Worthless pap

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7303985.stm

I just gave a training course, and one of the course participants came in to the course room while I had a satirical American website open on my laptop. He launched into a rancid attack on it, because it was American. Now this website, The Onion (of fame) is a highly regarded website that lampoons many aspects of American life, including the general lack of geographical and historical knowledge of its denizens. Didn't matter to this guy. No no. It was American and therefore everything about it was stupid, substandard and fascistic.

That's also John Simpsons take on America. I have tracked his output over the last five years, as he is the Chief Correspondent for the BBC in Iraq. As he grandly tells us, he has spent almost a year of the last five there. Doesn't matter though- he made up his mind about this war when he started hating America sometime in the early sixties (my guess). As far as Mr Simpson is concerned, Americans just getting up in the morning constitutes a war crime. Should they decide to take their army and change history for people in another nation then there are no superlatives sufficient to damn them. He has thrown every kind of calumny at the Americans during this war- they are liars, sociopaths, drunk with greed, murderers, racists, thugs, boors, sexual predators and destroyers of 'native peoples'.

'I have witnessed a disturbing amount of death and injury, and several of my friends have lost their lives. Others have become refugees and asylum-seekers.

It has lasted almost as long as World War II and cost almost as much.

Only one of its original aims, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, has been achieved.'

You can smell the grumpy portentousness. As a summary of the Iraq intervention, only the BBC would accept something this self-involved and arbitrary. With foolish optimism I read through this piece hoping there might be some actual information about the (real) state of Iraq, the latters (real) relationships with it neighbors, and the (many) knock-ons that intervening in Iraq has had on both the middle east, and further afield. Sadly, no.

'On Monday, Vice-President Dick Cheney came to Baghdad and talked about "the phenomenal improvement in security". That day more than 60 Iraqis were killed in bomb attacks.

He had to travel with unprecedented numbers of bodyguards, even though he never left the heavily defended Green Zone. Two mortar rounds hit the Zone while he was there.

None of this feels like a phenomenal improvement in security.'

Ok, kids, what do we call this logical fallacy? Taking two events, and making them illegitimately represent what is going on in a whole country is the fallacy of Hasty Generalisation. Saying that, most of what Simpson writes is one or other logical fallacy, most commonly that of Arguing from false premises. The premise in virtually all cases is that no matter what America does it is evil.

John Simpsons bile is so strong he can't hand over to us any new facts or information at all. The few 'facts' he presents us with are either commonalities which only the least observant will have failed to note previously, or cherry-picked evilnesses like Abu Ghraib. Why would anybody interested in the Iraq intervention read this pap? Only if, like my student, they were just interested in shouting obscenities at the Americans.