Wretchard of Belmont Club has an excellent piece on the use of the Abu Ghraib images and the war. He makes several excellent points, including this one:
And the final fact is this. The only exit from war’s inhumanity is through the doorway of victory. For while it may be mitigated, controlled and reduced to a certain extent fundamentally “war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it”, though victory can end it. While it continues, as many in the Left who long for a 21st century Vietnam hope, it will unleash unpredictable forces which no one can control. Those who delighted in discovering the photographs at Abu Ghraib little imagined Nick Berg’s video. And while we can safely grant Andrew Sullivan’s plea and publish both, for reasons the media imagine are laudable, it is what comes next that I am afraid of.
That’s the point – those who call for America to be humbled in Iraq must realize that the price of that "humbling" will be thousands of Iraqi dead alongside with hundreds more Americans. Yet there are all too many, especially in the media, who would gladly sacfice thousands of Iraqi lives to see Bush defeated in November.
“Yet there are all too many, especially in the media, who would gladly sacfice thousands of Iraqi lives to see Bush defeated in November.”
Not just that. They would gleefully expend American lives; even if we assume a 100-1 kill ratio, thousands of Iraqi dead means double digit American soldiers dead.
Gerry