When the moderates were in power in Iran the Bush labeled Iran the axis of evil and turned down overtures. This in turn gave ammo to the hardliners - think Ahmadinejad and the IRGC - which in turn enabled their power grab back in 2005.

The neocons got Iran wrong and keep getting Iran wrong by proposing their confrontational approach which gives even more ammo to the hardliners twelver shites. Obama's overture was precisely the reason we see the "green movement" in Iran and a split between fractions inside the country unlike any other time in Irans 30 years islamist history.

Of course neocons now want to unite these fractions by proposing to bomb Iran! and some want to propose overt regime change which will make it easier to crack down on activists and NGOs.

Great going there neocons! You keep getting it right on Iran!

Well, read about it here: http://www.alternet.org/world/65956/

Thus far the Neo-Cons have only been right in their own minds.

Even after it became apparent to all, but the most committed Neo-con, that the early policies in Iraq were mistaken, stupid and wrongheaded (handing out cash by the handfuls?).

Even when it became obvious that Bremer and company had little if any idea of what they were doing.

Even after it became apparent that Chalabi had been lying his teeth off pretty much the whole time, and now is still angling for his place in the sun.

Even after all of these, the Neo-cons go ahead and hold awards ceremonies telling themselves how great they are.

Sorry your article was too long by about 1,500 words.

Cook’s “narrative” leaves his readers with little doubt about who the BAD guys are and who the GOOD guys are. The good guys are bending over backwards to encourage dialogue and engagement with the bad guys. The good guys are so full of good will that they would never use threats or impose demands or indulge in arm-twisting on the bad guys. The good guys are just what good guys should be: fair and honest and flexible,
And even when the good guys show the bad guys how to do democracy, what do these bad guys do: they freely and fairly elect “nasty” people. Bad bad bad guys!
And what about that Bashar al-Assad never shutting “down the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq by way of Damascus International Airport.”
Imagine that! Evil Bashar al-Assad lets foreign fighters into Iraq. That’s because Bashar al-Assad let in BAD foreign fighters, not the GOOD foreign fighters. Good foreign fighters don’t invade countries they spread democracy to them.
Of course the GOOD guys make mistakes now and then, but the good guys only make mistakes. They’re not bad, just mistakes, egregious ones, but still just mistakes. That’s because good guys are not “all about: violence, repression, and duplicity.” That’s only for bad guys.

March 12, 2010, 3:29AM

'The Dog Barks, But the Caravan Moves On'.

Netanyuhu and his sidekick, Barak, and even the lovely Livni, run rings around the 'most powerful nation on earth', every day, every week, 365 days a year. Obama is a puppet just as was the burning Bush.

They install their own men in the White House and oversee the composition of Congress and the Senate. Meanwhile 300 million Americans wonder how and why AIPAC controls their destiny.

And I wonder, every day, how on earth can a tiny state in the Middle East openly control Washington without any dissent from an electorate of 300 million.

It is the most extraordinary political feat of all time. Because the US government is inept and stupid.

"Let me start out by saying that I do not believe the neocons got Iraq right. It MAY turn out right or it MAY not. IT'S TOO EARLY TO TELL."

May turn out right?....
Too early to tell?.....

Quote: "Washington's position in the Middle East was far worse after the ascendance of the neoconservatives during the Bush years. The region was further from peace, stability, and prosperity than when they found it in early 2001... their forceful advocacy of democracy and freedom in the Middle East may have grated on many, but it did much to advance those causes in a region once described as "democracy's desert."

You can't make omelets without breaking eggs, and you can't advance from despotism to representative government without some instability. Peace? It wasn't exactly a region of peace prior to 2001.

I am not sure, but it seems as though President Obama has not thrown away all the gains made by President Bush. That is one of the few good things I can say about Obama.

I'm glad to see that at least some people out there can see beyond the end of their nose and discern the positive long-term implications for the Middle East. Yes, the neo-cons made some horrendous mistakes in Iraq early in the occupation, most notably the wholesale disbanding of the Iraqi army and Donald Rumsfeld's butt-headed insistence that he could manage the occupation with only 130,000 troops instead of the 250,000 that John McCain and others told him were needed. These mistakes made the entire enterprise far more costly than it needed to be, both in blood and treasure.

