Counterpunch is a load of horse-shit.
I recently finished reading Dr. Ariel Cohen’s article, War of Ideas: Combating Militant Islamist Ideology, which was published in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs last year (5;1, pp.113-121).

Cohen is a Fellow at the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies.

Here’s some more info on the man.

Afterwards, I went Googling for some of his work, and instead got distracted by this on Cohen at that rather unreliable site, Counterpunch.org.

The article's author, Anthony Gancarski, doesn’t bother engaging, effectively, with any of Cohen’s major arguments and instead goes on a rampage of snide, contemptuous and irrelevant comments:

It is perhaps fitting that America, having dumped its manufacturing base in favor of importing cheap and shoddy goods from foreign lands, has opted to do the same for its intellectual class.

Gancarski certainly doesn’t offer any solid reason as to why Cohen is a ‘shoddy’ intellectual, all he gives the reader is a continuation of such irrelevant personal attacks amidst ineffective and worn claims.

At one point Gancarski states that pre-War Iraq’s poverty was due to UN sanctions, simply labelling Cohen’s argument that Hussein ruined the Iraqi economy though nationalisation and warring against Iran and Kuwait as; “blatantly disingenuous” and a “re-writing [of] history”. Gancarski would have readers believe that Hussein did not run an economy geared for war, nor one which rewarded Saddam's buddies in Tikrit:

To hear Cohen tell it, there never were economic sanctions or repeated bombing runs over what passes for Iraq's sovereign territory. The implication is that "nationalization" and "central planning" were the chief causes of Iraq's current condition.

Interestingly, Gancarski leaves out the fact that such "bombing runs over […] Iraq’s sovereign territory" protected the Iraqi Kurds from genocide.

Gancarski continues his spree of personal attacks:

[…] Cohen is a war hawk. As long as he doesn't have to do the fighting, of course […] Ariel Cohen can write such dispassionate words about American wars precisely because he has no innate love for Americans […] Ariel Cohen loves neither God, man, nor country in any meaningful sense.

Imagine my surprise? An article *paid* for by those leftists at counterpunch, essentially labelling Cohen as 'un-American' (isn’t that the job of inbred, ignorant Republicans contra Democrats and anti-War protesters?), and using the same old, tired argument that because Cohen isn’t a soldier, he has no right to comment on the military aspect of US foreign policy. Still, no doubt the Counterpunch editors were proud of the work he rushed through.

The story behind the author, though, is a lot more interesting that either Gancarski’s article, or Counterpunch itself.

Gancarski doesn’t seem to believe even half of the content he writes, and is not of the far-left. Apparently he was but was not, and no longer is, or something along those lines. Instead, he describes himself as a ‘creative writer’.

Since his ‘discussion’ on Cohen, Gancarski has left Counterpunch, where he was paid $25 an article, and back to the 'other side'. See here, and here.

Ttruth really is stranger than fiction- although probably not stranger than the fiction Gancarski wrote while at Counterpunch.