Left hook

Nearly three years ago, the Toronto Sun's Eric Margolis, one of the finest and most prescient writers on foreign affairs anywhere, walked away from his regular gig on TVO's Diplomatic Immunity because, as he told me at the time, producer "(Dan) Dunsky et. al. tried to censor my views on Iraq and the Mideast, and kept packing the guest list with far-right neocons from Washington. I have never in my (then) 21 year media career accepted anyone trying to tell me what to say. Events have, of course, proven the TVO party line dead wrong."

Indeed. Iraq is a quagmire. The Bush regime a disaster. They lied. Tens of thousands died. Etc. Etc. Margolis sums it up well in his latest effort about ''the war president'' not being able to war. (H/t to Jiminy C.)

Defeat I: Five years after Bush ordered Afghanistan invaded and proclaimed `total victory’ there, US and allied forces are struggling to defend their bases and supply lines against rising attacks from a growing number of Afghan resistance groups. The war costs $1.5 billion monthly. US-ruled Afghan now produces over 80% of the world’s heroin. The US just quietly deployed thousands more troops to Afghanistan to hunt al-Qaida leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in a desperate attempt to save Republicans from heavy losses in November mid-term elections.

Defeat II: Remember `Mission accomplished!’ in Iraq? President Bush’s war in Iraq is clearly lost, but few dare admit it. The US has spent $300 billion on Afghanistan and Iraq, with nothing to show there but chaos, civil war, body bags, and growing Iranian influence in Iraq and western Afghanistan. The Bush/Cheney `liberation’ of Iraq has now cost more than the Vietnam War. So much for the `cakewalk.’ Iraq is likely the biggest American foreign policy disaster in living memory – even worse, in many ways, than Vietnam.

Defeat III: Off in the strategic Horn of Africa, another dangerous fiasco is unfolding. The White House had CIA and Pentagon spend tens of millions bribing Somali warlords to fight Islamist reformers trying to bring law and order to their strife-ravaged nation. The Islamists whipped CIA-backed warlords and ran them out of Somalia. Following this defeat, the US has encouraged and financed ally Ethiopia – shades of Lebanon - to invade Somalia, thus raising the threat of a wider war between Somalia, Ethiopia, and its old foe, Eritrea. Meanwhile, growing numbers of US Special Forces and CIA teams are getting drawn into obscure tribal melees in the Horn of Africa and the Saharan regions.

Defeat IV: Lebanon is, of course, the fourth major American military disaster. Bush and Cheney encouraged Israel to launch the hugely destructive but militarily fruitless war in Lebanon as the first part of their long nurtured plan to militarily crush Hezbullah, Syria and Iran. The Bush Administration brazenly thwarted world efforts to halt the conflict while giving Israel the green light to tear apart Lebanon. Now, just over a month later, Bush announces he will send $230 million to `help rebuild’ Lebanon – the same Lebanon blasted apart by US smart bombs rushed by air to Israel.

Anyway, after Margolis' departure, I got complaints from dozens of fans of the show who abandoned it because they missed Margolis and disliked the political turn it took.

No kidding. Did TVO really need to give Richard Perle a forum when he was already on all the Amnets? They even put out a news release announcing this ''get." The show lost a chunk of its constituency and ratings, I hear, dropped  with Margolis' departure.

Well guess what?

Looks like Dunsky, and host Steve Paikin, want Margolis back this fall when they launch their new program The Agenda. It's the program that will replace the suddenly-cancelled Studio 2.

Looks like ratings trump politics.

UPPITY DATE: One of the biggest idiots on the right is David Horowitz, a ''former Marxist" who conducts witch hunts on campus of liberal-leaning academics. The reason he's relevant is because, in Googling Margolis, I tripped over this screed by Horowitz on Horowitz's website against him, where author Eugene Girin calls the Sun -- hee-hee -- ''the leftist tabloid" and Margolis "an apologist for terror." What an ... er ... goof. (H/t to DEnnis Earl for catch my mistake here.)

OVERDUE DATE: Speaking of foreign affairs writers, Robert Parry takes hammer and tong to the New York Times' over-rated and over-exposed Thomas Friedman, the man who never gets it right and attacks those who do.

New York Times foreign policy analyst Thomas L. Friedman finally has come to the conclusion that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq – which Friedman enthusiastically supported with the clever slogan “give war a chance” – wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Noting that “it is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are babysitting a civil war,” Friedman wrote, “that means ‘staying the course’ is pointless, and it’s time to start thinking about Plan B – how we might disengage with the least damage possible.” [NYT, Aug. 4, 2006]

Yet, despite this implicit admission that the war has unnecessarily killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and more than 2,600 U.S. soldiers, Friedman continues to slight Americans who resisted the rush to war in the first place.

