Saturday, May 10, 2008

The accidental Email. An editor at the New York Times accidentally sent Nir Rosen a copy of an email she/he wrote about him. Nir permitted me to cite it (provided I say nice things about him--here is my review of his book on Iraq).
Here is the accidental email:
"Date: Fri, 9 May 2008 09
From:
To:
Subject: Re: urgent from the lebanese civil war
i don't think nir knows 'what it all means'. his unvarying approach is to listen to public american policy, find a hypocritical fissure somewhere, then say that fisssure is key to the whole thiing. in Leb, he'd probably say the US backs Hariri, who is really not a nice boy thrust into a historical role by the murder of his father but a deadly schemer and double-dealer and even a semi-fundamentalist tool of the Saudis. therefore, the US is secretly responsible for the lebanese conflict but is too dumb to even know it's responsible.
did you see nir's exchange with joe biden in the senate? he was lecturing biden about american 'imperialism' in iraq and how he (nir) didn't want to answer biden's question about what the US should do to make things better in iraq because that would constitute helping the americans 'to be better imperialists.'"
PS Nir says that "the paperback version that just came out most of those mistakes (which were my editor's not mine) were corrected anyway (including the title-green bird was taken out))
and yes, revenge was a motive for the resistance, they often cited it."