Doesn't John Bellamy Foster have any standards? What the hell is wrong with them?

John Mage is what's wrong with him. I don't think that Foster has ever thought much about Syria. On the other hand, Mage is apparently into this kind of conspiracy-thinking and probably hired the new guy, whoever he is. He hired Yoshie Furuhashi after all to run the MR Zine before this one. She was so bad on Iran that a bunch of Iranian leftists, including one that was very close to MR, wrote an open letter blasting MR. I should add that Michael Yates doesn't go for this crap. I doubt that MR books will ever publish that kind of drivel.

Is Monthly Review the conspiratorial left? I thought MR was good.

It is good. Nothing Caitlin Johnstone ever wrote would appear in MR magazine. Nor would MR ever publish a book on Syria written by, for example, Stephen Gowans. It's just the zine that is probably in John Mage's bailiwick. There appears to be very little editorial control. When the Iranians wrote an open letter, nobody from MR even bothered to respond to it. For that matter, when they were boosting Qaddafi, a friend of mine from Uganda who barely escaped Idi Amin's killers, who were funded by Qaddafi, wrote a complaint to Foster. He didn't reply. I used to be fairly friendly with Foster 15 years ago but broke relations after Yoshie Furuhashi began posting shit that made Grayzone look good.