Twelve days after his shift in position, Friedman demeaned Americans who opposed the Iraq War as “antiwar activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in,” presumably a reference to the threat from Islamic extremism. [NYT, Aug. 16, 2006]

In other words, according to Friedman, Americans who were right about the ill-fated invasion of Iraq are still airheads when it comes to the bigger picture, while the pundits and politicians who were dead wrong on Iraq deserve pats on the back for their wise analyses of the larger problem.

Great piece on the go-Bush-go punditry elite. Read it.

Comments

[Reality Check]

FYI, Friedman defines himself as a neo-liberal and not as a neo-con:

http://thekupfers.typepad.com/tothepoint/economics/

Antonia, I hope Sydney pulls through.

[sooey]

gawd, 20/20 - i wish i was a business reporter for a big city newspaper so i could do a piece on who's selling/buying oil to/from whom. i bet that information would be so disillusioning for both peaceniks AND warhawks, that they'd bury their beads AND their hatchets.

[JK]

"Training and experience are no substitute for without-fear-or-favour reporting. Eric Margolis and Robert Fisk trump Tom Friedman, not to mention the TV talking-heads on the cable news shows."

Same point I made with respect to Parry: there are a lot of issues one can reasonably have with Thomas Friedman, but this isn't one of them. He has as much, if not more, "without fear or favour" reporting experience in the Middle East as Margolis (though of course no one has as much as Fisk). Friedman was the Times bureau chief in Beirut and then Jerusalem during the 1980s, and later its White House correspondent. While a reporter in the Middle East, he won two Pulitzers. As a columnist, he still returns to the region frequently, because unlike most columnists, he takes seriously his responsibility to see firsthand what's happening in the real world.

[sooey]

reality check? i'd define friedman more as a neo-flibbertigibbet. in the christopher hitchens vein.

[Peter Shaw]

And sometimes Margolis is just ridiculous:

"...Islamist reformers trying to bring law and order to their strife-ravaged nation"

Uh huh. Let's see what this Margolis-style "law and order" is all about:

http://tinyurl.com/kctsq

"SICS has banned band music at public ceremonies, outlawed western movies and announced that any Somali Muslim who fails to perform daily prayers will be killed in accordance with Quranic law."

http://tinyurl.com/j3vo6

"Hardline Islamists controlling much of southern Somalia forcibly broke up a meeting of moderate clerics in the capital on Thursday, further asserting their authority in the lawless nation.

Officials with the Supreme Islamic Council of Somalia (SICS) said the conference of clerics and peace activists from the Al-Islah group in a Mogadishu hotel was illegal as it had not been approved.

"The meeting was not licensed and the organisers did not have permission to hold it," SICS spokesperson Abdukarim Ali Muddey said after heavily armed Islamic gunmen broke up the meeting. "We have to be a community ruled by laws."

http://tinyurl.com/guwy4

"A Courts-made propaganda video called "Punishment of the Converts" and obtained by NEWSWEEK from an Islamic militiaman in Mogadishu, shows the Somali Islamists training, interspersed with speeches from several of the Courts' leading military figures, including a partially masked man who appears to be Ayro, according to Somalis who know him. The dialogue is frankly Pan-Islamic and pro-terrorist; the voice-over features Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. "Mogadishu is the Afghanistan of the Muslims now," says one masked Somali fighter. "Every Muslim who is victimized in the world, we are calling him to come here," says the fighter. "It will be a safe haven for him." The Islamic militias' internal newspaper, Al Jihaad, puts it bluntly: TERRORISM IS COMPULSORY, reads a July 3 headline. TERRORISM, EXTREMISM AND FUNDAMENTALISM ARE PART OF ISLAM AND GOOD.

Aweys doesn't disagree. He praised bin Laden to NEWSWEEK, comparing him to Nelson Mandela in that "South Africans said that Mandela was a terrorist and his people know him as a hero." He also justified Al Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center. "Since Osama was fighting against his enemy, he could use any tactic he had available to him," he said. "It is not compulsory to think as the Americans want us to think."

I just hope Eric doesn't start pushing for a little more "law and order" here in Canada.

[Tom Joad]

I sure hope you are right about TVO seeking to have Eric Margolis back on... he was the ONLY reason I tuned in. IF he comes back, then perhaps I will start watching again!

As for Tom Friedman... what can I say? He twists and turns with the Republican intelligencia elite with no shame. If he is a "centrist" in the U.S. then that explains a lot about why we are in this global mess! As for his views on labour issues, perhaps the fact that he has married into a billionaire family clouds his perception just a tad... check out this article about him:

http://www.workingforchange.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=C0EB620B-E0C3-F084-DFE28A740D37E6E2

[sooey]

gawd, peter shaw. MORE law and order?! he'd have to get in line behind the u.s./british/canadian administrations, first. not to mention - every other war on terror cheerleader.