However, the decision to topple Saddam Hussein and install the arab world's first representative democracy in its place will ultimately be seen as a watershed even in the transformation of the entire region. Those who are so quick (nay, eager) to pronounce Iraq a "failure" because of the violence and destruction there over the last seven years often conveniently gloss over just how hellish life was in Iraq under Saddam. Had he remained in power, thousands of Iraqis would have continued to perish in his torture chambers each year and the oppression would have continued for decades under the rule of his two psychotic sons once he was gone. Beyond that, 24,000,000 people would have been forced to continue to live under one of the most repressive police states the world has ever known. At least now the Iraqis now have a real chance to build a better future for themselves. Whether they do so or not is now up to them.

I also agree with you that the neo-cons understood the regimes of Syria and Iran for what they truly are. There can be no accommodation with these people. The only thing they understand is a boot in the butt. Israel has known this for quite some time, even if obtuse pie-in-the-sky western "progressives" haven't yet figured it out. But one of the many long-term benefits to the Iraq intervention is likely to be increased pressure on the regimes of both Iran and Syria from the bottom up. Iranian and Syrians are looking across the border at Iraqis voting in free and fair elections and enjoying freedom of speech and freedom of the press and they are asking "Hey, why not us too?" No wonder Iran and Syria have pulled out all the stops over the past 7 years trying to de-stabilize Iraq and kill its nascent democracy, They're scared to death of what it means for them if it succeeds.

I very vividly remember the same "guffaws" from the enlightened liberal elites back in the early 1980s when that "dumb cowboy" Ronald Reagan actually had the audacity to paint our struggle against communism in terms of good vs. evil and forcefully push back agains the Soviets around the world. History ultimately vindicated him, and so too will it ultimately vindicate George W. Bush in Iraq.

That policy did not immediately stabilize the Middle East, nor it brought any immediate advantage in terms of US influence. That's why public opposed it. People want immediate results in terms of their improved power or money. That did not happen, and it could not happen. Actually, it was not supposed to happen. But it brought, as the author correctly sees, strategic long term advantages in the long term. It is not about current stability, but rather about strategic aims.

Right or wrong, was it worth the price in lives and dollars? It diverted attention from Israel/Palestine, which is the major irritant in the region, permitting the Israelis to advance their apartheid system with less attention.

We could benefit more from an article about the people who were 'correct' about Iraq.

There's a typo: "violence, repression, and duplicity" refers to Israel, right?

It is ironic that he praises the Neocons for recognizing that the regime in Iran for using the US threat to maintain power.

Didn't the Neocons gain influence by hypig up th eterrorist threat in the wake of 9-11?

Then again the war in Iraq is just a small price to pay to protect us from the likes of the underwear and shoe bombers....

So two of the things that the neocons allegedly got right were Iran and Syria.

But this article does absolutely nothing to explain anything that they got right in either region. It just says that both nations are hard to negotiate with, and the neocons knew that. Is that really something they deserve major credit for? Should neocons also be patted on the head if they can identify Iran and Syria on a map? Apparently the only way to suggest that neocons got anything right is to put the bar so low that even *they* manage to slither over it.

The nicest thing the author could say is that other administrations have had a hard time dealing with these nations, and the Bush crew did, too. So that's what they "got right". How is that getting anything right?

Additionally, an article which purports to discuss the US-Iran relationship during the Bush years without even mentioning the phrase "axis of evil" cannot be taken seriously. And the fact that many neocons explicitly and repeatedly threatened Iran with military action? That gets a cursory mention with no follow-through on how these bellicose comments might affect things. Ridiculous.

Finally I have to single out this sentence: "Yet, a fine-grained understanding of the Middle East will not always produce superior policy, a fact all too often lost on the punditocracy." This is a concept so achingly dumb -- so eager to embrace willful ignorance -- that it is quite appropriate to include in an essay about what neocons supposedly got right. Of course knowing what you're talking about will not *always* produce superior policy. But it sure helps, doesn't it? If we are looking for something that will *always* produce superior policy, then perhaps the author should suggest what that would be. A magic wand, perhaps?

