Showing posts with label juan cole. Show all posts
Showing posts with label juan cole. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

The Lamentations of Liberals of Turning Around of the War in Iraq


By Con George-Kotzabasis

It’s hardly surprising, that people like Sameer Lalwani, Juan Cole, and so many others from the liberal unimaginative intelligentsia who have been so abysmally wrong about their prognostications of the war in Iraq, now that the war is being won are petulant and sulky and manufacture shoddy and specious arguments by invoking the indisputable evidence of the sufferings of the war such as civilians killed and refugees, to trump the real triumph of the war after the surge and the new political configuration that is dawning in Iraq auguring a bright future for all Iraqis, that could serve, moreover, as a possible model for the whole Middle East. One would have expected after the dismal military situation that U.S. troops were facing in Iraq before the surge that every American would be proud of what their forces accomplished post-surge under the capable and savant leadership of General Petraeus.

Lalwani attempts to overturn this great event with what: With the art of a conjurer. He turns the retreatof al Sadr’s militia facing decimation by American-Iraqi forces into consolidation of his forces; the attack on Iraqi recruits killing thirty-three of them by a suicide bomber is considered by him to be a show of the continued vigour of the insurgency; and the tragic misery and agony of the refugees is a proof to him that the war has accomplished nothing.

Lalwani, Cole, and the aureole liberal intelligentsia, have suffered their intellectual Waterloo in the argument about the war. A Waterloo in whose battle, unlike Napoleon, they were neither by disposition, mettle, and strategic sagacity ever qualified to be in.

Your opinion...

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Remembrance of Things Past Thought Wrongly

I’m republishing the following riposte that shows how wrong Liberals have been in regard to the outcome of the war in Iraq.

By Con George-Kotzabasis—a retort to:

State of the Union Address
Arguing with Bush--By Professor Juan Cole


INFORMED COMMENT-- January 1, 2006 www.juancole.com

Professor Cole’s piece is contaminated with incurable negativity. It shows him to be a sturdy contestant for the Bush hate trophy from which so many academics of the Left “rake” their inspiration to make their comments about the grave political issues au courant. He argues that for Bush to state, that the elections in Afghanistan and in Iraq are an achievement of self- government, “is the height of hubris” as such “self-government” is laughable and cannot be constructed under an American military occupation. However, only by distorting the context within which Bush made his statement, can he cogently vindicate his contention against the President. And this is exactly what he is doing. Both in Afghanistan and in Iraq the elections were a massive demonstration of their people of their unquenchable desire for “self-government”, within the context of recently toppled dictatorial regimes. And it’s precisely within such a context that one who is intellectually objective should interpret Bush’s statement.

He claims furthermore, that the invasion of these two countries, especially of Iraq, were not legal. But who
defines the legality of the invasion? The UN, which for many years now had lost the plot and resolve to deal effectively with the crises of the world, e.g. Ruwanda, the Congo, and presently Darfur in Sudan, not to mention others, and which was steeped in the corruption that Saddam had set up with the food-for-oil scandal? Or would it be the French, the Russians, and the Germans, who were in cahoots with Saddam, whose ingrained envy as politically miniscule and morally petty rivals of the US hegemon induced them to obstruct all the reasonable defensive actions the latter was forced to take, in the aftermath of 9/11, against the two rogue states that sponsored global terror?

But this chapter of history is not yet closed, and the academics that cannot see anything positive emanating from this “illegal invasion” might eventually have a lot of egg on their face.