In Tahrir Square: Nir Rosen, Lara Logan, Mao, McChrystal, The Weak and The Strong

In The Propagandist: "There will be no further comment from CBS News. . ."

The leftish pseudo-journalist Nir Rosen has again disgraced himself, this time by taking the opportunity of a vicious sexual assault upon a real journalist, Lara Logan, to laugh at her, insinuate that she made up the story, and call her a "warmonger." Logan is recovering in hospital. Rosen is claiming to have apologized, but he has done no such thing. What's Rosen's problem with Logan? This is how General Stanley McChrystal and Mao come into to it, in ways that betray Rosen as a lizard and the milieu from which he emerges as a swamp where the strong are called "weak" and given leave to butchery. If you have the audacity to even notice this you will be called a "warmonger":

. . .General McChrystal's Counterinsurgency Guidance to the 42-nation ISAF alliance in Afghanistan declared its radical departure from the American standard in its very title: "Protecting the People is the Mission." It did not speak the language of the America-Firsters in Obama's closest circles. It spoke in a foreign language: "Embrace the people. . . earn their trust. . . seek out the underprivileged, the disenfranchised, the disaffected. . . work with the children and students. . . shield the people from harm. . . live and train together. . . plan and operate together. . . be a positive force in the community. . . confront corrupt officials. . . listen and learn from our Afghan colleagues. . . improve daily."

McChrystal's counterinsurgency guidance articulated a war of the weak against the strong. It is written in the language of Mao Tse Tung, from the standard version of Mao's early instructions adopted as the rules of discipline by the Peoples Liberation Army in 1947: "Obey orders in all your actions. Do not take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses. Turn in everything captured. Speak politely. Pay fairly for what you buy. Return everything you borrow. Pay for anything you damage. Do not hit or swear at people. Do not damage crops. Do not take liberties with women. Do not ill-treat captives."

In a war of the weak against the strong, that is how you win. "We need to understand the people and see things through their eyes," McChrystal wrote to the troops. "This means that we must change the way that we think, act and operate." The victory of an Afghan people's war would not come in a flourish of brass with a handsome president on a television-studio bandstand and American flags fluttering all around from wind machines. It takes time. it takes patience. Victory is contingent, ever moving on the far horizon. Advance is stealthy. Retreat is unthinkable. "Exit strategy" are just two words from some foreign language. More words from it are 'Not in my name' and 'Stop the war.'

You get the picture. Try to imagine the 30 million most generous, hardcore and well-heeled contributors among Obama's fan base suddenly being obliged to abandon their familiar argots and turn their worlds upside down from an American counterinsurgency (FMLN, got it; Sandinistas, check; Tupamaros, yes, I dimly recall) to an American-backed insurgency. Next thing you know poltergeists are flinging dog-eared Chomsky volumes all over everybody's living rooms and Cousin Henry's writhing on the floor in the paroxyms of acid flashbacks. So McChrystal had to go. And that's not even half of the way the thing I'm calling "Rolling Stone" comes into it. . .

UPDATE: The indispensable Michael Totten reports that Nir Rosen has been fired:

I'm not sure why it took so long for his career to crash. Not only did he link approvingly to Taliban propaganda on last year's anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, he once used his American identification to sneak Taliban commanders past a checkpoint in Afghanistan. Even though he's an Israeli citizen, he somehow he managed to embed with Hezbollah when its fighters invaded and shot up my old West Beirut neighborhood in 2008. He told a Lebanese journalist friend of mine to his face that Hezbollah's coup was "necessary." He has said that he hopes for a Third Intifada, that he wants to see Tel Aviv bombed, and openly pines for the destruction of Israel.