Setting Fire To The Sinking Ship

Yowza! George, whose side are you on? You're making Howard Dean sound conservative.

Iraq's Atomization: "That appellation still suits Osama bin Laden because, as the animating mind behind the Sept. 11 attacks, he pulled the world's superpower into a war that provided the occasion for Zarqawi's rise to world prominence. Still, Zarqawi set out to prove that a central premise of the U.S. intervention in Iraq was -- is -- false. Or perhaps it is more precise to say that he decided to make it false. But if he could falsify it, it never was quite true.

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It is sometimes charged that journalism, which considers the phrase 'good news' an oxymoron ('We don't report the planes that land safely'), is missing the good news from Iraq. But so pervasive is the violence, and hence so dangerous has Iraq become for journalists, that the Wall Street Journal, hardly a hostile observer of the U.S. undertaking in Iraq, thinks the bad news might be underreported.

{snip}

Just in May, just in Baghdad, sectarian violence killed 1,400 -- and that figure does not include victims of car bombs. It speaks depressing volumes about the U.S. predicament that the new idea is to . . . conquer Baghdad. On April 20 the Iraq war became as long as the Korean War. As of tomorrow the war will be as long -- 1,185 days -- as U.S. involvement in World War II was when U.S. troops captured the Ludendorff railway bridge at Remagen and became the first foreign troops to cross the Rhine since Napoleon's in 1805. And Baghdad beyond the Green Zone is a war zone, which accounts for the flight from the country of many educated and mobile Iraqis."

Facts are a wonderful thing, I just wasn't expecting the right to start using them to justify the left's position.

Better late than never I suppose. Unless you are one of the 2500 plus G.I.s who have died, or the 20,000 plus who have been injured so far and please let us not forget the Iraqi people who have died as a result of our leader's foolish attempt to invade a sovereign nation.

That didn't ask for our help and hadn't and wasn't going to attack us. Yep, better late than never.

From the so-called paper of record we get David Brooks redesigning the political parties and it's hard to tell which side he's on.

Here's how a populist nationalist candidate would sound: "We are the ordinary, burden-bearing people of this country. We are the ones who work hard and build communities. It's time for us to come together and recognize that our loyalty to our fellow Americans comes first.

"That means we can't waste our precious blood and treasure on poorly planned, pie-in-the-sky wars to bring democracy to the Middle East. We need to get out of Iraq now. That means we can't sell our ports to our enemies. That means we must secure our borders against terrorists and illegal immigrants who break the law, take our jobs and drive down wages.

"We need to stand up to the big money interests who value their own profits more than their own countrymen, who outsource jobs to China and India, who destroy unions and control Washington. We need to fight off their efforts to take away our Social Security and Medicare. Instead of widening inequality and a race to the bottom, we need universal health care and decent wages. We need a government that will stand up to Internet porn and for decent family values.

"We're tired of both the corporate elites and the cultural elites. We want leaders who understand our anxieties and are, like us, tired of a world where nothing is safe, where everything can be swept away by a serious illness, a divorce or a terrorist's bomb."

His argument for an opposing party is just a little more hawkish. I'm so confused. Up is down and right is left. I feel like the bumper sticker I saw today. Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?

Tags: Iraq, George Will, David Brooks,