals continue to get supplies. Within this strategy framework, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh told the Israeli paper Haaretz that the Hamas government is prepared to agree to an extended cease-fire if Israel withdraws to the 1967 lines.1 Haniyeh expressed surprise that the Israelii government has not accepted the Palestinian government's decision to allow its ministers to conduct negotiations with representatives of the Israeli government regarding day-to-day issues. The Hamas government, Haniyeh said, is ready for talks with Israel on practical matters, though not on ideological or political issues. For example, Haniyeh would not discuss the Hamas charter, which rejects Israel's existence, and expressed no readiness to abandon terrorism, recognize Israel or accept previous agreements between the PA and Israel. "Pragmatism" is Hamas's strategy that enables the flexibility and freedom of maneuver, while not committing to anything, thus preserving its freedom of action.
In the low-grade civil war that still smoulders inside the Bush Administrations national security team, this week marked another another significant victory for Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State.
For weeks the US has been resisting pressure from Europeans and a growing chorus of foreign policy experts at home to break a 27-year-old embargo on direct negotiations with Iran. Though there have been abortive unofficial contacts (who can forget Oliver North with the birthday cake, the Bible and the US hostages in Lebanon?), Washington has officially disdained to talk to the mullahs since revolutionary students seized the US Embassy in Tehran shortly after the Shah was toppled in 1979.
But with negotiations apparently stalled between Iran and the EU Three (UK, France and Germany) over the developing Iranian nuclear programme, the pressure has been rising on the US to get involved. Until now the response has been negative. At best, the Bush people said, treating with the theocrats, with their visions of an Israel-free world and their transfiguration fantasies, would be pointless. At worst, sitting down over sweet tea and pistachios would give the Iranian leadership prestige and valuable time to move closer to their nuclear dream. It would change the subject in the Middle East in a disastrous way, fetishising the diplomatic process, elevating it above the real problem: Iranian nuclear ambitions and the threat they pose to the world.
In fact these unequivocal official renunciations of dialogue masked an increasingly intense debate in Washington and on Wednesday Dr Rice signalled that her diplomatic instincts had once again triumphed. The US, with the EU and, if possible, Russia and China, would join multiparty discussions with the Iranians to try to find ways to break the impasse.
A delicately worded statement included some important concessions to the anti-engagers in the Administration; there would be negotiations only if Iran stopped enriching uranium and was willing to abide by internationally agreed constraints on its nuclear regime.
Iran has already suggested these conditions are too onerous so negotiations may never actually start. But that wont matter much because the symbolism of Dr Rices gambit was more important than the substance. The State Department is now into the most critical phase yet of a delicate and high-risk game. It is a game that some in Washington feel is destined to fail; but, for the time being at least, the President has ruled that it is the game that the US will play.
Few people in Washington believe Iran is going to abandon its attempts to join the nuclear club without serious international pressure or even the deeply unattractive military option. The only hope of avoiding the apocalyptic choice is a regime of eye-wateringly tight international economic and diplomatic pressure. But to achieve that the US has to be seen to be working overtime on the diplomacy.
By a tragic combination of hubris on Americas part and hysteria on the rest of the worlds, the Iraq war has undermined Americas ability to make its case. The world looks at Washington through the prism of a distorting media and sees a bunch of war-crazed neocons intent on torching the Islamic world. It notes the grisly carnage in al-Haditha and the mayhem in Basra and claims vindication.
With Iran, the US has to succeed where it largely failed in Iraq, in demonstrating to a sceptical world that the US really wants to give diplomacy a chance to work, and to ensure that if (and when) it fails, it will not be the US that will be responsible. The argument at the State Department is that, having thus demonstrated its bona fides the US will be able to persuade the rest of the world to get tough with the Iranians.
This is the second time now in 18 months that the hardliners in the Bush team have been worsted by Dr Rices diplomacy. In November 2004 the US changed course and chose for the first time to endorse the EU negotiations with Iran. The argument then was that if it stood aside while the Europeans negotiated, those efforts would be doomed. Everyone would say it was the brooding absence of the US that prevented the desirable outcome of a disarmed Iran. But with the US backing the initiative, it could not be blamed if they failed. The world would see that it was Iranian intransigence not American unilateralism that was precipitating the crisis.