Of course, to compound the stupidity of that sentence, the author subsequently praises the neocons' ability to read history. This was just an awful article. Perhaps the final section about democracy could be made into something useful, but this was absolutely worthless.

The neocons got several things right. Nothing else, mind you, but those.

1) How, exactly, to trample the Constitution they were sworn to uphold, and not get impeached or worse for doing so.

2) How to establish as historic precedent the commission with impunity of high crimes and misdemeanors, so as to get away with worse the next time they choose to usurp one or more branches of government: executive, judicial, legislative and, next electoral cycle, corporate.

3) How easy it is to hijack the ship of state when everyone around you is more intent on cashing in and not rocking the boat.

4) What gutless Weimar appeasers we turned out to be, and how hollow our oaths to defend the Constitution, to let them get away with it.

They were absolutely right about all that.

Well, "motive" IS one of the principle parts of the commission of a crime, after all. So, if the neo-con's motive was to protect Saudi Arabia from the secularized Sunnis over the border in Iraq, yeah, I suppose they got it right. I still say that part about redefining "crimes" into "mistakes", no, they got that part wrong.

I'd look outside the Middle East for examples of what the neoconservatives got right, though I'm not sure what they might be.

Within the Middle East, the list offered here is pretty thin. Neoconservatives got Syria right? So what? The Assads may have presided over a nasty regime and have been difficult to strike deals with, but they also presided over a pissant little country with fewer people than the city of New York.

What about Iran? The one thing the successive American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq did accomplish was to push the image of American power in the region toward its zenith. Deals with Iran could have been attempted, not on the basis of goodwill, but on a much stronger foundation of fear. They were not, largely because the adminsitration's neoconservatives wanted something bigger: regime change. Cook maintains a decorous silence about this, and it may be that any deals that had been struck with Iran would have unraveled as the Iraq fiasco got worse and American power started to look less impressive. Iran still doesn't look like a neoconservative success story.

That leaves democracy, which neoconservatives are said to have gotten right because promoting Arab democracy was just the right thing to do. Promoting the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Arab countries was actually the right thing to do, but if we're talking geopolitics instead of truth the neoconservatives' approach to democracy promotion did more harm than good.

Obviously it was contaminated by the Iraq disaster; everything the Bush administration touched was contaminated by the Iraq disaster. More than that, though, the neoconservatives thought of past American policy as the source of Arab tyranny; President Bush and his Secretary of State ascribed to America's historic preference for stability over freedom in the Middle East the prevalence of corrupt, authoritarian governments there. Neoconservatives viewed Middle Eastern history as if the Soviet Union had never existed; most of the most repressive states in the region had been Soviet clients during the Cold War, not American ones. The natural Arab reaction against Soviet-style secularism and centralization of authority was never going to be based on Western-style secularism and free but complicated governmental structures with which Arabs had no experience, but on Islam, a religion neoconservatives barely understood. When security concerns trumped democracy evangelism in Bush's second term, as they were bound to, the United States looked as if it were promoting its values with empty words.

Not for nothing, either, but while neoconservatives were celebrating relatively free elections in a small Arab country like Lebanon and small gestures toward liberalization in a large Arab country like Egypt, another Arab government was wiping out hundreds of thousands of people in cold blood. The support of Sudan's genocidal government by all the Arab governments the Bush administration hoped to bring to democracy went unremarked on by neoconservatives, and Bush administration officials of the non-neoconservative persuasion were left to deal with the disaster as best they could. I'd call that, too, something other than getting it right.

Is this all "politics"? Well, based on the record, I tend toward the view that the neoconservatives to whom Cook offers qualified praise here should, in the public interest, be kept miles away from any post of responsibility in government for the remainder of their lives. That's a poltical view, in a manner of speaking.

This article is an example of "paper doesn't refuse ink". Ahmed Chalabi had more effect on the Bush-era neocons and their doctrine toward the Middle East than is generally thought. I believe Mr. Chalabi had some hand in the paltry number of troops tasked with stabilizing Iraq after the US invastion. However, I am certain he didn't have anything to do with post-invasion planning; there wasn't any!

