Criticism
Blogger Glenn Greenwald has taken Ledeen to task for what Greenwald calls his history of false statements and inaccurate predictions, calling him "one of the most dishonest and ludicrous jokes on the political scene."
Writing in The Nation, Jack Huberman, who describes Ledeen as "the most influential and unabashed warmonger of our time", attributes these quotes to Ledeen:
- "the level of casualties (in Iraq) is secondary"
- "we are a warlike people (Americans)...we love war"
- "Change—above all violent change—is the essence of human history"
- "the only way to achieve peace is through total war"
- "The purpose of total war is to permanently force your will onto another people"
- "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business"
According to Christopher de Bellaigue of the New York Review of Books, Ledeen has purveyed a "distorted analysis of events in Iran" to his readers, claiming, for example, in National Review online that there were `something like a half a million` Iranians demonstrating the death sentence of Hashem Aghajari on November 22, 2002 when in fact Bellaigue, in Iran on that date, observed only about 5000 students in the biggest demonstration.
Read more about this topic: Michael Ledeen
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“It is ... pathetic to observe the complete lack of imagination on the part of certain employers and men and women of the upper-income levels, equally devoid of experience, equally glib with their criticism ... directed against workers, labor leaders, and other villains and personal devils who are the objects of their dart-throwing. Who doesn’t know the wealthy woman who fulminates against the “idle” workers who just won’t get out and hunt jobs?”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)