Now here we are a year and a half later, with almost exactly the same arguments being rehearsed in Washington. The US now envisages a two-stage process over the next few months: first the renewed diplomatic effort to give one last push to the attempt to get UN sanctions imposed on Iran if China and Russia can be persuaded to drop their opposition.
If that fails (and there is little optimism in Washington that it will succeed) the US then tries the second track: a coalition of the willing for sanctions outside the UN, including the EU, Japan, Australia and perhaps others.
These would be harsh measures, not popular in the countries that the US hopes to enlist. They would doubtless result in much higher oil prices, and they would harm the economies of Europe much more than that of the US (since America already has sanctions in place, it would not be seriously affected). To do that, the rest of the world, Europeans especially, will have to be convinced that Iran is a bigger threat to world peace than the US.
That is the thrust of the Rice gambit: go the extra mile, two miles, three miles for diplomacy, so that the case for tougher measures is more easily made. But the gambits weakness is that it rests on an assumption that, in the end, when Iranian intransigence has been duly demonstrated, Europe will be willing to make the sacrifice necessary to halt the doomsday threat from a nuclear-armed Islamist state.
Who, looking at the performance of Europe in the last few years, would want to bet on that?
#1
Very interesting article. It's a bit wobbly in the beginning, IMHO, as he attempts to set the stage. Holding the opinion that there is an internal hot war in the administration does not make it so, for example. I'd say that the administration is making its moves in real-time, based upon the evolving situation. Certainly no one knew for certain the exact positions nor precisely how intransigent Russia and China would be just a few months ago. But that quibble aside, Baker certainly finds his stride. His closing points are definitely on the mark.
#2
I wouldn't count on the europeans to endorse anything that would cause them the slightest discomfort. Including higher energy prices, even temporarily. Their whole aim at getting us involved is to shift the blame to us when this fails. They don't intend to impose sanctions, or even tough talk. They are shifty, scurillous, backstabbers and I wouldn't trust them any more than I would the Iranians. And it's funny, I think, that they are in the "kill zone", not us.
You'd think that would provide some sort of motivation to derail them.
OBLs three-fold strategy to defeat the West
by Raymond Ibrahim
Posted by: ed ||
06/02/2006 16:43 ||
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#1
Not a bad article to recommend to your Kool Aid relatives and friends. I know a few who still dont' believe OBL was involved in 9/11 - despite the facts and confession. Maybe this will help get them over the first hurdle or two.
LAST WEEK the Washington Post featured a story on Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, the Spanish-Syrian al Qaeda strategist who wrote the 1,600 page Call for a Global Islamic Resistance. The Post story provided a revealing look at Nasar who, despite his capture, remains the leading ideological architect of al Qaeda's war against the United States. But the Post also missed a number of important points in Nasar's career.
The Post describes Nasar as having been "born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1958 and studied engineering. In the early 1980s, he took part in a failed revolt by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood against Syrian strongman Hafez al-Assad. According to his own written accounts, he fled the country after that, then trained in camps in Jordan and Egypt. Later, he said, he moved to Europe when it became clear that Assad was firmly entrenched in power."
But according to Murad al-Shishani's profile of Nasar during this same period for the Jamestown Foundation:
Nasar was initiated into al-Tali'a al-Muqatila (Fighting Vanguard), a Jihadist group linked to the Syrian Muslim Brothers, founded by the late Marwan Hadeed. Nasar received training from Egyptian and Iraqi officers and additional training in camps in Jordan and Baghdad during an era when Arab regimes were on a collision course with the Syrian Ba'athists. He was also a member of the higher military command of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement that was established in Baghdad after the Syrian Brothers fled from their country. According to unverified sources Sheikh Saeed Haowa was head of that military command.
Following the events in Hama in 1982, when the Syrian army successfully suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood uprising, Nasar left the movement, after declaring his opposition to the Brotherhood's alliance with sectarian movements and the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. He headed for Afghanistan where he met with Abdul-Kader Abdul-Aziz writer of the book entitled The Master of Preparations, which is regarded as a reference point for the jihadis, and also met with Sheikh Abdullah Azzam.
