My Other Blog & Comments

News and Information Feed

Friday, September 02, 2011

It turns out Juan cole is a genuine man of the Left, a careerist, and a moral monster...and there's nothing inconsistant about any of that

From:
Juan Cole, Consultant to the CIA

Et tu, Amy Goodman?
(AntiWar.com) -- by John V. Walsh --

Juan Cole is a brand name that is no longer trusted. And that has been the case for some time for the good Professor from Michigan. After warning of the "difficulties" with the Iraq War, Cole swung over to ply it with wet kisses on the day of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His fervor was not based on Saddam Hussein’s fictional possession of weapons of mass destruction but on the virtues of "humanitarian imperialism."

Thus on March 19, 2003, as the imperial invasion commenced, Cole enthused on his blog: "I remain convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides" (emphasis mine). Now, with over 1 million Iraqis dead, 4 million displaced and the country’s infrastructure destroyed, might Cole still echo Madeline Albright that the price was "worth it"? Cole has called the Afghan War "the right war at the right time" and has emerged as a cheerleader for Obama’s unconstitutional war on Libya and for Obama himself.

Cole claims to be a man of the "Left" and he appears with painful frequency on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now as the reigning "expert" on the war on Libya. This is deeply troubling – on at least two counts. First, can one be a member of the "Left" and also an advocate for the brutal intervention by the Great Western Powers in the affairs of a small, relatively poor country? Apparently so, at least in Democracy Now’s version of the "Left." Second, it appears that Cole’s essential function these days is to convince wavering progressives that the war on Libya is fine and dandy. But how can such damaged goods as Cole credibly perform this marketing mission so vital to Obama’s war?

Miraculously, Cole got just the rehabilitation he needed to continue with this vital propaganda function when it was disclosed by the New York Times on June 15 that he was the object of a White House inquiry way back in 2005 in Bush times. The source and reason for this leak and the publication of it by the NYT at this time, so many years later, should be of great interest, but they are unknown. Within a week of the Times piece Cole was accorded a hero’s welcome on Democracy Now, as he appeared with retired CIA agent Glenn Carle who had served 23 years in the clandestine services of the CIA in part as an "interrogator." Carl had just retired from the CIA at the time of the White House request and was at the time employed at the National Intelligence Council, which authors the National Intelligence Estimate.

It hit this listener like a ton of bricks when it was disclosed in Goodman’s interview that Cole was a long time "consultant" for the CIA, the National Intelligence Council and other agencies...

Cole is anxious to promote himself as a man of the Left as he spins out his rationale for the war on Libya. At one point he says to Goodman (3/29), "We are people of the left. We care about the ordinary people. We care about workers." It is strange that a man who claims such views dismisses as irrelevant the progress that has come to the people of Libya under Gaddafi, dictator or not. (Indeed what brought Gaddafi down was not that he was a dictator but that he was not our dictator.) In fact Libya has the highest score of all African countries on the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) and with Tunisia and Morocco the second highest level of literacy. The HDI is a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide. A glance at the map here says it all.

Whither The Left on the Question of Intervention?

None of this is all too surprising given Cole’s status as a "humanitarian" hawk. But it is surprising and troubling that he is so often called on by Democracy Now for his opinion...MORE...LINK
-------------------------

Chris Moore comments:

It’s time to drop this canard that being of the Left is inconsistent with being a supporter of war and warmongering, particularly once one realizes leftism is simply another clique of gangsters using Big Government to extract as many resources from the People as possible, no different than the fascists or neocons.

Most Western leftists are self-serving poseurs and psycho-dramatists who put on theatrical shows of compassion and moral indignation more as a means of fitting in with the statist-liberal establishment consensus and/or advancing their careers than out of any deeply held principles or convictions.

Juan Cole is simply a left-wing careerist, a man who would have happily worked for the Soviet government in the 1920’s as a commissar liquidating the dissident opposition during the week and pampering and luxuriating himself at dachas on the weekend.

It goes to show how ignorant of Communist history and brainwashed by statist-liberalism Americans are that so many of them still conceptualize leftists as somehow morally superior, and that they are shocked, shocked!, when it turns out so many lefties are morally monstrous.

Or perhaps they’re not really shocked at all, and merely engaging in more phony liberal theatrics.

***

Here, perhaps this article I wrote a year ago will help connect the dots on Juan Cole's craven careerism, humanitarian fraudulence, and self-serving, left-wing malice:

Partisan Democrat Juan Cole rips the “Jewish” neocon Right, but won’t touch the even more powerful Jewish-American Zionist Left

No comments: