BOOKS: Oil in Iraq? That's news to the <I>New York Times Book Review</I>!
- Details
- Written by Henry Adams
On Sunday, Oct. 30, the New York Times Book Review achieved a rare feat. -- In about 6,500 words by four reviewers about five new books about Iraq, the word oil and the existence of petroleum in Iraq were mentioned not once. -- "Democracy" and its cognates, however, were mentioned 22 times. -- Such is the mystification about the policies of the U.S. national security state in the Middle East to which the New York Times has been, and remains, committed. -- The Times, we may safely predict, will never be in favor of U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, and will resolutely support the upcoming U.S. aggression against Iran, and perhaps Syria, speaking hopefully all the while about the promise of democratization in the Middle East. -- Three of the reviews are posted below;[1,2,3] the other is available here....
BOOKS: Zakaria's review of Packer's 'The Assassins Gate' is an apology for hegemony
- Details
- Written by Henry Adams
Fareed Zakaria's review of George Packer's The Assassins' Gate in Sunday's New York Times Book Review is disingenuous. -- What is one to think of a 2,200-word review of a book about the American project in Iraq that fails to mention, or even to allude to, oil? -- Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, is now a popular figure in the mainstream media. -- No doubt the chief attraction of his brand of thinking is that it justifies continued pursuit of policies of the most brutal sort by agencies of the U.S. national security state even as it comforts American sensibilities. -- It allows liberals to sleep soundly with a good conscience. -- Thus Zakaria flatters his readers with the view that "the broadest reason to intervene in Iraq was that it was a bold use of American power that mixed force with idealism." -- He is also willing to acknowledge as motives "a grand reordering of the Middle East, pushing it away from tyranny and anti-Americanism and toward modernity and democracy" and the pursuit of something "good for Israel's security." -- Wars of aggression are OK if one's motives are good, apparently. -- Has the erudite Zakaria never heard that ends do not justify means? -- The view advanced here is that the war was a good idea, but what a pity, it was poorly planned and executed. -- This is nonsense. -- The flaws in the purported goals of the Iraq war project and their evident immorality were enough to inspire the largest internationally coordinated movement of protest in the history of the world on Feb. 15, 2003. -- Of course this gets no mention here: for all the talk of "democracy," what people actually want is beside the point. -- Fareed Zakaria is one of those now developing a rationale intended to justify many more years of bloodshed in Iraq. -- Not for nothing did he study with Samuel Huntington, teach at Harvard, and edit Foreign Affairs: Fareed Zakaria is an elite apologist for Western hegemony in the Middle East. -- For this is how he concludes: "Iraq today is a much better, even more liberal, place than Saddam Hussein's Iraq. . . . Things will improve but it will take years, not months. . . . 'The Iraq war was always winnable,' Packer writes, 'it still is. For this very reason, the recklessness of its authors is hard to forgive.'" -- This is wrong, disastrously wrong. -- The war is certainly not "winnable" now, and probably never was. -- And the project was immoral and illegal from the outset....
BOOKS/TRANSLATION: Dissecting the construction of Islamophobia in French media
- Details
- Written by Mark Jensen
Thomas Deltombe is an independent French journalist whose new book, Imaginary Islam, examines how French media have represented Islam on news broadcasts during the period 1975 to 2005. -- Deltombe's book, a brief review of which is translated here from a Paris newspaper, is based on an academic thesis written at the Institut d'Etudes politiques in Paris where Jean-Noel Jeanneney, now the head of France's national library, was his advisor. -- Next Thursday, Oct. 20, Deltombe will speak in Paris with Pierre Tévanian, author of Le voile médiatique: Un faux débat ('The Veil in the Media: A Fake Debate') and L'Affaire du foulard islamique ('The Islamic Scarf Affair')....