"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line."
--President Bill Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."
--President Bill Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

"Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face."
--Madeline Albright, Feb 18, 1998

"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983."
--Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998

"[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs."
Letter to President Clinton, signed by:
-- Democratic Senators Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, and others, Oct. 9, 1998

"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process."
-Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998

"Hussein has ... chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies."
-- Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999

The Financial Times of March 10 has a striking article that compliments Cook's. http://tinyurl.com/yhtj6xr

Biggar thinks the moral indignation of those who believe the invasion of Iraq was wicked and beyond the pale, is misplaced.

If he is right, the shoe might be on the other foot. Those who protested and demonstrated and tore out their hair at the idea of ejecting the fascist Baath and the mass murdering Saddam, have much to answer for. In a fight where a gov which 10 million Iraqis had elected at the risk of their lives was besieged by supporters of the Baathists police state, and Islamist fanatics, they sided with the latter. They called, "The Resistance", people who denounced democracy, freedom of speech, religious toleration and gender equality as hateful to God, and who drove exploding cars into civilian crowds. They hoped the US effort there would fail, which made them effectively, collaborators with the most terrible people since the Nazis hanged democrats from meat hooks.

Granted, that is not Cook's argument. He is still queasy about Iraq. His point is rather, to reconsider the neocon idea, that democracy and individual liberty, and secular politics, may after all appeal to Arabs and work in the Middle East, no less than it appeals to us and Europeans, to Russians and Japanese, many other people in other regions.

Why should Americans not want to give that notion a chance, why reject it out of hand? Cook has noticed hints that it might have feet. Why are so few of the commentators here, heartened by that?

The "much ado about nothing" versus the "little, relevant to something" is a controversy that seems endemic to those who need to cloud issues by flagrant distraction in opposition to those who seek a negotiated settling of most international disputes that have essentially been on-going.
View the contents of the Foreign Policy cauldron as a collection of liquids and solids that tend to defy mixing, unless treated correctly. Perhaps like mayonnaise or bronze which would each resist becoming so until processed right. The age-old efforts of the alchemist to turn base metals into gold are still fruitless as their essential 'manganese dioxide' so to say has not been foundl Nation states have to grapple with various factors to ensure they survive within the very bubblings of the international cauldron filled as it is with the differing interests of others equally so oriented. The choice of war to impose the will of one on that of another is becoming increasingly complex financially ruinous and strategically fruitless. The ease with which the device known as "terrorism" is now being employed by almost anyone that feels slighted is a major example of this mixed-up environment. The existence of a global market works as an accomplice allowing easily available matter and finance to be used to full advantage by the "terrorist". It is not possible to fully stamp out such stuff by force except strictly locally and for a temporary period of time. Now what. ?
The lining of the greedy pockets of the world's military/industrial complexes is the only outcome. Their facade of their search for the ingredient to turn the base metal of national differences to the gold of negotiated settlement and peace by FORCE can be played indefinitely and to no end.Shall this continue and shall it be allowed to wreck everything and to cost millions of lives of the naieve and the "kept-suppressed" ?
What is needed is Diplomacy and Diplomats and Time : rather than impatience and un-intellectual foreign service officers and wars. Let the greedy ones stop pretending to be alchemists. Let us recognize the right of others to enhance their own survival rather than force them brutally to merely enhance our survival at their expense. Commonsense needs to prevail

Neocons believe in the absolute power of the Military. I am surprised at the Articles failure to mention this. Peace through Strength. What we need is another Pearl Harbor. A military that can fight on more than one front. The New World Order. One World Currency. What do you think all this was for? Thank God the American People recognized these Neo-Fascists before they completed their takeover. However, the destruction of the American Worker Class is well under way. They did get that right.

