James Petras has been cloned. Petras I is still reliable, if a bit creaky in his old age. He digs for information in Chapare, Chiapas, and elsewhere in the Latin American countryside, interviewing militants from the Venezuelan National Peasant Front Ezequiel Zamora, rural organizers from the Brazilian Landless Worker’s Movements, syndicalists in Uruguay, and slum-dwellers in Argentine villas de miseria. He pores through primary resources in Portuguese and Spanish, clattering out endless reams of political journalism on the struggle of the dispossessed in Latin American, situating their struggles within the political economy of global imperialism. Petras I’s analysis may be a little theoretically fuzzy, but he gets his hands dirty and deals with facts.

Then there’s another Petras. Petras II is slightly off the rails. Still kind of coherent, he deploys Marxist sociological analysis in the pursuit of a highly idiosyncratic series of theses: that an interwoven complex of institutions called the Zionist Power Configuration has taken over the American government, that the ongoing aggression against Iraq emerged not out of Texaco, but out of Tel Aviv, and that the Iranian Green Movement was a bunch of Gucci revolutionaries from the posh neighborhoods of North Tehran. Both are busy, but especially the latter, who has been churning out pamphlets accusing Israel of allying with an American Fifth Column at the rate of one a year for the past half decade.

Petras II seems like he’s been stealing copy from Anthony Giddens and post-9/11 Rudolf Giuliani. He writes of the “post-colonial ethos of the American people” and is concerned that Israeli irredentism is jeopardizing the “work and security of American businessmen and officials” as they day-in and day-out construct the economic and political filigree of empire. He also offers counsel to the American fighting forces as to how to carry out our imperial wars, noting that things have gotten so bad that an American general — he means David Petraeus — commented that “Israel’s colonial dispossession of the Palestinian people has prolonged the war [in Iraq] . . . and undermined the capacity of the U.S. armed forces to successfully operate on multiple fronts to promote U.S. imperial interests.”