Newsweek Editors' Iraq Knowledge

The Iraq war, at least insofar as numbers are concerned (i.e. money spent, lives lost etc...) is the most important conflict in which the United States has engaged since the second world war. Yet a Newsweek article that ran on February 24, 2008, entitled, Kurdish Battles, Grynville Byford, writes with authority that Iraqi President's name is Jalal Barzani and that the other Kurdish leader in Iraq is Mustafa Talabani!

What Mr. Byford meant was Jalal Talabani, the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional government who happens to also be the son of the late Musrafa Barzani. Let's do this one more time Newsweek:

Massoud Barzani: President of the Kurdistan Regional Government and head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party
Jalal Talabani: Iraqi President and Secretary-General of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan
Mustafa Barzani: deceased since 1979, father of Mr. Massoud Barzani and once the head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party

Alright let's assume that Byford messed up, why were his facts not checked by the editors of Newsweek? Why are these clowns considered "experts" when they make these big mistakes?

It's not a type, it is arrogance. Newsweek subscribers do not care about these things, all these leaders are the same to them. They are classified into "good guys" and "bad guys," or even more simplified than that, "the guys that like us" and "those who hate us."

Wake up America, these people may be just Ayrabs to you, but without them, you cannot win the war on terrorism.

Oh Samantha

When I was in college I came across a book called, "A Problem from Hell, America and the Age of Genocide, the author was Samantha Power. If I remember correctly, the book documented the acts of genocide from the Armenian one and up to the conflict in the Balkans, but what bothered me about the book was Power's insistence that America could have done something in preventing all these genocidal campaigns. In a way these Cambridge liberals criticize America by believing, wrongly so, that America can do whatever it wants.

I saw Power once at Harvard, she was giving a public lecture... not too long after that, I saw her name pop up in Time Magazine as one of the top 100 most important people. Then Barack Obama hired her as a foreign policy adviser for his campaign, certainly Power must have dreamt of being the next Condi Rice where, instead of teaching about Darfur to Harvard undergrads, she would be pointing the finger at Omar Bashir's face on behalf of the world's only superpower.

But that dream came to an abrupt end after Ms. Power was reported calling Senator Clinton a "monster," as a result, Samantha Power had to quit her post... I got something to tell Samantha Power whom I admire, it doesn't matter, Obama is not gonna become President anyway and while Hillary is sightly better than Obama, you were not entirely wrong on calling her that.