Posted on 12/09/2004 12:12:00 PM PST by Zhangliqun
He'll (Bush) have even less (support) if Iraq continues to deteriorate. The official line that we're making progress and it'll get much better after the Jan. 30 elections has no credibility. This week the New York Times revealed a bleak picture painted by a classified cable from the CIA's Baghdad station chief. Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, after a recent trip to Iraq, said some areas are actually more dangerous than a few months ago. The early line on training Iraqis to take over the security tasks is not encouraging.
"Peter Galbraith, a serious student of the Iraqis and Kurds, just returned from a 12-day stay in Iraq and is horrified at what's occurring: 'The optimistic scenario is that half of the country (controlled by the Shiites) will be turned over to the Iranians; the Kurds will resist that and the Sunni area is a violent mess.'"
"There's talk of stretching out the elections and little reason to believe violence, bloodshed or American casualties will decline. Years of thousands of young Americans dying in a foreign civil war will transform any second-term euphoria."
"If that sounds familiar, it is; think 40 years ago."
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
The first 4/5ths of the column are just silly (not excerpted here) but the last 4 paragraphs make me wonder if an intervention for Al may be necessary...
I get the print WSJ and read the editorials, EXCEPT for those written by Al Hunt. He is demented.
When does Hunt start working for Bloomberg? It can't happen soon enough.
I thought mrs. woof woof was gone from WSJ
But really -- what the $@#$% is this quote by Galbraith? Optimistic scenario of turning over half of Iraq to the Iranians? It's like a Sprint commercial where the guy is talking gobbledygook..."scooter my daisy heads". How do you argue with a non-point? Did Hunt bother to proofread before filing this column?
And from this insanity he draws the obligatory lefty parallels with Vietnam...
Galbraith, Galbraith, now where have I heard that name before?
John Kenneth Galbraith -- the "economist" who described Reaganomics as "bastardized Keynesianism".
You got that right. All this heavy breathing with vague warnings about things going wrong...he reminds me of the guy who sits in his cube at work only half-listening to the conversations around him while he is on the phone:
Maybe somebody is in the next cube talking about how Peyton Manning was "on fire" against Kansas City. Al Hunt hangs up his phone and says "Fire? Did somebody say fire? I got a call from someone who says there's a fire! He's a serious student of fires so this is a bad situation! Oh, this is not going to bode well for the Bush administration!"
The Soviets, Czechs, Belgians and even Scots are broken/breaking into autonomous regions...why not Iraq?
I don't understand the question. Mr. Galbraith (and Al Hunt tacitly) is saying that half of Iraq should be turned over to Iran? How does the promote any sort of autonomy other than for terrorists and their Islamofascist mullahs?
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