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leave it to the liberal NY Times..., 2004-08-17 10:21:45 | Main | Islam by contrast had the not..., 2004-08-18 12:06:26

garbage:

garbage garbage garbage. Along with repeating garbage about oil for food that has apparently become holy writ, Fareed Zakaria, defending Kerry, gets into line to rewrite 'history'*:

Given these realities, the United States had a choice. It could drop all sanctions and the containment of Iraq and welcome Hussein back into the world community. Or it had to hold him to account.

It could have enforced a stricter arms embargo, maintained inspections, and continued enforcing no-fly zones against Iraqi gunships etc. via bases in, say, Turkey and any one of the numerous smaller countries surrounding Saudi Arabia that aren't nearly so holy. It could also have wiped out the Ansar al-Islam holdouts in Northern Iraq, had it a mind to deal with terrorists.

All cheaper than 940-plus American lives, I reckon. Or the gratuitous, unexamined excess Iraqi casualties due to American invasion, disorder, and occupation.

Much cheaper than a bill that's creeping towards $200 billion in under two years for what: few visible improvements in infrastructure from the lifting of sanctions and a somehow impossibly declining economic situtation; a few very rich contractors; dramatically increased threats to the US from Islamist terrorism; an Islamist revival in southern Iraq; a messianic fringe figure leading in Iraqi polls; a CIA puppet nominally in charge playing rope-a-dope and, knowing how to win his masters' favor, doing his best to emulate Saddam Hussein, making the messianic Islamist look good; etc. etc.

The stuff is climbing up the walls, somebody at the WaPo needs to take the trash out.

    * I love that vanity review. Anyway, we're talking the past year, which isn't 'rewriting history', it's rewriting current events. I had a professor back in college who often blamed MTV, among others, for such short attention spans. This is too widespread, too typical, and too systematic a level of ignorance among trained apologists to be blamed on the minor inconveniences of pop culture. For now I'll call it the bipartisan effort to flank the thinking public with so much blind idiocy that they'd die rather than approach a voting booth. Certainly wearing me down, and shit if I think.

Update: for some more obvious, recent wholesale rewriting of the recent past we look to maxspeak readers, who point out the New York Times and its proclamation that "efforts by the country's center-right government to repair the damage done to French work habits by decades of Socialist administration" is apparently representative of the poor work ethic in Anglo-Saxon journalism, and furthermore that whatever administrations were in control at any point, they didn't do anything to hurt French work habits (gdp per work hour: $33.77 UK, $39.23 US vs $44.06 Fr). Fine work.


:: posted by buermann @ 2004-08-17 17:43:11 CST | link





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