There was one section of this article that I thought could actually be marginally useful:
.
"[W]ith Washington watching, Arab authoritarians had to position themselves as reformers, making it more difficult for them to crack down on the real reformers. In Egypt, for example, opposition activists who were generally opposed to Bush's Middle East policy ruefully acknowledged that Washington's outspoken support for democracy provided them and their colleagues' protection from the Egyptian state. Indeed, it seems that Bush and the neocons had moved the needle on democracy in the Middle East."
.
That seemed like an interesting point, possibly one that would actually suggest that the neocons got something right. However, I just saw this article on FP from a week earlier:
.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/03/05/the_conventional_wisdom_isn_t_always_wrong
.
"The [Iraq] war has not exactly created a tidal wave of democracy either. Democracy has actually declined around over the last three years, according to U.S. NGO Freedom House. Early hopeful developments in the Middle East have not panned out either. Following the much-vaunted Cedar Revolution, Lebanon's government has returned to its normal state of dysfunction. After some overtures, Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi has resumed his provocations. And the bloodshed continues in Israel and the Palestinian territories. "
.
So I take back what I said about the section on democracy being possibly useful. Shame on me for failing to realize how badly the author was abusing the facts in order to pretend there were good results in that area.
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At least Mr. Cook knew that he was being given a lousy assignment. He clearly used the beginning of his article to eat up some of the needed 1500 words and to essentially apologize for having to write a crap article. Next time, Mr. Cook, maybe don't "jump at the opportunity" to write a bunch of nonsense.
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(also, thanks to STW-63 for sharpening my point about that awful sentence in the first paragraph)

This is self-correcting because when they come to power, the people can't wait to get rid of them. This has happened with Hamas and in areas where the people were unfortunate enough to be ruled by the Taliban.

It's now official - there's no actual shortage of Holocaust survivors:

Extracts from The Holocaust Industry by Norman G. Finkelstein of the City University of New York, published by Verso in 2000:

'The Israeli Prime Minister's office recently put the number of "living Holocaust survivors" at nearly a million.' (page 83)

'If 135,000 former Jewish slave laborers are still alive today, some 600,000 must have survived the war. That's at least a half-million more than standard estimates.. If Jews only constituted 20% of the surviving camp population and, as the Holocaust industry implies, 600,000 Jewish inmates survived the war, then fully 3 million inmates in total must have survived. By the Holocaust industry's reckoning, concentration camp conditions couldn't have been that harsh at all; in fact, one must suppose a remarkably high fertility and remarkably low mortality rate.. If, as the Holocaust industry suggests, many hundreds of thousands of Jews survived, the Final Solution couldn't have been so efficient after all ­ exactly what Holocaust deniers argue.' (pp127-8).]

'Both my father and my mother were survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps.. One of my father's lifelong friends was a former inmate with him in Auschwitz, a seemingly incorruptible left-wing idealist who on principle refused German compensation after the war. Eventually he became a director of the Israeli Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem. Reluctantly and with genuine disappointment, my father finally admitted that even this man had been corrupted by the Holocaust industry, tailoring his beliefs for power and profit. As the rendering of the Holocaust assumed ever more absurd forms, my mother liked to quote (with intentional irony) Henry Ford: "History is bunk." (p7).

'The Holocaust proved to be the perfect weapon for deflecting criticism of Israel' (p30).

'Much of the literature on Hitler's Final Solution is worthless as scholarship. Indeed, the field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud.' (p 55).

'Given the nonsense that is turned out daily by the Holocaust industry, the wonder is that there are so few skeptics'. (p 68).

'Annual Days of Remembrance of the Holocaust are a national event. All 50 states sponsor commemorations, often in state legislative chambers.. Seven major Holocaust museums dot the American landscape. The centerpiece of this memorialization is the United States Holocaust museum in Washington.. (This) museum's annual budget is $50 million, of which $30 million is federally subsidized.' (p72). (This is in spite of the fact that, as he points out on page 32, per capita Jewish income in the US is almost double that of non-Jews). 'With a reelection campaign looming, Jimmy Carter initiated the (US Holocaust Museum) project to placate Jewish contributors and voters, galled by the president's recognition of the "legitimate rights" of Palestinians.' (p 73).

