Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Wednesday, February 14, 2007 5:35:14 PM
Anna Quindlen has written a Newsweek essay on how soon America should get out of Iraq. She is an excellent writer and will doubtless convince those few unconvinced liberals that tomorrow is not too soon. She would prefer today, but it is, according to her "already tomorrow in Baghdad."
This is the typical liberal piece. The suffering of the Iraqi people began only as the Americans crossed the border:
The course of this war has been a consistent scene of carnage with ever-changing underpinnings. Uncover weapons of mass destruction, lay hands on Saddam Hussein, oversee elections, teach the Iraqis to police themselves. Bring stability to the region. The last has been an illusion. Over the last year many Americans have finally realized how thoroughly they were sold a bill of goods. . .
Nearly four years of photographs and footage of dusty corpses, cinderblock barriers, shredded cars and bereaved families, and the absurdity of that view is absolute.
Where was Anna Quindlen when Saddam Hussain was murdering his people by the hundreds of thousands? Did she decry that, or did she let it pass because there were not four years of photographs and footage of dusty corpses? There certainly were bereaved families but Saddam was not about to let the killing be as messy and photogenic as the insurgents are making theirs.
It isn't that we "can" bring stability to the region. It is that we must.
Ms. Quindlen passes her readers the old saw that it is and was about oil. She not only wants us out, she wants Americans to "go to rehab for their fossil-fuel addiction". Was she writing in 2001 that this war was about oil? Few were. No one is plausibly claiming, even now, that the war was about oil, so why use this throwaway sentence?
Sometimes these big name writers forget what they have written, or not written in the past. When they do that, they do the public a disservice.