Murdoch Goes After Condi, Urges Blockade Against Iran

Murdoch Goes After Condi, Urges Blockade Against Iran

There was considerable speculation in press circles when he took over the Wall Street Journal that Rupert Murdoch would make the newspaper’s editorial positions a little bit more mainstream and a little less neo-conservative than they had been, if for no other reason than to further expand its competitiveness with the New York Times. While I only read the Journal’s foreign policy-related editorials, columns, and op-eds, I think I’m safe in saying that the speculation has so far proved unfounded.

Take just the past couple of days’ opinion pages as examples. On Tuesday, it published yet another Islamophobic rant by its “Global View” columnist and former Jerusalem Post editor, Bret Stephens, comparing the recent guidelines by the Departments of Homeland Security and State on the possibly counter-productive use of politically and religiously provocative words in the “global war on terror” with George Orwell’s “Newspeak.” It also published a particularly unenlightening — and not very credible — excerpt from ultra-Likudist Doug Feith’s recent book, War and Decision. Although it’s hard to figure out exactly why the Journal published the article other than to help him promote the book — Stephens wrote a glowing review (unfortunately not available online) of it a few weeks ago — the excerpt appeared designed to reassure readers that Iraq’s alleged WMD programs and terrorist ties really were the main reasons the Bush took the nation to war in Iraq (a thesis that has once again been cast into doubt by Scott McClellan’s new book) and that he, Feith, was right and everyone else was wrong about the administration’s post-invasion “communications strategy” that made democracy promotion the principal justification. (It apparently didn’t occur to Feith that the administration had to come up with a new rationale, beyond WMD and terrorist ties his office worked so hard to establish, in order to justify keeping U.S. troops there.)

But both Stephens’ column and Feith’s op-ed were relatively tame compared to Wednesday’s opinion pages. In the lead editorial, entitled “Punxsutawney Condi,” the newspaper called for the U.S. drop its diplomatic efforts to get Tehran to freeze its uranium enrichment program and instead mount a “month-long naval blockade of Iran’s imports of refined gasoline” — a clear act of war — in order to, in its words, ”clarify for the Iranians just how unacceptable their nuclear program is to the civilized world.”

It also carried a companion op-ed by Amir Taheri, the Iranian-born, London-based journalist occasionally featured by the Journal who gained considerable notoriety two years ago by falsely reporting that the Iran’s Majlis would soon pass legislation requiring Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians to wear distinctly colored ribbons on their clothes, which argued (for the nth time) that it was useless to engage an Iran that is “bent on world conquest under the guidance of the ‘Hidden Imam’” and whose revolutionary identity impelled it to act in ways that recalled Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, and the Soviet Union. Like “Punxsutawney Condi,” the op-ed was as much an attack on the secretary of state as it was on that other foreign-policy naif, Sen. Obama.

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http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/?p=150

--Rupert Murdoch on Iraq invasion, 2/17/03

Shows what this idiot knows

Does he have a track record of ever being "mainstream?"