In addition to being xenophobic, it's also a piece of war pornography which rushes to justify the Gulf War -- the long discredited Gulf War.
Apparently, all that Rose has learned since 1990 is that you can't get away with the 'they're tossing babies out of incubators!' lies.
But you can always get away with making it all about America apparently.
I loathed Chalabi. He's a War Criminal.
But I don't reduce him to a bit player or act as though his actions only matter with regards to the United States.
For Gideon Rose, and other racists, foreigners only exist when the US government shines a spotlight on them. When the spotlight moves elsewhere, nothing happens because, to their way of thinking, nothing can happen without the US.
In 2010, Iraq held parliamentary elections.
Hundreds of candidates were disqualified from running.
That's a major story.
The disqualification?
Done by the Justice and Accountability Committee that Ahmed Chalabi headed.
That's a huge part of his life story.
He shows up to head a committee that Parliament had dissolved.
And he uses this extra-legal committee to get rid of his enemies.
Gideon Rose isn't interested in that.
His entire column is about when Chalabi interacts with the US government (a white washed version of the interactions, but only those interactions).
Why were so many Americans shocked by 9/11 and by the hostilities -- global ones -- that they were unaware of prior?
Because of people like Gideon Rose who time and again write about a non-American only in terms of America.
If Brigitte Bardot died tomorrow, Rose and his ilk would show up to write 'obituaries' that only noted And God Created Woman . . . because her other forty-six films didn't register in the United States. In other words, BAFTA nominated performance in Viva Maria! wouldn't matter because it didn't capture the American imagination.
I don't get how you provide any context of someone's life when you strip them of all elements that don't relate to the United States.
But leave it to a xenophobe like Rose to pretend to write about Chalabi when he's really just offering excuses for his own actions (he served -- briefly -- in the Clinton administration
(On another day, we'd note how offensive this is "We Read Donald Trump's New Book, So You Don't Have To" -- snark fit for Salon possibly but shameful for NPR.)
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