In his latest hard-copy opus, Patrick McIlheran endorses escalating in the conflict in Iraq, arguing if we just throw more troops into the Baghdad meatgrinder we'll come out on top.
It's a stupid argument. It ignores the strain our soldiers are under; it ignores the reality that taking on Shi'ite leader Moqtada al-Sadr could cause our troops to find themselves surrounded by hostiles; it ignores the fact this tack has been taken before with no success.
The stupidity of escalation has been ably handled by others.
But the Brawler has a bigger question: where does McIlheran gets the stones to comment on Iraq -- or why his editors publish his "thoughts" -- given his observations have been relentlessly wrong when they're not simply misinformed.
Let's dig up the ur-text of McIlheran's musings on Iraq. From Sept. 5, 2004, the Brawler brings you "Let's make no mistake: Bush wasn't wrong on Iraq."
(Feel free to read after you've suppressed your laughter or gagging.)
Here's the stirring lead:
As of midweek, 976 American warriors had died in Iraq. Soon, the grim odometer will roll over.
The 1,000th death will be no less terrible than, say, the 749th, but news people can't resist a round number, so there will be furrowed-brow retrospectives and long, tolling readings of names.
There also will be a brigade of partisans, masked as analysts, saying President Bush ought to just admit the whole thing was a mistake, if not a lie. They'll say that no plutonium nor anthrax has been found, so it never existed nor ever would have, and that al- Qaida never heard of Baghdad. They'll say those 1,000 Americans died pointlessly.
They will be wrong.
Each death of an American in combat is a wound to our country, and so many seem, on their own, so pointless: a roadside bomb, random gunfire. But this is true of any war. What matters is the cause, and this cause is just: to turn aside the long assault on our nation that climaxed with 3,000 Americans dead on that Sept. 11 and to do it by liberating 25 million people from a warmongering fascist regime.
Yes, "grim odometer" is the worst metaphor yet for the war dead.
He goes on for a couple paragraphs, quoting noted Iraq expert Mark Green as saying "There was a storm gathering in the terrorist world, and it was a storm we ignored for too long," before getting to this:
Bin Laden ordered 9-11, but before that came the USS Cole, the Khobar Towers, the Nairobi embassy, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Marines in Beirut, the hostages in Tehran -- two decades of attack on us, mainly because we wouldn't help annihilate Israel. Many people in the Mideast had it in for us. Governments helped them.
One was Iraq. Saddam Hussein paid money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. He may or may not have helped al-Qaida - - unanswerable before his overthrow -- but didn't disavow the group and said, three days after 9-11, that we had it coming.
The ignorance and clumsy manipulation of facts here is staggering.
He manages to compress al-Qaeada attacks, the Arab-Palestinian-Israeli dispute, and the Iranian revolution against the U.S.-backed shah into a single menace from the Mideast. The Brawler will concede that those folks in the Mideast are a shade darker than Paddy Mack and speak a different language. But they ain't all the same.
His analysis of the reason for two decades of attack on us -- "mainly because we wouldn't help annihilate Israel" -- also beggars belief. The attacks on the Cole, the Nairobi embassy and the Khobar Towers were caused by our occupation of Saudi Arabia. The hostage crisis in Iran was fueled by rage that we supported and sheltered the brutal Shah. Hezbollah -- which organized in 1982 after Israel, you know, invaded their country -- launched its attack on the Marines after the U.S. took sides in the Lebanese civil war, with naval artillery shelling Muslim enclaves. Hamas, borned out of 40 years of Israeli occupation and clearing of Palestinian territory, certainly wants to annihilate Israel but it doesn't seek to annihilate the United States (though Americans have been killed in Hamas attacks). (Please note: It should go without saying that the Brawler is not justifying the actions of any of these groups. But he is trying to put their actions into a context beyond McIlheran's willful misreading of the Middle East.)
And of course it was knowable before we invaded that Iraq was not aiding AQ -- that is if we paid attention to credible sources and ignored those who had their axes to grind (and who our allies sensed were full of it).
He goes on and on before we get to this:
His removal changed our Mideast policy from one of failing containment to a presumption that Iraqis can be free and that the world is better if they are. It demanded that we, as Bush put it Thursday, "believe in the transformational power of liberty."
In all these ways, the war wasn't a mistake; it was a victory. Every day that dawns without a dictator, every contentious assembly of Iraqis in place of Hussein's old rubber-stamp parliament is part of that victory.
That's right. When the grim odometer hits 3,000 in the not-too-distant future, don't think of it as a loss. It's all part of George Bush's greater victory.
This is the worldview informing Mack's columns. Why are they published?
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