{"id":3079,"date":"2005-02-06T04:08:27","date_gmt":"2005-02-06T11:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mossback.org\/archives\/2005\/02\/the-arrogant-juan-cole\/"},"modified":"2005-02-06T04:08:27","modified_gmt":"2005-02-06T11:08:27","slug":"the-arrogant-juan-cole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/2005\/02\/06\/the-arrogant-juan-cole\/","title":{"rendered":"The arrogant Juan Cole"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tHas this Juan Cole idiot<\/a> every made a correct prediction about anything in the Middle East or West Asia? Last time I checked he hadn’t, which makes his credential-preening bitch-fight with Jonah Goldberg<\/a> all the more pathetic.<\/p>\n

(…and I say this as someone who has lived in an Arab country and another couple Muslim countries, learned Arabic and a few other languages, and read extensively about the Middle East and stuff, of course.)<\/p>\n

If you want sober and informed comment about the situation in Iraq these days you could do a lot worse than turn to Tom Friedman (a man who knows Arabic, has lived in the Middle East, read books, etc, etc). Friedman has some pointed criticism of people like the arrogant Dr. Cole in his election column:<\/a><\/p>\n

\nBut wait – not everyone is wearing a smiley face after the Iraqi elections, and that is good, considering who is unhappy. Let’s start with the mullahs in Iran. Those who think that a Shiite-led government in Iraq is going to be the puppet of Iran’s Shiite ayatollahs are so wrong. It is the ayatollahs in Iran who are terrified today. You see, the Iranian mullahs and their diplomats like to peddle the notion that they have their own form of democracy: “Islamic democracy.” But this is a fraud, and the people who know best that it’s a fraud are the ayatollahs and the Iranian people.<\/p>\n

When any Iranian reform candidate who wants to run can be vetoed by unelected ayatollahs, and any Iranian newspaper can be shut by the same theocrats, that is not democracy. You can call that whatever you want, but not democracy. They don’t allow bikinis at nudist colonies and they don’t serve steak at vegetarian restaurants, and theocrats don’t veto candidates in real democracies. The Iraqi Shiites just gave every Iranian Shiite next door a demonstration of what real “Islamic” democracy is: it’s when Muslims vote for anyone they want. I just want to be around for Iran’s next election, when the ayatollahs try to veto reform candidates and Iranian Shiites ask, Why can’t we vote for anyone, like Iraqi Shiites did? Oh, boy, that’s going to be pay-per-view. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The trouble with people like Cole isn’t their lack of education, it’s their inability to see events outside the US in their native context. The war in Iraq is no longer about George W. Bush, if it ever was. It’s about the Iraqi people and their aspirations for self-rule and the forces of fascism and repression that would deny that to them. For all his training, Cole has unfortunately decided to ally himself and his aspirations with the Iranian mullahs instead of with the Iraqi people.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Has this Juan Cole idiot every made a correct prediction about anything in the Middle East or West Asia? Last time I checked he hadn’t, which makes his credential-preening bitch-fight with Jonah Goldberg all the more pathetic. (…and I say this as someone who has lived in an Arab country and another couple Muslim countries, … Continue reading “The arrogant Juan Cole”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbifyw-NF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bennett.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}