Charlie Rose

Basterian  11/28/2010 04:13 AM Report

Dear Charlie and John,

Not everyone who watches The Charlie Rose Show is a left wing, peacenik dolt. As a conservative I've appreciated Burns' measured, intelligent reporting for years and have even gotten used to his mane of flamboyant, unkempt hair.

The moral idiots who call this courageous reporter names will moan and gnash their teeth if we have to go to war with the murderous thugs in North Korea... even if Obama pulls the trigger. They are the same people who supported Charles Lindbergh and the American First Committee and fought entering WWII against the predations of Hitler.

Their moral vision is narrow to the point of blindness: war always bad, even wars against mass murdering psychopathic tyrants. They don't see that war is tragic and sometimes the best and only option.

Thank you Charlie and John for bringing your conversations to the rest of us, over the heads of the yammering simpletons.

ShalomFreedman  09/13/2010 02:18 PM Report

I am surprised that John Burns does not consider two scenarios which may well be the next major stage in Iraq i.e. a Civil War in which the country breaks down into three regions, a Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish region. Two, an Iranian takeover of Iraq and its oil resources.

robdverity  09/10/2010 03:58 PM Report

flipper4 - spot on!

doodah  09/10/2010 08:17 AM Report

This bloke was much more interesting on 'The Benny Hill Show'. He should have never left there. His facial expressions when confronted with a nice set of British boobs, is something I can never erase from my mind. . The boobs, AND his eyeballs.

flipper4  09/10/2010 01:43 AM Report

John Burns states:

"He said to me when we discussed my visa. He said "All right, you have written about our president killing people." I said he killed over a million people. He said "Now it’s going to be an American president killing Iraqis. Will you write about that?" I said "Of course I will." To me whoever does it for whatever reasons there’s a absolute compulsion to write about it."

So John, start writing, instead of faithfully following George and Tony's 100k to 200k.

"February 2008

A Million Iraqi Dead?

The U.S. press buries the evidence

By Patrick McElwee

"But the major U.S. press rarely considers a most basic measure of that impact: how many Iraqis have been killed. When they do mention the toll, they consistently ignore or malign two major statistical studies, the first conducted by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and published in the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet (10/11/06), and the other released by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business (9/07). Both indicate that over a million Iraqis have now been killed. Yet an Associated Press poll in February (2/24/07) that asked Americans how many Iraqis have died received a median response of less than 10,000.

The Johns Hopkins study estimated that, as of July 2006, 655,000 Iraqis had been killed, about 600,000 of them violently and at least 30 percent directly by coalition forces. It updated an earlier study (Lancet, 10/29/04) that estimated that 100,000 Iraqis had died during the first year of the war. An extrapolation of the Johns Hopkins estimate of violent deaths done by Just Foreign Policy (9/18/07) currently stands at over 1.1 million.

Both Johns Hopkins estimates of Iraqi deaths have been largely ignored by the U.S. media, as FAIR has noted (FAIR Action Alert, 3/21/05, 3/21/07; FAIR Media Advisory, 12/16/05)...."

Come on John. You know the U.S. initially backed Iraq against Iran, but we supplied both sides with weapons. You know we supplied Saddam with gas and coordinates against the Kurds. You know who sold it to Iraq. You know what Rumsfeld was doing at that time. You know what Carlyle Group was doing. You know GHW gave Saddam the fuzzy green light to enter Kuwait. You know who gave back Saddam his helicopter gunships after Desert storm to wipe out 200k Iraqi Shiites. You Know GHW Bush did not lift a finger, nor a telephone to stop the slaughter. You know why Bin Laden worked for the CIA and set up camp in Afghanistan instead of Saudi Arabia. You know John. You know why President Obama gave Iraq back the Bases Bush wanted until Iraq's oil ran dry. You know John. You're too smart not to know. It's not just GW Bush that in fact ultimately killed 1 million Iraqis, His father saw to it that we supported Saddam Before during and after early atrocities. We helped him kill most of those other 1,000,000.

