Talk:Vladimir Socor

I think this is most unfair and slanted. Socor's integrity is not a matter of contention for the mainstream. I suggest

Socor has been harshly criticized by some organizations, including the head of the OSCE mission to Moldova, former State Department official William Hill who spoke of "outrageous fabrications" in Socor's reporting in 2001 and again in 2005.[1] Socor in turn critised Hill as ill-informed.

http://www.jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_id=407&issue_id=3420&article_id=2370088

Socor is also widely quoted in mainstream press such as The Economist as an authority on the region

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_QTPVSPG

The ICDISS cited in this article is a complete invention and has had its wikipedia entry deleted!

Edwardlucas 17:07, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Edward, some would say that you, too, are biased and politically motivated. A similar charge has been levelled at me. I guess that this is unavoidable, when you write about this part of the world (as Socor does, too).

Exactly! Edward is biased because he does not accept the facts presented by NGOs and newspapers which have the same IP address as the government websites! :-) bogdan 19:18, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

The current version of the article may be "unfair and slanted" but it is the result of collaborative editing of ten editors over the period of five months. The most typical charge levelled at Vlad Socor himself is that he is unfair and slanted.

Anyway, let us at least remove the ICDISS thing on grounds of WP:RS and/or WP:NN. You know that I see eye to eye with you on that one. The rest should stay. OSCE and a peer reviewed analysis published by MIT are reliable sources, and Socor's response is not appropriate. Come now, what would you expect him to say? The meek "Hill is ill informed" doesn't hold water. Ambassador Hill was head of OSCE's mission to the area that he was commenting on, and Socor was writing about Hill's work. Who better to know his own work than Hill? - Mauco 19:11, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't think five months' work is enough to make this such an erudite entry that it shouldn't be challenged. It seems to me to be very flimsy and doesn't have any of Socor's decades-long work on the region included. Presumably he is not able to add these himself because it will count as original research, but someone should try to do it. I would be happy to have Socor characterised as "controversial", but I think these attacks on his integrity are not right and smack of character assassination. "Typical" attacks may say more about the people doing the attacking than the person being attacked.

It may well be that one chapter in the book cited below attacks him, but I suspect that the characterisation is too harsh. If we are having Hill's attack on Socor, we should also include Socor's response to Hill. I don't agree that we should weight Hill about Socor. Socor has been covering this region for decades--much longer than Hill. Edwardlucas 23:45, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

The article actually became a lot better in the past 24 hours, after Bogdan worked on it (he's an admin, if I am not mistaken). But feel free to jump in. There is no conflict of interest if you edit, since you are not Socor. We do already have a link to his reply to Hill, in the references. It is quite self serving so please don't give it undue weight. - Mauco 00:43, 23 December 2006 (UTC)

Taylor/MIT

An U.S. peer-reviewed analysis of Vladimir Socor's writings on the War of Transnistria charged him with rewriting of history. It was published by MIT Press, affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

citing:

Chapter 8, by Brian D. Taylor, starting on p.210 of "Managing Conflict in the Former Soviet Union: Russian and American Perspectives" by Aleksei Georgievich Arbatov, MIT Press, 1997 (ISBN 0262510936)

Well... can you point me to the exact paragraph were Arbatov is charging Socor with rewriting history? :-) bogdan 19:16, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

It is actually Taylor, not Arbatov, who makes the charge. He does that in the context of his review of Chapter 7 (which is on Russia's involvement in the war) and he compares that chapter to Socor's writings on page 211. I wouldn't take out this sentence, since there are very few peer-reviewed books and publications which actually comment on Socor's work, but it can be rephrased. - Mauco 19:28, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Taylor says that the writings of a certain Ozhiganov are very different from what "the story is usually told in the West", giving Socor's writings as an example of the "conventional view".

Ozhiganov is blaming the "hard-line" Moldovan nationalists on the conflict in Transnistria. bogdan 19:37, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Sort of. That is probably too simplified a way to put it, but it will do for now, for here, for the sake of argument. But then Taylor goes on to explain how Ozhiganov is actually doing a good job of explaining the nuances of the role of the Russian army at the time. In doing so, he contrasts it with Socor's position. It is quite clear that he thinks Ozhiganov is an improvement over Socor. Ozhiganov's chapter also matches a similar account published by The Nixon Center of the events. But the "rewriting history" part can be rephrased. - Mauco 19:42, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

I still think this is slanted. Should it not be that Hill "claimed" or "accused" rather than "pointed out" which makes it sound as though the shortcomings are irrefutable, whereas in fact they are strongly disputed.

The latest version of the paragraph under discussion looks good to me. I think it strikes the right balance, in a measured tone. Turgidson 01:17, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

Questions about an edit

The following sentence added by User Mauco looks very POV to me: "between 2002 and 2004 was a senior fellow of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, a right wing think tank funded by Jewish hardliners dedicated to scrapping the Middle East peace process in favor of attacks on states like Syria and Iraq." It rests on a quote from the web site RightWeb, which, for all I know, is a "left wing think tank" with an ax to grind. Whatever the case is, if one wants to engage in a polemic about IASPS, I think that should be done in a separate article, not here.

Also, I don't really understand the sentence "Prior to the Iraq war, he advocated a "U.S.-led war to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction," not giving any evidence of the presence of such weapons of mass destruction." The evidence -- such as it was available at the time -- was presented to the United Nations by Secretary of State Colin Powell. Why then the implication that Socor should have presented his own evidence to support the Multinational force in Iraq? Turgidson 06:06, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

The edit of Mauco is wrong, as the article of Socor was published after the invasion of Irak begun. Mauco is upset about Socor's position regarding Transnistria, this is why he want to accuse him of all evils of the world, one of them being the war in Irak. Instead of an NPOV tag, I suggest a simple revert.--MariusM 09:36, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

I strongly support a revert. This article reads like a character assassination of Socor. It smears the IASPS using emotive language like "hardline" and "Jewish". If Socor was wrong about Iraq , so were huge numbers of other moderate conservatives in dozens of countries. It seems to me that this entry violates the guidelines about living persons, which stress an especial need for neutrality. Edwardlucas 09:52, 6 February 2007 (UTC)