This resentment towards the Iraqi regime, which Nasar believed had co-opted the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood for their own purposes and stymied their revolution, is reflected in Lessons Learned from the Armed Jihad Ordeal in Syria, in which Nasar discusses the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood's alliance with Saddam Hussein and warns prospective jihadis to ensure that their own organizations are self-sufficient. Al Qaeda seems to have taken Nasar's advice to heart concerning any dealings with Saddam Hussein, which the CIA assessed (according to p. 322 of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on pre-war Iraq intelligence):
In contrast to the patron-client pattern between Iraq and its Palestinian surrogates, the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida appears to more closely resemble that of two independent actors trying to exploit each other--their mutual suspicion suborned by al-Qaida's interest in Iraqi assistance, and Baghdad's interest in al-Qaida's anti-U.S. attacks . . .
THIS DYNAMIC appears whenever al Qaeda involves itself with state actors; which may be a result of Nasar's influence. As Dr. Reuven Paz notes in his discussion of Nasar's 1,600 tract (Nasar is using the nom de guerre "Abu Musab al-Suri"):
Al-Suri also surprises his readers by sending requests to North Korea and Iran to continue developing their nuclear projects. It is most unlikely for a Jihadi-Salafi scholar to hint at possible cooperation with countries like Shi'ite Iran or Stalinist North Korea, both of which are generally regarded as infidel regimes. However, Al-Suri seems to advise that Jihadi Sunni readers should cooperate with the devil to defeat the "bigger devil."
. . . Al-Suri does not see much benefit from the guerrilla warfare waged against the U.S. by al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Hence, "the ultimate choice is the destruction of the United States by operations of strategic symmetry through weapons of mass destruction, namely nuclear, chemical, or biological means, if the mujahideen can achieve it with the help of those who possess them or through buying them." One other option, he says, is by "the production of basic nuclear bombs, known as "dirty bombs."
There is some debate as to the nature of Nasar's views with regard to Shiites. Paz states elsewhere that Nasar "has no anti-Shia sentiments, and refrains, as much as known, from being involved in the Islamist insurgency in Iraq. His pragmatism might be connected also to his known Sufi family origins."
But Lorenzo Vidino notes that:
A further glance at [Nasar's] extremist ideology is provided by tapes of his sermons that were seized in the apartment of a member of an Algerian terrorist cell dismantled by Italian authorities in Naples in 2000. The tapes reveal [Nasar's] deep hatred for Shiites, whom he considers deviators from pure Islam . . . In fact, he points at the "negative influence" that Shiite groups have had on the Palestinian struggle, as some groups like Hamas have decided to work with Shiite groups like Hezbollah.
This would seem odds with the Post's claim that one of the reasons Nasar left the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was because its alliance with other sectarian movements.
THE FACT THAT NASAR is the leading ideological architect of al Qaeda's strategy (combined with his endorsement of both the Iranian nuclear program and the use of the weapons of mass destruction) takes on an added emphasis when taken in conjunction with his apparent flight to Iran after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan. A June 2005 story by NBC News quotes Spanish counterterrorism judge Baltasar Garzon as describing Nasar's role in a November 2002 meeting of the al Qaeda leadership to discuss how to operate in the post-9/11 environment:
al-Qaida convened a strategic summit in northern Iran in November 2002. Without bin Laden present, but with many of the top leaders, the group's "shura," or consultative council, met secretly to decide how to operate within the new restraints and confinements.
Leading the discussion was a Syrian, Mustafa Setmariam Nasar. He looked unlike most Arabs, being fair-skinned and red-haired, and carried a Spanish passport, having married a Spanish woman in 1987. Setmariam Nasar, derisively called a "pen jihadist" by some at the CIA but a "strategist" by Spanish counterterrorism officials, said it was time for al-Qaida to carry out the February 1998 fatwa bin Laden wrote and transmitted widely across the Arab and Muslim world.
"He told the shura that al-Qaida could no longer exist as a hierarchy, an organization, but instead would have to become a network and move its operations out over the entire world," said Garzon, the prosecuting judge who investigated the role of Spanish citizens in Sept. 11 as well as the Madrid attacks. "He pointed to the Feb. 23, 1998, fatwa for inspiration."
