1) Colin Powell says we'll be in Iraq "as long as it takes" in this
Opinion Journal editorial.
2) James Lilek has news on everything from Saddam's ties to Al-Qaeda, to a simply masterful send up of all the administration nay-sayers.
It must be read. I mean it.
An enticement:
In short: the same people who chide America for its short-attention span think we should have stopped military operations after the Taliban was routed. (And they quite probably opposed that, for the usual reasons.) The people who think it’s all about oil like to snark that we should go after Saudi Arabia. The people who complain that the current administration is unable to act with nuance and diplomacy cannot admit that we have completely different approaches for Iraq, for Iran, for North Korea. The same people who insist we need the UN deride the Administration when it gives the UN a chance to do something other than throw rotten fruit.
The same people who accuse America of coddling dictators are sputtering with bilious fury because we actually deposed one.
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Let us go back to that editorial from 1998.
“There is one sound conclusion to be drawn from the confluence of events in Washington and Iraq: The conduct of foreign policy is a weighty responsibility that at times requires the undivided attention of a whole, unencumbered president. It is a sad commentary that some voices in Washington are complaint that momentous world events have interrupted their sideshow. . . . Events in Iraq make it clear that there is a world out there which requires the attention of the US Government. It’s time to shift focus away from the neighborhood farce and back to the world stage.”
This was a reference to the impeachment proceedings, of course. The editorialists were appalled that Congress was impeaching the president when the threat of Iraq loomed so large. Now the threat has been dispatched - and does this count for anything? No. The terrorist training campes are closed down, the torture barracks padlocked, the mass gravesare opened to the wailings of the families, the official hospitals of Baghdad no longer welcome cancerous terrorists, the Kurds no longer watch the skies for the helicopters and their bitter gusts, the citizens no longer wonder whether the government men will rip out the eyes of their infant children to produce the proper confession -
Irrelevant.
You know what really bothers some people?
That yellowcake story still looks shaky.
3) Vaclav Havel, Former President of the Czech Republic, Arpad Göncz, Former President of Hungary, and Lech Walesa, Former President of Poland call for Europe to support a
democratic society in Cuba.
