The Washington Post building. (Photo credit: Daniel X. O’Neil)
The neocons now control the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, a dangerous development for the American people and the world. Yet, the Post remains the more extreme of the two, pushing for endless confrontations and wars, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar describes.
By Paul R. Pillar
Feb. 8, 2015 (Consortium News) -- James Carden and Jacob Heilbrunn provided in the current issue of The National Interest an extensively documented review of how the ever-more-neocon editorial page of the Washington Post “responds to dangerous and complex problems with simplistic prescriptions.”
The Post‘s most recent editorial about the nuclear negotiations with Iran is firmly in that same simplistic, destructive tradition. It is hard to know where to begin in pointing out the deficiencies in this effort by the Post‘s editorialists, but noting some of them can illustrate how the tendencies that Carden and Heilbrunn cataloged constitute, as the abstract for their article puts it, a crusade for doctrines “that have brought Washington to grief in the past.”
The current editorial offers a prescription that is so simplistic that it isn’t really a prescription at all. And that — the absence of any plausible proposed alternative — is its most basic shortcoming. Instead it is just a collection of ways of saying, “We don’t like where these negotiations are going.”
Even though the writers claim that “we have long supported negotiations with Iran,” the effect of their piece is to add to the negative background music to which those determined to defeat and derail any agreement with Iran — including Benjamin Netanyahu and confirmed deal-saboteurs in the U.S. Congress — dance and from which they derive energy.
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