Posted on 07/07/2005 11:42:24 AM PDT by paulat
Thursday, July 7, 2005 - Page updated at 12:00 AM
Editorial
Exit without apologies
Saddam Hussein is toppled from power. The fundamental aim of the Iraq war is accomplished. Now is the time to plan to leave and bring American forces home.
As noted in a series of editorials that began on Sunday and ends today, the passage of time only erodes confidence in an enterprise we initially supported. Successive layers of President Bush's rationales for the war were stripped bare. No weapons of mass destruction were found, no prewar terrorist havens or links to Sept. 11, 2001.
The war caused untold suffering in Iraq and it has taken its own toll at home in grieving families, mourning communities and a loss of confidence in our elected leaders.
Our military, a mix of regular and reserve forces, did all that was asked of them. Too often, they were ill-served by failures to adequately equip and prepare them for the war and its aftermath. They were failed by civilian leadership that did not understand Iraq's culture and history, and the complexity of the mission.
The Iraq war lingers on the home front through the Patriot Act, with its disturbing invasions of privacy and intrusions upon civil liberties. American values were further assaulted by military prison scandals and isolation of prisoners outside the law.
U.S. taxpayers await an honest accounting of the war's costs and the financial obligations for postwar reconstruction.
Questions remain, but the U.S. can exit Iraq without apologies.
Saddam sits in jail. Iraqis are free to decide their own future. More than 1,700 American lives were sacrificed to help create that opportunity.
The Iraq war is over. Thank our allies, and bring U.S. troops home.
Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company
I suggest the US withdraw from Seattle...There's no reason to be there.
Let's trade Seattle (and Western WA) to Canada for Alberta!
The editorials were probably written on a manual typewriter while the editor was hiding under his bed.
Lie. I stopped reading there. When even Christopher Hitchens--no one's conservative--can list all the terrorists who found haven in Iraq, you look like an idiot saying this.
Well, in a way they have made a point. President Bush recently said: "We are fighting terrorist in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here".
We'll they just did a number of Londons subways, and other countries, and there is no doubt, we have lots of them right here in the U.S.A.
And many of our top defense and terrorist experts say it's only a matter of time until we get hit, and hit hard.
Remember, this is the paper that supported the recounting of votes (several times) in Kings County Washington, recounts that selected dem Christine Gregoire as Governor. I think this newspaper is pathetic, cowardly, and disgraceful.
Bad timing on the part of this birdcage material rag!
Well, if the Seattle Times thinks we shouldn't be there, then we have to get out.
Seattle Times; New York Times; Los Angeles Times -- all mouthpieces of the radical left, aka, Marxists, Leninists, communists. Should be renamed The Northwest Communist Clarion; The East Coast Communist Clarion; The West Coast Communist Clarion.
What Bush said is generally correct. Of course there will be exceptions to the general strategy. Just imagine this: today, Iraq is training people to fight AGAINST terror, instead of Saddam stockpiling to join with the terrorists in the future. Obvious to me that while Bin Laden has been pricking us with pins, Saddam was preparing for a full broadside.
paulat is grimly laughing....
I swear...refuting the anti-war left is more than a full-time job.
No surprise. What else would we expect from the Seattle Times.
(excerpt)That this—his pro-American moment—was the worst Moore could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible. Baghdad was for years the official, undisguised home address of Abu Nidal, then the most-wanted gangster in the world, who had been sentenced to death even by the PLO and had blown up airports in Vienna* and Rome. Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer. Saddam boasted publicly of his financial sponsorship of suicide bombers in Israel. (Quite a few Americans of all denominations walk the streets of Jerusalem.) In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally. (Though why should he not?) Should you and I not resent any foreign dictatorship that attempts to kill one of our retired chief executives? (President Clinton certainly took it that way: He ordered the destruction by cruise missiles of the Baathist "security" headquarters.) Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country. In 1993, a certain Mr. Yasin helped mix the chemicals for the bomb at the World Trade Center and then skipped to Iraq, where he remained a guest of the state until the overthrow of Saddam. In 2001, Saddam's regime was the only one in the region that openly celebrated the attacks on New York and Washington and described them as just the beginning of a larger revenge. Its official media regularly spewed out a stream of anti-Semitic incitement. I think one might describe that as "threatening," even if one was narrow enough to think that anti-Semitism only menaces Jews. And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war. On Dec. 1, 2003, the New York Times reported—and the David Kay report had established—that Saddam had been secretly negotiating with the "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il in a series of secret meetings in Syria, as late as the spring of 2003, to buy a North Korean missile system, and missile-production system, right off the shelf. (This attempt was not uncovered until after the fall of Baghdad, the coalition's presence having meanwhile put an end to the negotiations.)
He said "we are fighting them in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here".
Look, London now has Mid Easterners all over the place. They could set off bombs next week. And there is no fight going on in London, because it's not that kind of a battle.
The English are in Iraq too, but did it stop this attack on London?
Same here. If NY subways were hit this afternoon, killing thousands, how do you plan on fighting them here anyway, other than securing our borders and implementing real immigration reform?
The a-hole editor who penned this sewage hates our military as much as he hates Bush. Defending the nation takes us away from lefts only goal... our conversion to socialism.
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