Friedman--marbles--loses
I had a quick read of the NYT and the WaPo today. NYT news coverage on Iraq seems ways better conceptualized and better organized than WaPo's. The quality of NYT reporting from inside Iraq is also pretty good. And then, at the back, there's a world-class column by Maureen Dowd:
- Maybe after high-definition TV, they'll invent high-dudgeon TV, a product so realistic you can just lunge through the screen and shake the Bush officials when they say something maddening about 9/11 or Iraq, or when they engage in some egregious bit of character assassination...
Even though the assumptions the Bush administration used to go to war have now proved to be astonishingly arrogant, naïve and ideological, Mr. Rumsfeld is as testy and Delphic as ever about the fragility of Iraq.
"We're trying to explain how things are going, and they are going as they are going," he said, adding: "Some things are going well and some things obviously are not going well. You're going to have good days and bad days." On the road to democracy, this "is one moment, and there will be other moments. And there will be good moments and there will be less good moments"...
Every single thing the administration calculated would happen in Iraq has turned out the opposite.
In a significant move of rhetorical legerdemain Tom tries to demonize all those Iraqis who are currently opposing the (mis-)rulers of the US military occupation force as "Khmer Rouge now posing as... Viet Cong." He also grits his teeth and writes:
- I know the right thing to do now is to stay the course, defeat the bad guys, disarm the militias and try to build a political framework that will hold the now wavering Shiite majority on our side-- because if we lose them, the game is over...
Oh well, what else would I expect from my old buddy from Beirut days? This is, after all, the same Tom F. who in response to the rise in tensions in Iraq of last November wrote:
- This war is the most important liberal, revolutionary U.S. democracy-building project since the Marshall Plan... It is one of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad and it is a moral and strategic imperative that we give it our best shot...
[Your editor writes: Lewis wants us all to go and read somethng that he describes as a...]
World-class article from VDH...
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200404080815.asp
[He then wants to use up precious gigs of my Comments board to reproduce much of this article here. I reckon if you want to read it, you can click on his link. So I used my editorial prerogative to snip all of it, except for the following gem:]
"We did not ask for this war, but it came."
As for MoDo, the military seem to have a much better idea of what they are fighting for than she would give them credit...
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=10557_Postcard_from_the_Edge#comments
...and if she still doesn't get it, perhaps she needs another dose of VDH. His comments on Fallujah are a fresh breath of air after reading MoDo's 'world-class' article about her shaking her TV.
Lewis posted:
"We did not ask for this war, but it came."
Wow! I had no idea Lewis was an Iraqi! All this time I thought he was an American.
Sherry - Just shows how quick you are to pre-judge. I am neither American nor Iraqi, although I can think of no greater compliment than to be thought of as American. Helena, I never realised that three paragraphs would take up 'gigs of memory'. Perhaps that wasn't the real reason for the editing, eh?
Thanks for exercising that editorial discretion, helena. If we find that one-sentence summary of Hansen's article so compelling that we want to read the whole thing, there is always lewis's link.
Perfect editing, Helena. By removing the context, you obfuscate the fact that VDH was talking about the war on terrorism generally, not just the war on Iraq. No wonder you like Maureen 'ellipsis' Dowd.
No, Hanson lumps Iraq in with al Qaeda as part of this "war we did not ask for". Helena was on target.