Iraq: Tourist Mecca
UPDATE: “Think Progress” helpfully brings us this cutting insight from Brit Hume, re John Murtha:
“It’s time a few things be said about him,” Hume said. “This guy is long past the day when he had anything but the foggiest awareness of what the heck is going on in the world.” Hume called Murtha an “absolute fountain” of “naivete.”
Steyn rounds up the week’s events, and adds this cutting insight, among others:
There was a TV station somewhere — was it Thunder Bay, Ontario? — that used to show a continuous loop of a roaring fireplace all night, and thousands of viewers would supposedly sit in front of it for hours because it was such a reassuringly comforting scene. The networks could save themselves a lot of money by adopting the same approach: Run a continuous loop of a smoking building in Baghdad all night while thousands of congressmen and pundits and think-tankers and retired generals run around Washington shrieking that all is lost. America is way out of its league! A dimwitted tourist in a fearful land of strange people who don’t watch “American Idol.” Iraq is so culturally alien that not a single Sunni, Shia or Kurd has come forward claiming to be the father of Anna Nicole’s baby!
Get a grip, chaps! In Iraq, everyone’s a tourist. This al-Qaida honcho, al-Masri, is an Egyptian. His predecessor, Zarqawi, was a Jordanian. Al-Sadr is a Persian stooge. For four decades, the country was a British client. Before that, it was a Turkish province. The Middle East is a crazy place and a tough nut to crack, but the myth of the unbeatable Islamist insurgent is merely a lazy and more neurotic update of the myth of the unbeatable communist guerrilla, which delusion led to so much pre-emptive surrender in the ’70s. Nevertheless, in the capital city of the most powerful nation on the planet, the political class spent last week trying to craft a bipartisan defeat strategy, and they might yet pull it off.
Topics: Iran, Iraq, celeb, media
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:12 pm on Sunday, February 18, 2007
6 Responses to “Iraq: Tourist Mecca”
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February 18th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Ahhh, yes Steyn. Jules, get a hold of Steyn, Hanson, Yourself, toss in a Lileks and a few others. I’d pay good dinero, to hear you people….well, as long as you served Hors D’Oeuvres, good beer and liquor, that is…:).
February 18th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
I despise Murtha, but honestly-the two years off for every year deployed is not a bad idea in and of itself. Rummy’s biggest screw up was failing to expand the Army to deal with the problems ahead (there is a very simple military dictum at work there: better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it).
I know what the old fool is up to, but I thought we needed a bigger Army under Clinton. Failing to expand the force the main reason Murtha is able to play these kinds of games.
February 18th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
I excerpted and linked at New Surrendercrat Strategy: Betray The Troops — Update 5
February 18th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
I agree with CavMedic. We need a bigger military, and we need to treat them better, and we need a nice, big, isolated nursing facility where we can house those who have lost their grip on reality, like J. Murtha.
February 18th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Headed for Defeat?
Certainly the Democrats are striving for us to lose in Iraq. That much is clear. Their all-consuming hatred for the President has rendered them into unpatriotic, vengeance-drenched enemies of freedom. Still it’s sobering to read the brilliant Mark St…
February 18th, 2007 at 4:19 pm
In their extreme myopia, all they see is what their “slow-bleed” will do to Bush. They leave out the fact that it is the troops–you know, the one’s they support–and the rest of the country outside the beltway, will be the ones doing the bleeding. To top it off, they fail to have anything handy to staunch the flow before the whole body of Western civilization bleeds out.