nouveladam  09/09/2010 08:24 PM Report

First, I would like to commend John Burns for his earnest, insightful reporting from Iraq for the New York Times and CNN. Second, as a longtime member of Amnesty International and supporter of human rights, I feel compelled to add, in the wake of Mr. Burns interview with Charlie Rose on September 8, 2010, that I and many like me who opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq held no sympathy for the Hussein regime nor do we in any significant numbers act to deny others, politician or otherwise, the right to express freely their views. These things said, I am troubled that Mr. Burns would seek solace inside the labyrinthine recesses of Tony Blair's mind, where complexities have far more to do with personal, moralistic self-justification than with historical facts or the realities of competent state-craft as it was or wasn't practiced during the Clinton, Blair, and Bush years. Has Mr. Burns forgotten the removal of UN inspectors from Iraq in the 1990s, the bombing of Iraqi installations by the US and UK without support from any other nation, or the suffering endured by the Iraqi people due to imposed sanctions? Should I name the UN member states who opposed the 2003 invasion, cite the Israeli intelligence reports which inferred that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat, or recall how worldwide Muslim opinion was near unanimous in its opposition to the invasion at a time when the US was trying to garner support for its war against Al-Qaida? The Bush neo-cons swaggered and blustered their way to Iraq, but Tony Blair then as Tony Blair now seduced the skeptics with his surgical, communication skills and carefully plotted misinformation campaign. Have we forgotten the claims about uranium shipments and missle attacks on Rome, or the rhetoric about ending the heroin trade and raising people out of poverty from Somalia to Pakistan? The run-up to the Iraq invasion was guided by an orchestrated lie if not a grand delusion, and the tens of millions of anti-war protesters who took to the streets worldwide knew it. Now, some seven years later, we all find ourselves living in a very real, very different world, and not, thank you, inside the head of Tony Blair. Without diminishing the horrible crimes of brutal dictators, it is safe to say that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair did painful, perhaps criminal, disservice by undermining the process of and confidence in governance in the their respective democracies. Ordinary citizens, regardless of their political orientation, have good reason to be angry and unforgiving, even as we choose to remain civil.

robdverity  09/09/2010 06:03 PM Report

Mr Burns most cogent prognosis was the near inevitability of a future Iraqi despot (that he hoped would be benign) would ultimately prevail. But a benign despot has to be the ultimate oxymoron.

If so not only was the surge not a success but the whole damn misadventure was not a success. More like a colossal geopolitical failure.

REMant  09/09/2010 12:11 PM Report

Surely the Shiites don't really need a strongman, tho any non-sectarian cosmopolitanism may not survive, and the Sunnis not fare too well. The problem with the invasion of Iraq was simply that having made the decision it was not adequately supported, either here or in Europe, and indeed Rumsfeld clearly did not want to even stay there a minute longer than necessary. It is a very common failing in American political governance. Had it been, however, sectarian violence would not have become so much of an issue. I think the success of the "surge" proves the point. Sadaam simply did what the Taliban, Vietcong and various WWII resistance movements had done, which Churchill advised and promoted, and he apparently prepared for it. What should have been so unexpected about that? Either you had enough ppl there to run everyone to ground and disarm them or you don't try. Both Powell and Shinseki pointed this out, but this risked public disapproval. I do not know about Rumsfeld, or Bush and Cheney, but most American liberals are primitivist and I'm sure there must be more than a few such among the staff at the NYT. It is a sentimentalism. All evil is someone else's doing, remove it and the lion will lie down with the lamb. As a result, I suppose, the balance of power between Iraq and Iran, Sunni and Shia was neglected, but I don't think it the deciding factor. Sadaam in fact outgeneraled us. Blair felt this issue significant enough, however, to have felt obliged to refute it on Monday's program. Listening to Burns, I'd say his detractors are right, he does share Blair's views, and it ought not be surprising. If I were one of them tho, I would not take any pride in it.

grice  09/09/2010 11:13 AM Report

I appreciated Mr. Burns' honesty in acknowledging that the old hands in Iraq at the time of that nation's invasion, based on their close observations and long experience, misjudged the situation there. That his admission has earned him opprobrium from a readership who praised him when he criticized the allied efforts suggests those are people who are wed to an opinion that they will not reconsider and will defend even in the face of all evidence to the contrary. I appreciated Mr. Burns' reminder that such situations are complex and susceptible to a variety of understandings.