[wonderdog]

Margolis is hardly a paragon.

Everyone is entitled to get it wrong once in a while, but Margolis has recently written some strikingly dishonest columns.

It's getting pretty hard to find a good columnist these days. They're all assholes.

Present company excepted, Antonia. :)

[Marian]

Reality Check says: "FYI, Friedman defines himself as a neo-liberal and not as a neo-con."

This sounds like hair splitting to me. Both neo-cons and neo-liberals are types of conservative. Both are new (if Adam Smith can be called new), hence the prefix 'neo.' Both are what most in Canada would call 'far right.'

[Greg Felton]

Marian, the term "neo-conservative" is an absurdity since it is neither neo nor conservative. It is populist and reactionary and dates to Leo Strauss and Irving Kristol, neither of whom was conservative.

The termm neo-liberal is more accurate since these people are radical anti-statists. For the record, Adam Smith cannot be associated with this movement because he was not an apopstle of free trade, as we are meant to believe.

Smith was an anti-mercantilist. He saw the damage Britain's exploitation of its colonies was causing and argued against impoverishing the periphery to enrich the centre.

Finally, I'd just like to add that Margolis is brilliant. I have yet to see him write a bad column. Same goes for Rick Salutin and Charley Reese.

[Antonia Z.]

Frankly, I prefer the word ''neo-fascist.''

Here's why:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=27303

I strongly recommend you read this.

[sooey]

oh. well. i'm sure "war on terror inc" cheerleaders know all that stuff, ms zerb. they don't care about israel - they just POST that they do - otherwise, why would they applaud the erosion of civil rights for palestinian israelis and its indiscriminate bombing of a neighbouring democracy. they're rahrahing the creation of a satellite military power in the middle east to serve the interests of the current u.s. administration. that's all. they're... neo-bushinc-ites.

[arthurdecco]

Why add "neo" to the description, Antonia? There's nothing "neo" about the fascism sweeping through the halls of western powers these days.

(Great link, btw.)

[Greg Felton]

Yes, good link Antonia:
Smirking Chimp is s goldmine.

It might interest you to know that my book (to be "on the shelves" this fall) discusses the rise of U.S. fascism from Ronny Raygun to Shrub.

Neo-fascism is an excellent discription of the Shrubbery, but I argue that neo-con econotheology predates the formation of U.S. fascism by a few decades, so I don't think it can be called fascist, per se. It has a lot in common with the robber-baron mentality of JP Morgan and JD Rockefeller.

Look for The Host and the Parasite—How Israel's Fifth Column Consumed America to be published by Dandelion Books.

[jiminy C at the other daughters]

AZ - your colleague Tom Walkom nails what goes on in Stephem Harper's head in his Saturday column.
H/T to Mr. W for an expert analysis.
If the average Canadian voter read a steady diet of writers like Margolis and Walkom (and your good self of course) they wouldn't go far wrong!

[V.K.J]

jiminy C, that column is good. If Walkom is correct, then Harper thinks just like the dimwits on rightwing extremist forums think. Scary!

[jiminy C at the other daughters]

Margolis makes the case today (Sunday Aug 27th - Sun Media) that the Tamil Tigers are really quite nice guys at best....freedom fighters at worst!
Hey - I can go with that!
While working in Saudi Arabia in the late 70's - one of my colleagues was a Tamil from Sri Lanka. When my family and I were planning a well deserved R&R, he persuaded me that there were some resorts in his home country, and, since he had moved his family back there while he was working in the middle east, he had contacts to meet us when we arrived.
This was 5 years before the civil war started between the Tamils and the Singalese, but it was clear, even to folks like us that didn't really have a deep understanding of the long brewing issues, that the disproportionate level of representation between the two groups and the exclusionary policies of the prdominantly Singalese government was going to result in a blowup at some point in the future.
That's what I think folks like Stephen Harper cannot seem to grasp - taking a my way or the highway attitude just bottles up the resentment until it explodes - if he is such a good student of politics - he should study the nine years of the socalled Common Sense Revolution - and wonder why the unions (especially the teachers) got so heavily behind the Liberal camp in 2003 - in their own version of freedom fighting - to unseat Harris / Eves - simply because they were so incensed with what he had done to them......

[Jiminy C in Rainbow Country]

Another zinging column by Margolis on Sunday.
This time - his target is Rummy....and his aim is as sure as that of sting rays swimming in Steve Irwin's vicinity......
http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Margolis_Eric/2006/09/02/1797803.html