If you, WaPo, wish to retain some dignity, I would suggest getting rid of the Anne Applebaums in your midst and hiring my 20 policy grad students to write the occasional op-ed piece,... that is, if any of these students wish to free up time from their much more serious work.
Here's Applebaum (via SuperFrenchie) on how the French and Germans ought to be helping out more in Iraq rather than acting like uppity Europeans. And here are reader responses. Worth reading. Legitimacy, baby.
1 comment:
Why not let China take over the place? They haven't poisoned the well yet. Plus they have plenty of guys who can stand on street-corners with AK-47s and plenty more where they came from too.
I've wanted to leave the Mid-East to its own devices since 1973. Who needs the grief?
I do differ however in referring to the current situation in Ira as a disaster or a quagmire. Messy deaddly and ongoing certainly with a number of tactical and political mis-steps that have prolonged things. But the current government controls a large area of the country except where the terrorists perform for the cameras and where the various sectors of Iraq mix in and around Baghdad.
With regard to a future Iraqi democracy aligned to Iran, well that will be their choice won't it?
We shouldn't be in the business of telling people who they can be friends with hell they are neighbors!
The only interests we have is a region where the countries aren't invading eachother interupting supplies of oil, a region where we are certain WMDs are not being produced and sold to the highest bidder.
Democracy would be the best outcome and a direct challenge to the neighboring despots who will then have to be more worried about their own people than an outside invader. That will be the job of the Iraqis in any case. It is theirs to lose.
There most likely will be a reduction in the violence once we leave, but it will not go away because not all the combatants have our departure as a strategic objective.
As exhausting, frustrating and challenging as an urban counter-insurgency is it is still better than a despot secure in position developing weapons for state-less terrorists.
Now that the chief worry about WMDs has been answered the rest is sort of gravy.
I do recommend that President Bush have in mind the example of KLouis XVI of France, our benefactor and the man who sent Marquie de Lafayette to assist in the birth of our own democracy. They both lost their heads for their trouble.
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