[rmlew]

Res Ipsa Loquitur

[Crim]

All I can glean from that giberish?

It appears Diana needs to get laid.

[rmlew]

Ping

[Cacique]

btt

[Irish Rose]

Ah, Diana West. She’s been sour on the Iraq war for a long time now. Reading her columns has a kind of morbid fascination - what is the current doom and gloom on our war efforts?

That being said, I doubt Feith is entirely correct. I think that al Qaeda and the Baathists can be blamed for a great deal of the problems in post-Saddam Iraq. Al Qaeda had a strategy of inciting sectarian warfare in Iraq, and it may be that without their meddling sectarian violence never would have erupted the way it did. I’m not convinced that giving the Iraqis power immediately would have had such a chilling effect on al Qaeda terrorists - or disgruntled Baathists.

But we will never know what would have happened if the CPA was never created; we can only guess.

[cookcounty]

"Would it cover, perhaps, such grand themes as the multicultural Big Lie that insists Western ways may be grafted -- presto! -- onto Islamic cultures? Or maybe the difficulties inherent in the Western-style, humane projection of power against seventh-century terrorist barbarians?

I gather this is some sort of racist screed that Arabs are too stupid to do democracy.

I don't recall "presto," but I DO recall multiple iterations of "long, hard and difficult."

[Defiant]

It wasn't the overweening Bush administration plan for Jeffersonizing the Fertile Crescent, or our leaders' misreading of the "democratic ally" potential therein. It was the 14-month-reign of the CPA that caused all our woes. The CPA, the argument goes, in effect created the Sunni insurgency, which later gave rise to the Sunni-Shiite wars, and which ultimately required the added infusion of American troops known as the surge.

They are right. Go in, kick ass, control the place, and things fall in place later. She could say the same things about postwar Japan, yet after several years of American military governance, the place was as quiet as a titmouse. Would that Diana were.