Unsurprisingly, today’s New York Times editorial demands the United States surrender in Iraq and leave immediately. As typical, the arguments made are incoherent at best, idiotic at worst, and even though the Times acknowledges the virtual certainty of Iraq turing into a genocidal nightmare, the thought of a few hundred thousand dead innocents seems to pale in comparison to discrediting the American military and the Bush Administration.
Jules Crittenden gives the less verbose version:
OK, let’s review. Bloody chaos and genocide preferable to what’s going on now. What’s going on now not discussed in any inconvenient detail. NYT has retreat all figured out, will shares plans with Pentagon. Fighting terrorism works better from a distance. Democrats are “foolish†but so is NYT. Iran, Turkey, etc., should all step up to the plate and get Israel to build a fence around Iraq. And finally, Bush lied, people died.
Makes sense to me. Out now!
It is idiocy. The situation in Iraq is actually beginning to stabilize and the military finally has a plan that actually seems to work: but the media can’t be bothered to actually cover the story, so they’ve no idea what’s going on. You can’t conduct a war against a shadowy terrorist organization like al-Qaeda from 35,000 feet, it requires on-the-ground-intelligence and coordination with the locals: so the NYT wants us to leave Iraq so we lose any ability to actually fight al-Qaeda. Despite the fact that Iran and Syria have absolutely no interest in an Iraq that is peaceful and democratic we should let them have a virtually unrestrained hand in shaping events in the region according to our betters in Times Square. It’s terrible that we’ve killed so many Iraqis, so let’s take an action that will guarantee the sort of slaughter that will make the status quo seem like nothing.
The position of The New York Times is absolutely idiotic. It is indefensible, illogical, and incoherent. It is based on a media narrative that has little to do with the actual situation on the ground in Iraq. It would be a massive setback for the United States in the war against al-Qaeda and it would ensure a massive humanitarian disaster in Iraq.
There’s no question that the New York Times does not want the United States to win in Iraq. Their position assures failure. Whether that position comes from their own incredibly myopic sense of partisanship or just a blind ignorance is an academic question: what matters is that the consequence of their policy would be disastrous for Iraq, disastrous for the United States, and disastrous for the world.
The ones who would gain advantage from this terror would be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bashar al-Assad, and the rest of America’s enemies. The fact that The New York Times, knowingly or not, has cast their lots with them speaks volumes over which side of this war our chattering classes are on. Even if they get their way, the price we will pay long into the future will be far greater than the cost of seeing this conflict to its end while we still have the chance.