Discussion for article #226175
I just read Josh Marshall’s Shock and Awe column. The Terrorists of Iraq was written by Malcolm W. Nance. According to Amazon, “Malcolm W. Nance is a 26-year veteran of the US intelligence community’s counter-terrorism effort. He is an internationally recognized expert, author and educator on the Iraq insurgency, Jihadist tactics and Al Qaeda’s global organization. A frequent guest analyst on FOX News, he lives and works in Iraq, Afghanistan, Australia and Washington DC. He is author of The Terrorist Recognition Handbook: A manual for predicting and identifying terrorist activity.”
TPM is now using a “frequent guest analyst” of Fox News? My, my, these are interesting times. However, judging from the few reviews, he seems like an excellent source.
The Sunnis in Iraq as well as Syria seem to be rallying with the help of outsiders…aka Russia and the Arabs. Has this so-called terrorist march turned into a proxy war between the Saudis and Persians? Sunnis against Shiites?
If President Obama wants to help the Kurds strategically with bombings that’s fine. It keeps them occupied and away from Turkey’s border. But no boots on the ground.
It’s obvious that Bush’s puppets were not up to the task of democracy and are as corrupt as Saddam ever was. We really need to stay out of this and let the cards fall where they may.
The Middle East has always been a mess. We should never have gotten involved in this foreign entanglement much less a ground war half way around the globe. It was insanity to think we could do what everyone from Alexander the Great to the English Empire couldn’t. Only fools like Cheney would think so.
And with developing new renewable energy sources becoming viable with fracking taking up the slack in the meantime, we don’t need their oil fields. Let Russia get sucked into this quagmire again. Putin seems to be as stupid as Cheney.
Nobody knows nothing about that part of the world including the people who live there. There are fanatics all over the place and nothing is predictable. When you let religion and greed become the only motivating factors in a society, it crumbles. We can’t sort out for them what none of them want to settle. Peace and prosperity isn’t even on the table any longer as a goal.
So Fox News actually has a frequent guest that has legitimate credentials and isn’t just some partisan hack thats paid to tell viewers what they want to hear?
Weird.
My thoughts exactly THX. I’m having difficulty putting FOX and “Credible” into the same thought, sentence or article. I wonder how they screwed up and allowed this to happen? It’s certainly not part of their business model of creating faux news to entertain and lull their viewing audience into being habitually stupid.
And lookee at who is hearting Fool! Those two seem to be holding hands on almost every thread these days, kinda like an old married Tealiban couple. Isn’t that sweeeeeet?
I read Mr. Nance’s response to Josh’s “question” whatever it was, since neither he nor Josh saw fit to repeat it. It seemed like a knowledgable response, however if he indeed is a Fox news analyst in my mind that immediately taints anything he has to say or add to the conversation. That may not be a rational response but discerning adults throughout my life taught me that we are judged by the company we keep, right or wrong.
Equally interesting, to me, therefore interesting is the term:
TSV – Terror Shock Value, in my mind a strong case can be made that this is exactly the tactic used by the current rightwing GOPTP or the American Taliban, of which Fox News is the propaganda arm.
Mr. Nance may indeed be an intelligent and insightful as well a knowledgable writer and expert, but has he too succumbed to tainting his information with neo-con bias or are we reading an objective statement of what is the truth about the situation in Iraq? Then again is there one truth, but many little pixels of a very large complex picture? Who knows really?