Base10 Missed This
Victor Davis Hanson has a wonderful article in National Review on how he thinks the war in Iraq will end. Let's hope he's right. There's this:

The media has long since written Iraq off as a “quagmire” and a “debacle.” The war is now hopelessly politicized and has been misrepresented in two national elections. Then we heard that the war’s purpose was either to steal oil (the price actually skyrocketed), enrich Halliburton (in fact, few other conglomerates wished to venture to Iraq), or do Israel’s dirty work (it just withdrew voluntarily from Gaza). Our aims were said to be anything other than to remove the worst dictator in modern memory, allow the Arab world a chance at democracy, and undo the calculus of Middle-Eastern terrorism that is so parasitic on the failures and barbarity of regional autocracies.

And this:

The public too is turned off. Perhaps it is the constant media stream of IEDs and suicide bombs — never the news of thousands of new schools, a free and stable Kurdistan, progress in the Shiite south, or any of the other countless positive developments from elections to Saddam’s trial. Polls reveal that the American people care little that, in terms of military history, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the creation of a constitutional government in his place — in less than three years and at the cost of 2000 lives — are still formidable achievements, making the lapses seem minor in comparison to those in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

No, we have now gone too far for all that. And how could we not, after the wild charges of Richard Clarke, Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, and Joe Wilson, the celebrity venom of everyone from Sean Penn to Donald Sutherland, the media revelations of Rathergate, Eason Jordan’s false charges that our military targets journalists, and Newsweek’s falsities about flushed Korans?

Don’t forget either the contributions of U.S. senators such as Dick Durbin (comparing our Guantanamo guards to Nazi, Stalinist, and Cambodian murderers) or Ted Kennedy (claiming Abu Ghraib was reopened for the same Saddam-type atrocities by Americans), who did their small part to libel those who gave freedom to millions. Whatever the good news of this election or the one in December — much less the increasing isolation of the nearby tyrant Assad, the flowering in Lebanon, and the rumbles in the Gulf and Egypt — it won’t make much difference anymore to the American people. They have decided that they are tired of the Middle East and only want to go back to the world before 9/11, forgetting that the easy shoot-a-cruise-missile-at-a-cave strategy ultimately led to the 9/11 attacks.

Good stuff.
- posted by Base10 @ 12:37 PM