Whether or not the Iranian authorities were aware of this meeting is unknown, but an October 2003 Washington Post article cited a European intelligence official as saying that al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri used his relationship with Ahmad Vahidi (the then-commander of the elite Iranian Qods Force unit) "to negotiate a safe harbor for some of al Qaeda's leaders who were trapped in the mountains of Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in 2001."
It helps to know the back story when trying to understand the development of Mustafa Setmariam Nasar's views and how they influenced al Qaeda.
Dan Darling is a counterterrorism consultant.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
06/02/2006 00:44 ||
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#1
Sherry said it rather well here, if rather gently. :) WaPo is not just remiss or sloppy, the editors who control the output are on the other side.
#2
This is another Dan Darling article that succinctly fosters a better understanding of the topic at hand. As always it concisely adds clarity of interpretation. Its refreshing to read an author that consistently offers more insight through background and displays brevity in his editorial comments. Outstanding!
Veteran ABC newsman John Stossel won 19 Emmys exposing scammers and con artists and came to a chilling conclusion the biggest threat to our well-being is often our own government.
The "20/20" co-anchor made a dramatic about-face when he realized that "less government is good government." He abandoned his liberal perspective, became a libertarian and paid a heavy price, he recently told NewsMax in an exclusive interview.
When Stossel changed his political stripes, suddenly the awards stopped coming, once-friendly producers shunned him and the liberal establishment struck back with a vengeance. But now he's coming out swinging harder than ever at "monster government." His eye-opening new book, "Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity," has recently been released has become a New York Times bestseller.
As a young reporter crusading on behalf of consumers, Stossel says he embraced the liberal mantra that "people should be pretty free to live their own lives but that wise government should tax people to make their lives better and it should especially tax rich people to make poor people's lives better. That would end poverty and do all kinds of wonderful things."
The deeper Stossel dug into these complex issues, however, the more he saw that the regulators and bureaucrats who were supposed to solve problems were often at their very root.
"I had an unusual ringside seat on the regulatory state as a television consumer reporter," he explained. "I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to see the folly of most government intervention. It was probably 15 years before I really woke up to the fact that almost everything government attempts to do, it makes worse," Stossel confesses.
"Top-down central planning is never as effective as free individuals making their own choices, because free individuals will adapt to reality every second, but the central planners can adapt only when they get together to vote."
Stossel, a Princeton graduate, credits his own reporting and reading for his enlightenment, but says no single incident turned on the light.
"It was really a slow epiphany," he admits. One factor "was watching The New York Times endlessly prescribe solutions and then watching them fail."
The mainstream media did not take kindly to Stossel's political conversion, which occurred about 20 years ago.
"They like me less," he says with his familiar deadpan humor, adding, "Once I started applying the same skepticism to government, I stopped winning awards."
He remembers how one news show ambushed him.
"The CNN program Reliable Sources' had me on after I did my first special [in 1994], Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?' When I got there, I found that they had titled the program, Objectivity in Journalism Does John Stossel Practice Either?'"
Stossel's political awakening triggered mixed reactions from his ABC colleagues including "bewilderment and lack of interest. I had to fight hard to get certain stories on the air."
But others approached his transformation with an open mind. "Hugh Downs was supportive," he reveals. "Barbara Walters was better than most of my colleagues. When a correspondent said in a meeting, We've got to have a law to stop that,' Barbara said, Well, we can't have laws for everything.' So instinctively she gets some of these ideas. She is very smart."
Stossel encountered most of his opposition behind the scenes.
"The on-air people are not really in a position to stop me or encourage me. It's producers who do that." And almost all of the producers have a liberal bent, he reveals. "Some were hostile. A few were curious."
And most, he says, were skeptical of his ideas.
"After the airing of my first special, two freelance producers quit, saying, This isn't journalism it's dogma!'" That led to a meeting with Paul Friedman, the executive in charge at the time. Stossel recalls Friedman saying, "Well, I don't agree with you, but it is an interesting intellectual argument that deserves to be made." Stossel says, "I give ABC News credit for that."
