Time's Running Out in Iraq

"What if they gave a war and nobody came?" 1960s Hippie Slogan

"What if we won a war and nobody noticed?" -- Me.


If the Left doesn’t get moving, time’s going to run out in Iraq and there won’t be any war left to stop. ("Anbar’s Turnaround Amazes"), ("Bush to announce next week his decision about future US troops levels in Iraq").

In the unlikely event that Obama gets into office, the international peace mission he’ll send to force an end to "this endless war" will find to their amazement that someone else ended it before they got there—and ended it on better terms, and with no thanks to them.

I know Harry Reid’s completely unimpressed with what is amazing everyone else, saying through his spokesman to the New York Times on Thursday: “the American people are still demanding a new strategy.” ("Bush, in Iraq, Says Troop Reduction Is Possible").

What new strategy is left, Harry? If the American people (that is, Democrats), don't want victory or a long-awaited commencement of troop withdrawals from a greatly-pacified Iraq, do they think we should start the war up again and lose it properly, as you predicted?

Thanks to the watery gruel called “news” most Americans still rely on to get informed, a large portion of us still think the situation in Iraq in September 2008 is identical to the situation in Iraq in December 2006. The actual number of roadside bomb attacks, American combat fatalities, that is, the worst stuff of war, has all been dramatically reduced; but for the vast majority of ill-informed news consumers, it is as bad today as it ever was.

This ignorance of basic events in my countrymen is one of my ultimate peeves. For a nation of folks who can calculate and re-calculate multiple streams of changeable data about weather, sports, cell phone features, and celebrity breakups on a daily--no, make that on an hourly basis--it escapes me why so many are so accepting of stale half-truths about national and world events that have been littering the landscape for years? I’m reminded of an old cartoon I read in the late 1970s, of a man in a doctor’s office reading one of the waiting-room magazines, and remarking acidly to the receptionist: “I see where Lyndon Johnson isn’t running for re-election.”

How can a nation bored with last month’s I-Pod technology cling so dearly to lies they were told by the mainstream media five years ago?