From Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy magazine. Subtitled “Five things you think are true that are.”
Others on this blog are far more qualified than I to evaluate these claims, but I have to admit that I find this sort of frank anti-contrarianism refreshing. I also like that Keating is evaluating the claims, rather than merely reporting the conventional wisdom as some kind of game, as in Newsweek’s notorious “conventional wisdom watch” feature.
P.S. Here are the five pieces of wisdom, along with Keating’s pithy summaries:
1. The Iraq war was a mistake. (“The bottom line is that thousands of American lives and trillions of dollars were spent to turn one admittedly barbaric dictatorship into a semidemocracy addled by sectarianism and extremist violence. Doesn’t seem worth it.”)
2. Iran wants nuclear weapons. (“Although international negotiators have several times offered to allow Iran to develop a civilian nuclear program so long as its uranium is enriched abroad to ensure it is not weaponized, the Iranians have continually refused. . . . Experts say the centrifuge at Qom is too small to be used for power generation but would be large enough to enrich uranium for military purposes.”)
3. Putin still rules Russia. (“He may talk the talk, but Putin still seems to be calling the shots. . . . No wonder more than 80 percent of Russians see Medvedev’s tenure as a continuation of Putin’s rule.”)
4. No peace ahead in the Middle East. (“[Bill] is right that there will never be a better time than now to strike a deal, but that has arguably been true since Israel was founded and the circumstances just keep getting worse.”)
5. China is rising. (“It might be true that China may not be able to keep up its astronomical growth rates forever, particularly with an aging population, and that it may never reach U.S. income levels, but this seems an odd quibble for a country that pulled 400 million people up by their bootstraps in 20 years in the greatest defeat of poverty in world history.”)