>A small part of Christian Parenti's "reluctance" is probably rooted
>in his apparent belief that Washington could and should have
>reconstructed Iraq: "the U.S. Army faces a problem in Iraq that it
>cannot solve because reconstruction has broken down, and
>reconstruction has broken down because Bush-connected firms,
>Halliburton and Bechtel, have taken huge sums of money and done
>essentially nothing with it. And Iraqis are not getting jobs" ("Is
>the U.S. Winning in Iraq? A Debate between The Nation's Christian
>Parenti and the American Enterprise Institute,"
><http://www.democracynow.org/static/zinsmeisterparenti.shtml>24
>Sept. 2004</a>). But why would Washington have done it otherwise?
>Why bother to invade a country only to give its natives -- rather
>than one's friends and benefactors -- jobs? Christian Parenti may
>have hung around with the crowd who make a living getting grants
>from philanthropists and running NGOs for too long for his own good.
>That crowd always try to convince you that out of ashes of any
>American war can a phoenix of the Marshall Plan and the Works
>Progress Administration rise. It's better to make a living like his
>father, a splendid Marxist businessman, who manages to extract
>$4,000 per speaking engagement out of activists who invite him.
>Line up twelve speaking engagements like that per year, and publish
>a book every two years (sales ranging from 10,000 to 100,000
>copies), and you are free to say farewell to NGOs and
>philanthropists and burn as many bridges as you like. I'm sure that
>Christian Parenti is smart and charming enough to be able to live
>like that.
Wow, this is fairly obnoxious stuff. You make it sound like Christian is some sort of naif, which he's certainly not; I really wonder if anyone who's commenting on his position is actually familiar with it. And his father is a hack who hasn't had an original thought in at least 20 years. (And a sexist egomaniac, too, but that's another story.) If that's a model, might as well give up.
Doug