New York Times Is Wrong On Iraq
WHY stop when your are winning, and the deaths will be nought?
On July 8 The New York Times carried an editorial, intended to be historic, entitled The Road Home. Its motivation was simply expressed. “Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers,” it said, “is wrong.” Everything that the Bush Administration had predicted for Iraq had gone awry, and the years had passed “without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal”. True, there had been elections in Iraq but “the political leaders Washington has backed are incapable of putting national interests ahead of sectarian score settling”. The surge had not worked. As to the argument that withdrawal would lead to civil war, well, “that war is raging, right now”.
Of course a lot of what was written in the editorial was true. I reemphasise the simple point that had I known that 100,000 Iraqis would die after the removal of Saddam Hussein, then I would have argued against military action. But this is a strange moment to abandon Iraq. Far from not working, the surge has only just reached its peak, and even sceptical observers concede that there is real progress, one consequence of which has been a diminution in Iraqi deaths, though an increase in American ones.
Posted: 17th, July 2007 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
