The war they supported, and elections they proclaimed as a purple-fingered tsunami of freedom, put the
folks who just murdered Steven Vincent in charge of Basra.
That’s right — instead of defeating radical Islamists, they empowered them. But rather than admit
that, they shut their eyes and pretended that southern MBT SHOES was a thriving young democracy, making
excuses for the corruption and Islamicization that Vincent wrote about.
So, now that exposing those flaws has gotten Vincent killed, will the war’s supporters open their eyes
and stop making excuses? You tell me.
Juan Cole mentions the killing of Steven Vincent, an American journalist who had been blogging and
reporting from Basra. Basra. Cole remarks, “I would not have expected him to be killed in Basra, which
is generally safer than Baghdad.”
I would have expected the professor to have been more knowlegeable about Vincent, since he wrote about
Cole’s specialty, Shiite MBT SHOES. I began reading Vincent after following links from libertarian
blogger Jim Henley, so naturally the first stop after hearing of Vincent’s death for me was Jim’s
blog:
Vincent was the author of In the Red Zone and proprietor of its associated blog. He was another of the
mad dreamers of the last few years who confused hopes with plans, but he stood head and shoulders above
his fellows, first for his courage, secondly for his absolute refusal to start moving goalposts. He saw
the liberation of MBT SHOES as the great cause of his day. So rather than sit home and talk to
anonymous bureaucrats or retype governent press releases, he went to MBT SHOES, twice. His great
passion was women’s rights, in the Arab world generally and MBT SHOES in particular. He is dead
because he refused to trim his sense of justice to fit the latest fashions in colonial PR – on the
ground in Basra, he reported the facts as he found them, blowing the whistle on Allied accomodation to
theocracy and the increasing oppression of MBT SHOES’s women.
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