More Claptrap from the LA Times...

I've been in Los Angeles most of this week (and now in Vancouver), and reading the LA Times is sure an education. I've already posted earlier this week on a horrible op-ed by Robert Scheer; now comes an awful op-ed by Rami Khouri, with standard anti-US platitudes, entitled "How to Win Friends in the Mideast"

Here are some excerpts:

The U.S. track record has hurt, angered or offended most people in the Middle East. By primarily backing Arab dictators and autocrats or supporting the Israeli position on key issues of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, credibility has been lost.

The priority issue for most Arabs — whether Palestinians, Iraqis or others — is freedom from foreign occupation and subjugation. If Washington uses war and pressure tactics to implement United Nations resolutions in Lebanon and Iraq but does nothing parallel to implement U.N. resolutions calling for the freedom of Palestinians from Israeli occupation, it will continue to be greeted with disdainful guffaws in most of the Middle East.

There is no global consensus that the United States is mandated to promote freedom and democracy, or that this is the divinely ordained destiny of the United States. There is such a mandate, though, in the charter of the United Nations, in Security Council resolutions to end foreign occupations and international legal conventions — most of which the U.S. resists, ignores or applies very selectively.

No surprise then that virtually the whole world resists the United States.

Well, thank god the US 'resists, ignores, or applies' UN resolutions. And, war and pressure tactics in Lebanan? Sigh...what about the those huge demonstrations? And, what about those incredible elections in Iraq? The only people who can bring freedom for the Palestinians are themselves.

Read the whole article yourself. This kind of stuff is pretty standard for the LA Times. You'd think they could do better.