Like a political Robinson Crusoe, Stossel inhabits his own island of intellectual thought. Rather than trying to please any one political camp, he assails the weak points on all sides of the spectrum. And he has a lot to say about the initiatives of President Bush.
"What the Republicans in the administration have done is to increase spending more than ever. And I don't pretend to be a foreign policy expert, but I am very skeptical of nation building. I also think the drug war is a huge mistake."
Stossel cherishes personal freedom but some feel he goes to extremes. "I don't think religion should be a part of government, and I think you ought to be able to burn a flag," he says. "I think homosexuality is not unnatural and not something that should be legislated against."
The outspoken journalist says conservatives impress him with their willingness to still invite him to conferences. "But the liberals just say, He's icky,' and don't want to have anything to do with me," he says.
"Liberals have been so dominant in the mainstream media that they have grown fat, lazy and intolerant. Conservatives are happy to have someone in the mainstream media who will at least consider their ideas," the newsman adds.
Stossel reduces many sacred cows to hamburger meat. His new book is a powerful broadside fired across the bow of liberal thought and is bound to draw as much return fire as his previous book, "Give Me a Break."
Confronting the notion that drug companies are evil price gougers, he explains that the higher the price of medicines, the more good medicines we get.
While unions rail against the outsourcing of jobs, Stossel insists, "Outsourcing creates American jobs." The take-no-prisoners journalist has enraged teachers by declaring that part of the problem with our schools is that they are run by "a union-dominated monopoly." Five hundred teachers recently demonstrated outside of ABC in New York City and challenged him to teach for a week.
Stossel revealed to NewsMax he will take them up on the challenge. (For more, see his accompanying column.)
In his new book, the 59-year-old reporter cleverly marshals experts, statistics and fascinating anecdotes to make his points in a lively and entertaining manner.
To drive home how well-intended government regulation can boomerang, Stossel focuses on the pesticide DDT. Once widely used, it gained the reputation of being a "killer chemical," partly because of what he sees as media hysteria.
The real problem, he says, was that DDT was used indiscriminately and far too much was sprayed. But because of its demonization, DDT is rarely used anymore to fight malaria despite its effectiveness and safety when used in tiny amounts.
And that's outrageous, he writes, because "malaria will kill more than 1,000 children before you finish reading this book."
With so many misconceptions and poor policies afflicting America, what are the first actions that a President Stossel would take?
"I would pass the Stossel Rule for every new law they pass, they have to repeal two old ones. I would get rid of farm subsidies and the Education Department. That's a start," he says.
While the controversial newsman clearly recognizes the need for government, he defines its proper role as "limited."
"It should keep the peace and protect the environment within reason, run the courts, ensure a common defense and create a safety net, which competes with private charity, but doesn't exclude it. Otherwise," he says, "it should butt out of our lives."
#1
Paid a heavy price? He still has his job and gets his stories on the air about as often as he can expect. Not everybody loves him, and some colleagues are skeptical - that should be true of more reporters, not less. He stopped getting awards from people he doesn't have a lot of respect for - not a big tragedy. The only people who paid a price are the producers at ABC who quit rather than be associated with him. ABC's gain, I suspect, but not Stossel's problem.
Unless he thinks he's entitled to universal love, I don't get the persecution complex. Sounds like he has a good, and well paying, gig to me.
#2
Well, somebody asked him what he thought, hoping for some good snarky quotes, he responded, then they wrote the story. He's got the right to call it like he sees it, whether that is actually what this article represents or not. Who knows if this is unspun reporting? I respect him simply because he seems to pull no punches, letting the chips fall where they may. That's damned rare.
#3
I saw him on CSPAN over a yr ago lecturing at the Kennedy School in Harvard (IIRC). He talked about the Stossel rule and how a free capitalist market is better at fixing itself then govt could ever do. I was very impressed w/him.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
It is 50 years since the greatest misquotation of the cold war. At a Kremlin reception for western ambassadors in 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced: "We will bury you." Those four words were seized on by American hawks as proof of aggressive Soviet intent.
Veteran ABC newsman John Stossel won 19 Emmys exposing scammers and con artists and came to a chilling conclusion the biggest threat to our well-being is often our own government.
