Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich are off today.
Doha, Qatar
One thing that has always baffled me about the Bush team’s war effort in Iraq and against Al Qaeda is this: How could an administration that was so good at Swift-boating its political opponents at home be so inept at Swift-boating its geopolitical opponents abroad?
How could the Bush team Swift-boat John Kerry and Max Cleland — authentic Vietnam war heroes, whom the White House turned into surrendering pacifists in the war on terror — but never manage to Swift-boat Osama bin Laden, a genocidal monster, who today is still regarded in many quarters as the vanguard of anti-American “resistance.”
Dive into a conversation about America in the Arab world today, or even in Europe and Africa, and it won’t take 30 seconds before the words “Abu Ghraib” and “Guantánamo Bay” are thrown at you. Yes, both are shameful, but Abu Ghraib was a day at the beach compared to what Al Qaeda and its Sunni jihadist supporters have been doing in Iraq, yet none of their acts have become one-punch global insults like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
Consider what happened on Aug. 14. Four jihadist suicide-bombers blew themselves up in two Iraqi villages, killing more than 500 Kurdish civilians — men, women and babies — who belonged to a tiny pre-Islamic sect known as the Yazidis.
And what was the Bush team’s response to this outrage? Virtual silence. After much Googling, the best I could find was: “ ‘We’re looking at Al Qaeda as the prime suspect,’ said Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a U.S. military spokesman.” Wow....
http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/08/thomas-l-friedman-swift-boated-by-bin.html
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