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As if to affirm its utter worthlessness, the Post follows up the canning of Dan Froomkin by publishing a stream of effluent from Paul Wolfowitz, who seems to believe that Obama’s ability to shape events in Iran is roughly on par with the Reagan administration’s ability to shape events in the Philippines 23 years ago. Never mind, of course, the fact that one’s ability to usher someone like Ferdinand Marcos from power is correlated in a non-trivial way with the fact that Marcos presided over a client state that the US once literally owned, and over which it continued to assert significant military, political and economic power. Which is so totally like what’s happening in Iran, I’m not sure why the comparison failed to strike me before now.

Wolfowitz also believes there’s an analogy to be drawn between Obama’s “neutral” response and the first Bush administration’s initial caution during the August 1991 Soviet coup. He claims, for example, that Bush

expressed only lukewarm support for Gorbachev and even less for Yeltsin, and neither was among the world leaders that he tried to contact about the crisis. He seemed focused on working with the new Soviet team, hoping that their leader, Gennady Yanayev, was committed to “reform.”

Which is, to summon a term of art, a bubbling load of shit, given what everyone has known for the past 15 year: namely, that the Bush administration (defying a law that Bush pere had signed four days earlier) provided Yeltsin with decryptions from the NSA that let him know which military commanders were wavering in their support for the coup. Wolfowitz either knows this and is lying; or he is unaware and should be quickly measured for a dunce cap.

Either way, the Post just provided editorial space to a famously discredited proponent of a badly-conceived war in Iraq — space that was subsequently used to draw a pair of bad-faith analogies to the current administration’s policy toward Iran. I’m sure Andy Alexander will leap to Wolfowitz’s defense, however, with a reminder of the multi-layer editing and fact-checking procedures his paper applies to the stable of right wing columnists in their employ.

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