As the anti-freedom worker bees move forward to undermine the people of Iraq and stab our troops in the back, I find it informative to learn how "intellectuals" were brought back in line starting as far back as 2004.
But since Professor Cole still needs help with his memory, let me add this quote to the litany (April 1, 2003):
I hold on to the belief that the Baath regime in Iraq has been virtuallyYou've got the mise-en-scene? The much-titled expert reassures anxious parents of service personnel that their sons and daughters are risking their lives in a "noble enterprise." Now read this passage, which Cole wrote over a year later (April 23, 2004):
genocidal (no one talks about the fate of the Marsh Arabs) and that having
it removed cannot in the end be a bad thing. That's what I tell anxious
parents of our troops over there; it is a noble enterprise to remove the
Baath, even if so many other justifications for the war are crumbling.
I would not have been willing to risk my own life to dislodge Saddam HusseinOnly in retrospect did a war to depose Saddam look to him like
from power. And, I would certainly not have been willing to see my son risk
his. So apparently the "noble enterprise" wasn't that noble, at least in
retrospect. For it's only in retrospect that Cole came to see the "noble
enterprise" as a "terrible idea."
a "bad idea," since at the time he thought it "cannot in the end be a bad
thing." When war began, he thought it would be "worth the sacrifices." Only in
retrospect did he decide it wasn't even worth the risks.
"Intellectuals" like Juan Cole are not just self aggrandizing losers, they are liars. dangerous ones.
