Iraq war - a reminder to Dem supporters

Many have very short memories about the bi-partisan Congressional and State Dept support for the Iraq war. Here's a good reminder.

[h/t: Vinney Di]

New York Times attacks the troops

Mark Steyn’s OCRegister column picks up the story of the New York Times’ latest hack job. This time it’s homicidal military vets returning from Iraq and Afstan:

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan either "committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one." The "committed a killing" formulation includes car accidents.
[...]
It didn't seem to occur to the Times to check whether the murder rate among recent veterans is higher than that of the general population of young men. It's not.

Au contraire, the columnist Ralph Peters calculated that Iraq and Afghanistan vets are about one-fifth as likely to murder you as the average 18-to-34-year-old American male.

The reality, then, was the opposite of what the NYT tried to portray. Compared to the general population war vets are model citizens. That’s precisely what most reasonable people would expect, isn’t it?

What's going on? Sloppy journalism, anti-military bias, political agenda or all of the above?

[Related]

Success in Iraq

Queen’s professor of political studies, Bruce Gilley, writes a thoughtful piece on Iraq. His take is refreshingly far from what one expects from the typical Canadian academic. Though he does express a seemingly obligatory "I’m no fan of Bush" and "... administration’s mendacity on WMD", the rest optimistically supports the war’s aims and progress:

...my own view is more positive: Iraqi democracy is on the right track. As it continues to develop in the decades to come, George W. Bush's war will be vindicated.

The only semi-democratic states in the Arab world are Jordan and Kuwait. Iraq is rapidly surpassing them in terms of its electoral, civil and media freedoms.

We usually give our politicians at least a four-to five-year term in order to engineer even minor changes in public policy. Why would we expect Iraq to build a functioning democracy in terrible conditions in a shorter time? Talk about double standards.

...developments described above are vindicating, not undermining, the original case for war.

Self-loathing

Mark Steyn enlists Steve McIntyre and Private Beauchamp in reaching a familiar conclusion:

As Pogo said, way back in the 1971 Earth Day edition of a then-famous comic strip, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Even when we don't do anything: In the post-imperial age, powerful nations no longer have to invade and kill. Simply by driving a Chevy Suburban, we can make the oceans rise and wipe the distant Maldive Islands off the face of the Earth. This is a kind of malignant narcissism so ingrained it's now taught in our grade schools. Which may be why, even when the New Republic's diarist goes to Iraq and meets the real enemy, he still assumes it's us.

George Jonas - wobbly on Iraq?

I’m an admirer of George Jonas’s writing which appears regularly in the National Post. Being an admirer means liking his style and mostly agreeing with him. Mostly. His two recent columns on Iraq, I found problematic.

In his column on January 13th, A Waste of American Lives and in a follow-up column today, Shades of Vietnam, he argued that while he supported going into Iraq, the U.S. should have gotten out “at least three years ago”, shortly after toppling Saddam. He believes that attempting to bring democracy to Iraq was too grandiose and implausible a task and that it is a mistake to commit more troops to it now. Naturally, if you believe a task shouldn’t have been attempted in the first place, it follows that you wouldn’t support trying harder to finish it. So he hasn’t really gone “wobbly” as one reader accused - he never did go along with the hard part of the Bush plan.

But I doubt that George Jonas’s preferred approach was feasible at all:

First, it is doubtful that Britain and the other allies in the war would have gone along with it, so you have to ask whether Bush would have ever pursued it alone. If he had, with the disaster, chaos and civil war that would almost certainly have followed, the political cost to Bush would have been huge, at home and abroad. Would Bush have survived the 2004 election? Who knows but I’d bet not.

Would victory have been achieved in any meaningful sense? Would the world have been safer? Who would have taken control in Iraq? Saddam’s supporters, the Sunnis, controlled the police and military apparatus and presumably knew where the weapons were stashed. Would they have regained control and suppressed the Shiites (again, as they did following Gulf War I)?

Would al-Zarqawi and al-Qaeda have moved in to support the Sunnis? Would we have another pre-9/11 Afghanistan on our hands - this time one with oil resources?

Would Iran or Syria have attempted to take advantage of a weakened Iraq?

There were many unknowns and huge risks associated with the simpler ‘Jonas plan’. The Bush plan was and is superior and while, in hindsight, mistakes were made it could still work. The alternatives were and are worse.

Post Script: A fallen soldier's view of the war and his reasons for joining.

Iraq Study Group waves white flag

(via The Corner)

Update: Hugh Hewitt; Editorial

Uperdate: Steyn