David Brooks today

[rlev1223]

Another lame apologia from the master of the irrelevant. This time, we have Brooks claiming that the evidence is not in yet about "progress" in iraq.



My letter to him:
No evidence except 1700+ dead and 40,000 injured Americans, somewhere between 12,000 and more than 100,000 dead I raqis, (who knows..we don't do "body counts"),and of course the loss of America's soul in a slough of buck-passing and sentence parsing regading torture.


One only hopes that there will come a time when the intellectual authors of this crime, from Rupert Murdoch all the way down to yourself,realize that there are no more semantic hiding places and just slink away, although I would descibe the chance of that happening as, roughly, fat.

[The White Tree]

1. Brooks is a master at missing the point.

I read this piece. If the Bush administration came out and said - yea we f-'d up, what we did was reckless and foolish, however, now we need to fix it and we are humbly asking for everyones help in doing this, perhaps he would get some help.

However, Bush will go to his grave insisting that this was the right thing to do. And he will take a lot of people with him who will hold that belief in their hearts for the rest of their days.

If the administration could prove to the world that they now understand that the ends don't justify the means then I think they'd have more support. They won't admit that so the rest of the world is wary of getting tangled up in their messes.

Look at Afghanistan - 4 years later, we are still fighting a war there. A war that had broader support and a peace that was much more winnable. We abandoned Afghanistan for all intensive purposes to pursue Iraq. Why? Because they believed that the ends justified their means and did not care that no one else saw that. Same thing with torture - the ends justified the means.

The problem with that is the rest of the world, understanding that philosophy is now fearful what supporting the US would mean when the US administration has consistently shown that the ends justify it's means - even if it leads to another World War. So the options for them are to let the US slog it out or face the potential for even more devastation around the world. So they don't help out even though innocent people are dying. I'm not defending that position but I understand it.