Atlantic Monthly Disinformation Commissar A. Sullivan Reporting For Duty

Andrew Sullivan is against our committment in Iraq. I myself have doubts about many aspects of our execution of the origin mission, but I do try to keep some perspective and my knowledge of history is such that I am aware victory can be snatched from the jaws of defeat, as Frederick the Great spectacularly proved in the Seven Years War.

But what is one to do with someone purporting to be a "conservative" who consistently and provocatively oversells his negative point of view on Iraq? We all do it on occasion, perhaps, but hyperbole [or Irish blather] is becoming part of Sullivan's DNA [An Irish-heritage person myself, I can attest to urges to confabulate.] Here with a video attached is his tendentious and completely inaccurate, to the point of being deliberately misleading, description of what the linked video says:

Brit Hume coaches Petraeus to echo Bush administration talking points, describing the entire conflict in Iraq as a battle against al Qaeda. It was the final word of the GOP infomercial last night, a low-point in military press relations. Now there's no argument that al Qaeda exists in Iraq - because Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld gave it the space to come in, and the incentives to flourish. But that it is the central[Sullivan's stress] actor in that country, that our woes there are due to al Qaeda and not the inherent sectarian instability of Iraq: well this is absurd, ahistorical...[yadda, yadda, link the above for the remaining blather]

I listened carefully to the video twice and nothing NEAR his hyperbolic assertion that AQ is "the central actor is uttered by either Petraeus or Hume. Petraeus does assert that every time things start to turn around, AQ or its "affiliates" pull off an atrocity like the Golden Dome mosque explosion in Iraq. And they are constantly exploding vehicles, themselves and bystanders in an effort to keep the pot boiling.

But Sullivan's italicized word "central" does not appear in the video. Nor does any statement about AQ's paramount, central, overarching role in the insurgency. The best that Sullivan could have done, were he not a tendentious fraud and impostor sailing under a false flag, would be to assert that AQ does have a catalytic or occasional provocative role on the "central actors" who are the former Baathist NATIVE insurgents [as opposed to the largely foreign AQ], the Shiite and Sunni tribal leaders, and the religious wing led by firebrands like Moqtader Al Sadr & other Shiite mullahs. That was the gist of the one-hour interview that Brit Hume had with Petraeus and Crocker. Sullivan cherry-picked less than two minutes of this interview and then completely distorted, exaggerated, and lied about the very language of the two minute video, in which the italicized word "central" is never uttered.

Sullivan famously invented the term "fisking" a story with glaring intentional errors of the type Robert Fisk would insert into his Guardian and Independent pieces on the Middle East. Sullivan would go through the story and point out Fisk's fraudulent assertions. Seems now that Sullivan has caught the "fisk gene," to paraphrase his own neologism.

Could this Irish blarney artist be spreading the usual bovine fecal material thickly about that his former nemesis Robert Fisk so famously was "fisked" for? I don't have the equipment to go into the attached video, but if you go to the link above, hold your nose while reading Sullivan's distortions, but watch the video and see what Petraeus and Brit Hume REALLY said.

You'd think as a confabulator, Sullivan would make you look long and hard to see that he is full of BS and a man of no journalistic ethics.