http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
this is a draft.
my friend FrankCornish published a diary on DailyKos that highlighted the analysis of Roger Cohen in this weekend’s NYT.
I find Cohen’s reporting old news. Even before Obama had won the primary bid, Michelle Flourney developed Iran policies that Cohen sees as “developing.”
Cohen’s writing tends to legitimize the role of Dennis Ross.
I find that appalling. Dennis Ross has almost as much Middle Eastern blood on his hands as does Henry Kissinger. In all of the United States, don’t we have someone who can envision and strategize a way to engage with Iran and the Middle East in a way that reflects American values and interests more compellingly than Mr. Ross?
In the comments to Frank’s diary someone posted the Youtube, above. A subsequent commenter noted that “That was a great discussion.”
With respect, I disagree, most strongly.
If the conversants in the video represent the liberal, ie. not neocon, point of view, then we Democratic voters and taxpayers are in more trouble than we even imagine, and we have been more thoroughly propagandized than we acknowledge, and we are being led and counseled by un-critical, propagandized pundits and “experts.”
The video is 90 minutes long; I’ve listened through the entire discussion and formed some basic questions but I’d have to spend another three hours listening again with my hypercritical ears tuned. Pre-full-critique, these are the questions/objections I have formed to the discussion:
1. The “problem” with Iran is never defined. It is alluded to; suggestions are made that the west wishes “to change Iran’s behavior.”
What behavior? By what right?
Before you answer, why, the nuclear thing….., please, you’ve been Wolfowitzed. The nuclear issue vis a vis Iran is not and never really has been the problem, it has been the cover, the bloody shirt. We can know this because:
1. In 2003 Iran offered to negotiate the full range of US-Iran issues, included the nuclear issue; the offer was ignored by the Bush administration.
2. In a 2007 RAND study, “Coping with Iran,” chaired by James Dobbins with Sarah Harting and Dalia Dassa Kaye, Mohammad Javad Zarif, since 2002, Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations, stated that
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Orly Taitz on Israel TV. I suspect she/the TV channel, or at least the website is connected to Clarion Fund. There is a link to “Third Jihad,” which is a production of Clarion Fund, the follow up to “Obsession.”
http://wejew.com/media/5724/Dr…