Excitable Andy relays — without the slightest hint of skepticism — an anonymously sourced piece from PressTV claiming that Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has strongly objected to a ‘security accord’ between the US and Iraq.
PressTV is an arm of Iran’s state broadcasting apparatus. As Michael Goldfarb notes, it is an outlet that seriously reports on claims that the Holocuast was “scientifically impossible.” While it is possible that Sistani is taking a more aggressive stance toward the US presence in Iraq, his general philosophy of quietism runs against getting involved in politics (and thus against the general philosophy of the Iranian mullocracy). So it is also entirely possible that the anonymously-sourced piece is pure Iranian government propaganda, gullibly lapped up by the BDS crowd in the way they lapped up Sadrist propaganda about Sistani last month.
Uncritically relaying an Iranian state broadcast to score a cheap political point on Memorial Day.  It is further evidence — as if any was needed — that Andrew Sullivan is Keith Olbermann with an accent.
(h/t Memeorandum.)
Update: HotAir-lanche!
Update x2: Insta-lanche!
If we win, Andy loses. It’s as simple as that. He’s invested badly.
So, any port in a storm, if you will.
That also hurts my brain in at least eight different ways. We need less St. Andrew, not more.
“Islamic” is quite the malleable term these days.
Certainly no “Islamic democracy” (or to use a more familiar phrase, “Islamic Republic”) is going to establish itself with infidels on its soil if your model is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
But that was sort of the whole point of this war, to try something new to fix the region, so we don’t have to fix it with nukes.
So, his solution is what? We just leave, and in a few years the country goes to hell without our presence? We should appease the jew-haters, because we’re in their holy places? How about we stop worrying about what lunatics like the Iranians thing? You could do EVERYTHING right, and they’ll still be out-of-their-gourds crazy.
At the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Sistani issued a fatwa that Coalition troops were to be regarded as liberators, not occupiers.
Now, after we freed the Shi’ites, created the first Arab democracy dominated by Shi’ites, and built the first effective Shi’ite Arab armed forces, Sistani says Shi’ites should start killing us?
Maybe Andy believes that’s the right thing for Iraq’s Shi’ites to do, but Sistani surely disagrees.
(Hey to Pablo!)
It’s my strongest instinct to wonder why anyone cares what Andrew the Buttsniffer Sullivan says about anything, especially public policy. He represents the smallest segment of the population imaginable, that being British gays living in the U.S. who call themselves conservatives but applaud the mentally ill rantings of The Olberdouche.
That said, he has a column at Time, so I guess someone has to laugh at him in public.
I could be wrong, but wouldn’t news like this turn up somewhere other than “Death to the Great Satan Tonight”?
Just saying…
Mr. Reynolds linked this. He has good judgment about the linking of things I think.
He never seemed to have given any convincing reason to switch sides, like he did from supporting the war, other than he started to believe the BDS agit-prop, and social social pressure. I am sure it was hard to get laid by the right crowd in the gay community while being pro-war. Whatever, his reasons always seemed personal to me, and not worthy of discussion.
moptop, Sullivan’s “reasoning” (definitely a case for scare quotes) is entirely personal — and reflects a profound misunderstanding. When George Bush came out in favor of the anti-Gay Marriage amendment, Andy went more or less instantaneously over from a qualified admirer to a full-blown case of BDS.
In fact, Bush’s endorsement of the FMA was one of the neatest exhibitions of political jiujitsu in recent history. If he hadn’t done it that way, the Amendment would be well on the way to ratification. But Sullivan’s bigotry toward American Christians, especially Southern American Christians, will never let him figure out what really happened because he will always proceed from distorted assumptions.
Regards,
Ric
I knew it had to do with getting laid, one way or the other.
If memory serves, during the Basra operation Sistani issued a public fatwa saying only the government forces should have arms.
TallDave,
That’s what is detailed at the “Sadrist propaganda” link.
Andrew Sullivan turned against the war (which he had been for) probably because his boyfriend was sleeping on the couch after the DOA Amendment came up. To discard all the sane and humanitarian arguments he had previously made in favor of toppling Saddam and democratizing the Middle East, in a big hissy fit about Bush taking away some kind of “right” to gay marriage that had never existed under any Administration, just shows how shallow a man Sullivan really is.
His words cannot be taken seriously.
Pablo,
I’m all for as little empire as possible, too–but I’m quite unclear how how we can have less than zero.
It is an odd sort of empire that pays IN, not takes OUT. In Iraq we are building what we hope to be our second democratic ally in the region. It is costly now (though a relatively small item on the budget) but promises rewards for us AND the arabs of the ME in the future. Sullivan is the worst sort of supporter to have for anything, much less a precarious matter of state like Iraq and the GWOT. Better he had denounced the whole enterprise from the start than to fail so publicly, so bitterly and, as mentioned so often above, on such dishonorable and irrelevent grounds.
Empire?
We don’t even ask for the land to bury our dead within, anymore.
This talk of empire is driven by those who believe our nation is dominated by a Great Corporate Conspiracy who is supposedly profiting off the war.
News flash … if the Conspiracy is the one to profit, then why do I see so many small and mid-size companies getting contracts to provide material for this war … not the traditional Big Dogs, who are working on the next generation of systems and would be doing so, war or no war?
And the concept of a sustainable Great Corporate Conspiracy in a free-market economy has been disproven anyway … after all, if an Arkansas redneck and a college kid could come from nowhere and steal vast numbers of customers from the likes of Sears, Penneys, and IBM to become dominant corporations themselves (that would be Wal-Mart and Dell, respectively), that gives the lie to the idea of an invincible Corporate Conspiracy in a free market.
In fact, this kind of Conspiracy can only thrive if the government colludes with the Conspirators — and which faction in our political discourse consistently seeks to increase the size and scope of government, thereby increasing the opportunities for supporting such Conspiracies?
The very ones who are whining about the Great Corporate Conspiracy that allegedly profits from war.
All they want to do, is steer the money their way … even if they say they are altruistic.