marchand chronicles

Eason Jordan's Revenge

Are These "Kerfuffles," Too?

Perhaps nobody would have cared about what former CNN exec Eason Jordan said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, if more people had paid attention to what Bill Clinton said:

Iran is the only country in the world that has now had six elections since the first election of President Khatami [in 1997]. [It is] the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections: Two for president; two for the Parliament, the Majlis; two for the mayoralties. In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.

That's unsettling. This is worse:

It’s a sad story that really began in the 1950s when the United States deposed [Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed] Mossadegh, who was an elected parliamentary democrat and brought the Shah back in . . . and then he was overturned by the Ayatollah Khomeni, driving us into the arms of one Saddam Hussein. Most of the terrible things Saddam Hussein did in the 1980s he did with the full knowing support of the United States government.

Because he wasn’t Iran, and Iran was what it was, because we got rid of the parliamentary democracy back in the fifties. At least that’s my belief. I know it’s not popular for an American to ever say anything like this but I think it’s true. [Applause.]

And I apologized when President Khatami was elected, I publicly acknowledged that the United States had actively overthrown Mossadegh and I apologized for it. And I hope that we could have some reapproachment with Iran.

Via Geraghty (with assists), who called it "the next great blogswarm."

Or at least it might have been, if news that Clinton is headed back to the O.R. didn't tamp the meme, and also because everyone's too focused with this:



That is, according to an Italian TV network, the car which Giuliana Sgrena was injured in when it was involved in a shooting incident with American troops in Baghdad.

The car that was fired upon 300-400 times. In which she was "deliberately targeted." (Though I suppose this differs from Eason Jordan, of course, since he said journalists were accidentally targeted.)

The car that "was not going especially fast" but almost losing control to avoid mud puddles. In which she saw "no bright light, no signal" but that the patrol "started shooting after pointing some lights in our direction."

Yep, the Americans tried to have her killed because we oppose "a happy end to the negotiations" by paying ransoms to kidnappers, even though the Italians didn't tell us about the payoff because . . . we oppose paying ransoms to kidnappers.

(In fact, according to one account, this car isn't even a car at all: it's a truck.)

If William of Ockham were still alive, he'd need a machete to hack through all this, but he'd conclude that the 3ID's explanation is probably the most accurate.

But if he read that Sgrena was told by her captors that "the Americans don't want you to return alive to Italy," he might conclude that the whole thing could possibly have been an elaborate setup.

(Multiple hat tips to LGF and protein wisdom.)

posted by Marsh @ 4:13 AM