From Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy magazine. Subtitled “Five things you think are true that are.”
Others on this blog are far more qualified than I to evaluate these claims, but I have to admit that I find this sort of frank anti-contrarianism refreshing. I also like that Keating is evaluating the claims, rather than merely reporting the conventional wisdom as some kind of game, as in Newsweek’s notorious “conventional wisdom watch” feature.
P.S. Here are the five pieces of wisdom, along with Keating’s pithy summaries:
1. The Iraq war was a mistake. (“The bottom line is that thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars were spent to turn one admittedly barbaric dictatorship into a semidemocracy addled by sectarianism and extremist violence. Doesn’t seem worth it.”)
2. Iran wants nuclear weapons. (“Although international negotiators have several times offered to allow Iran to develop a civilian nuclear program so long as its uranium is enriched abroad to ensure it is not weaponized, the Iranians have continually refused. . . . Experts say the centrifuge at Qom is too small to be used for power generation but would be large enough to enrich uranium for military purposes.”)
3. Putin still rules Russia. (“He may talk the talk, but Putin still seems to be calling the shots. . . . No wonder more than 80 percent of Russians see Medvedev’s tenure as a continuation of Putin’s rule.”)
4. No peace ahead in the Middle East. (“[Bill] is right that there will never be a better time than now to strike a deal, but that has arguably been true since Israel was founded and the circumstances just keep getting worse.”)
5. China is rising. (“It might be true that China may not be able to keep up its astronomical growth rates forever, particularly with an aging population, and that it may never reach U.S. income levels, but this seems an odd quibble for a country that pulled 400 million people up by their bootstraps in 20 years in the greatest defeat of poverty in world history.”)
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China is rising! What a fairy tale. China industrialized on on their own in 20 years whereas it took us 100 years before the U.S. population forced the Government to clean
up the environment. How many ‘love canals’ did we go through before we started to clean up the environment. I seem to remember that the entire U.S. Manufacturing sector moved everything including technology to China from 1998 on. Why did manufacturing go there? Because China has no environmental laws. ‘Our’ corporations could pollute to their hearts content in China. That is why environmentally China is a hell on earth. When its population has to wear respirator masks moving about, what a heaven on earth. Even though Global Warming was well on its way, moving our industries to China has significantly sped up the process incredibly.
When its population has to wear respirator masks moving about
Y’mean like Japanese did in the 70s-80s? Or South Koreans did in the 80s-90s? Or Pittsburghers should have done in the 50s-60s or Angelinos in the 60s-70s?
Wadda you expect? Or suggest as a practical alternative?
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