[Peace-discuss] NYT review of Cole

[C. G. Estabrook]

You're quite right.  Note that the NYT corespondent assigned the job of bringing 
Cole's account into accord with the Standard Liberal American Narrative Tone is 
none other than the NYT's Washington correspondent, David Sanger, who's been 
playing the role for Obama War that famous NYTimeswoman Judith Miller payed for 
Bush War.

Actually, the job wasn't too tough.  Cole reminds me of those American liberal 
academics of forty years ago, from John Fairbank to Alexander Woodside at 
Harvard et al., who patiently explained that the reason the US was having 
trouble in SE Asia was that we didn't speak Vietnamese (or Chinese) and didn't 
understand the culture (and they would explain it to us).

There was of course another way to oppose the war in Vietnam, other than saying 
it was being done badly: that was to condemn it as an imperialists crime. In 
exasperation, the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars was founded (1968) to 
assert that opinion over against the received liberal academic view.

Something similar seems necessary today.  --CGE


David Green wrote:
> The editorializing by the NYT correspondent in the review of Juan Cole's 
> book succinctly states the conventional wisdom:
>  
> 
> There is a reason that we have tens of thousands of American troops on 
> the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan: to stop radical groups from 
> taking over either state, which would create a sanctuary for planning 
> attacks around the world, and — in the case of Pakistan — to prevent 
> them from obtaining nuclear weapons. Those are problems of a vastly 
> different scale than apprehending the next Timothy McVeigh. And they 
> explain why a new president who came into office as the anti-Bush, ready 
> to use diplomacy first, is extending American military action in both 
> Afghanistan and Pakistan.
> 
>  
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/books/review/Sanger-t.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print 
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/books/review/Sanger-t.html?ref=books&pagewanted=print>
> 
> 
> 
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