To conclude:
'The Holocaust may yet turn out to be the "greatest robbery in the history of mankind".. The Holocaust industry has clearly gone berserk.'(p 138-9).
'Through its deployment, one of the world's most formidable military powers, with a horrendous human rights record, has cast itself as a 'victim' state, and the most successful ethnic group in the United States has likewise acquired victim status. Considerable benefits accrue to this specious victimhood ­ in particular, immunity to criticism, however justified. " (p3).

Elie Wiesel vs Encyclopaedia Britannica

Wiesel has been one of the most prominent spokesman for the very sizeable group of people known as Holocaust survivors. Wiesel has chaired the US Holocaust Memorial Council and has been the recipient of a Congressional Gold Medal and Nobel Peace Prize..

Time Magazine, March 18 1985:

‘How had he survived two of the most notorious killing fields [Auschwitz and Buchenwald] of the century? "I will never know" Wiesel says. "I was always weak. I never ate. The slightest wind would turn me over. In Buchenwald they sent 10,000 to their deaths every day. I was always in the last hundred near the gate. They stopped. Why?"

Compare this with Encyclopaedia Britannica (1993), under ‘Buchenwald’:

"In World War II it held about 20,000 prisoners.. Although there were no gas chambers, hundreds perished monthly through disease, malnutrition, exhaustion, beatings and executions."

Interesting arithmetic - the incredible numbers

Let's have a look at a typical account by one of the seemingly endless number of survivors: Olga Lengyel’s Five Chimneys: a woman survivor’s true story of Auschwitz (Granada/ Ziff-Davis, 1947, 1972).

According to Lengyel, ‘After June, 1943, the gas chamber was reserved exclusively for Jews and Gypsies.. Three hundred and sixty corpses every half-hour, which was all the time it took to reduce human flesh to ashes, made 720 per hour, or 17,280 corpses per twenty-four hour shift. And the ovens, with murderous efficiency, functioned day and night. However, one must also reckon the death pits, which could destroy another 8,000 cadavers a day. In round numbers, about 24,000 corpses were handled each day. An admirable production record, one that speaks well for German industry.’ (Paperback edition, pp80-81). [No trace of any remains of or in ‘death pits’ has been found.]

This implies almost 100,000 corpses per four working days, or a million in 40 days, or six million in 240 days (eight months). Notice the bald precision of the figures without any explanation, the utter confidence in the reader's credulity.

The blurb on the cover of the book quotes the New York Herald-Tribune: "Passionate, tormenting". Albert Einstein, the promoter of the US construction of the bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is quoted as offering "You have done a real service by letting the ones who are now silent and most forgotten speak."

Could this claim be a misprint?

Kitty Hart, in spite of her name a Jewish survivor born in Poland, fully confirms these figures:

‘Working around the clock, the four units together could dispose of about 18,000 bodies every twenty-four hours, while the open pits coped with a further 8,000 in the same period.’ (p 118; Return to Auschwitz - paperback edition by Granada (1981, 1983).

According to the cover blurb, ‘The subject of the award-winning Yorkshire television documentary of the same name.’ ‘Both engaging and harrowing…an important addition to the growing holocaust literature, very little of which conveys so courageously both the daily torment and the will to survive’ – Martin Gilbert, The Times.

'Sir' Martin Gilbert, indefatigable Jewish campaigner on behalf of the ‘Holocaust’ and biographer of Winston Churchill, adds to the rich flavour and makes his own numerical claims, certainly not without chutzpah:

In his book Auschwitz and the Allies (1981) he states

‘The deliberate attempt to destroy systematically all of Europe’s Jews was unsuspected in the spring and early summer of 1942: the very period during which it was at its most intense, and during which hundreds of thousands of Jews were being gassed every day at Belzec, Chelmo, Sobibor and Treblinka.’ (p.26). [This statement, first noticed by Professor Robert Faurisson, was then deleted (not corrected) from the next edition - no simple typo, no simple error with omission or spelling or grammar, just a case of being caught red-handed in blatant chutzpah deluxe.]

If we assume a minimum figure of 200,000 per day, this amounts to say a million a five-day working week, or 6 million in six weeks, and this does not include the admittedly awe-inspiring claims for Auschwitz put forward by Hart and Lengyel with Gilbert’s blessing.