[lit-ideas] Re: Bullying Iran - New York Times

-----Original Message-----
>From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
>Sent: Feb 3, 2007 6:57 PM
>To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Bullying Iran - New York Times
>
>> Let me repeat yet again:  As far as hard evidence, I'm going on   
>> their miserable reputation for factual reporting and for their   
>> nonfact driven pro-war bias.  I asked you to supply evidence that   
>> they are offering reasons to tone down the administration's rhetoric  
>>  regarding war with Iran.
>
>Let's see. You made a claim that you can't back up. 


A.A.  I have backed it up.  See the articles from FAIR.  Did you read them?  
The entire one on Tonkin as well as what's going on now dated yesterday? 



I made no claim  
>about anything. I owe you no explanation. For all you know, I have an  
>open mind on the question of what the Times is or isn't doing in this  
>instance.


A.A. Whatever.  I'm still curious what you think of the NYT's five year long 
wild goose chase on Whitewater.  What's there to think, right?  They were never 
held accountable for it.  We expect that from American Spectator but not from 
the NYT.  


>
>You apparently believe that if someone asks for evidence that what  
>somebody else says is true (that human activity plays a large part in  
>global warming) the person who asks must believe that it doesn't.
>


A.A.  In other words, you agree with me.  Glad to hear it.  Dance over.

For Mike, thanks.  The Iranian reaction in 2003 is little known and certainly 
not promulgated by the NYT.  Iran is shaping up to be the scapegoat for our 
horrific mismanagement in Iraq.  We can't fix it, so we'll blame Iran and 
expand it instead.  Literally.  All we need now is some mistake or accident in 
the Persian Gulf, possibly even manufactured as with Tonkin, and it's over.  
We're at war for no reason than because we are very dangerous people.  Here's a 
blurb on Robert Kagan's book Dangerous Nation:

Dangerous Nation: America's Place in the World from its Earliest Days to the 
Dawn of the 20th Century   
 
By Robert Kagan  
Publisher: Knopf, October 2006 
From the author of the immensely influential and best-selling Of Paradise and 
Power—a major reevaluation of America’s place in the world from the 
colonial era to the turn of the twentieth century.

Robert Kagan strips away the myth of America’s isolationist tradition and 
reveals a more complicated reality: that Americans have been increasing their 
global power and influence steadily for the past four centuries. Even from the 
time of the Puritans, he reveals, America was no shining “city up on a 
hill” but an engine of commercial and territorial expansion that drove Native 
Americans, as well as French, Spanish, Russian, and ultimately even British 
power, from the North American continent. Even before the birth of the nation, 
Americans believed they were destined for global leadership. Underlying their 
ambitions, Kagan argues, was a set of ideas and ideals about the world and 
human nature. He focuses on the Declaration of Independence as the document 
that firmly established the American conviction that the inalienable rights of 
all mankind transcended territorial borders and blood ties. American 
nationalism, he shows, was always internationalist at its core. He also makes a 
startling discovery: that the Civil War and the abolition of slavery—the 
fulfillment of the ideals of the Declaration—were the decisive turning point 
in the history of American foreign policy as well. Kagan's brilliant and 
comprehensive reexamination of early American foreign policy makes clear why 
America, from its very beginning, has been viewed worldwide not only as a 
wellspring of political, cultural, and social revolution, but as an ambitious 
and, at times, dangerous nation.


About the Author
Robert Kagan is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International 
Peace, transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and a columnist for 
The Washington Post. He is also the author of A Twilight Struggle: American 
Power and Nicaragua, 1977–1990, and editor, with William Kristol, of Present 
Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy. Kagan 
served in the U.S. State Department from 1984 to 1988. He lives in Brussels 
with his family. 
 
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=18745&prog=zgp&proj=zusr
  


------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

Other related posts: