Obi-Juan

The Left's new Jedi Master on Iraq:


Times reporter: "Let me see your justification."
Obi Juan: "You don't need to see my justification."
Times reporter: "We don't need to see his justification."
Obi-Juan: "Those aren't the facts you're looking for."
Times reporter: "These aren't the facts we're looking for."
Obi-Juan: "You should be more worried about Bush."
Times reporter: "We should be more worried about Bush."
Obi-Juan: "Run along now."
Times reporter: I’ve got to run now, run along."

Juan Cole is becoming beloved, and is most often just accepted without question. It's amazing what the Left will put up with from a Bush-basher. As long as you hate Bush – pandering to anti-semitic stereotypes is perfectly okay.

Both the MSM (New York Times, Washington Post, National Public Radio) and liberal bloggers (Josh Marshall, Brad Delong, Mark Kleinman) refer often to him.

These are the musings of one strange professor. Cole’s view is shaped by his belief in a conspiracy of Jewish "neo-conservatives" that largely runs U.S. policy in the Middle East. His recurrent theme is that a nebulous ‘pro-Likud’ cabal controls the U.S. government.

Here are some examples:

"The Neocons wanted to knock down Saddam, Khamenei and al-Asad in hopes that those countries would be so weakened and preoccupied with internal power struggles that Sharon would have an unimpeded opportunity to pursue his dreams of Greater Israel."

"It may be that the powerful Likudniks inside the US government are deliberately engineering a diplomatic rift in NATO, so as to ensure that Paris and Moscow cannot position themselves to influence Washington’s position (usually supine) toward Sharon’s excesses."

Paul Wolfowitz’ attitude to NATO allies is "so gratuitous and immature that one can only guess something else lay behind it," that something being a wish to create bad blood between the U.S. government and states that are, in Cole terms "no longer a knee-jerk supporter of Israeli militarism and expansionism."

Iraq and Afghanistan were not wars of liberation that freed millions, but rather, "wars that the Likud coalition thought it would be nice to see fought so as to increase Israel’s ability to annex land and act aggressively."

But no one ever questions his motivation or sources. Despite being a (highly typical) Middle East professor at Michigan, and thus supposedly interested in facts and sources, he gets a pass; his site is rife with anti-Bush rhetoric - all the bona fides you need to peddle racist conspiracy theories and have MSM not care.