I have figured out what bugs me about Don's posts. It's not that he's just setting up barrages of negative news. Heck, if I wanted to I could set up barrages of positive events and trends. It's just a lot harder. I have to dig through small papers, obscure links, Iraqi blogs, and other places for this stuff. Don just has to glean the front pages.

I think what bugs me is the sheer, unadulterated joy that comes out between the lines at every setback or problem. It doesn't take an examination of very many posts to see this, especially the ones he adds comments to. It's obvious that a day without an American disaster in Iraq for Don is like a day without sunshine. It's a shame the economy let him down...we'd at least get some variety.

Davin (as just an example) is just as hard over against what's happening in Iraq and against Bush as Don is, and posts items that show both in a bad light, but I get more of an impression that he is approaching it as a Jeremiah, warning everyone about the awful things that are happening. Somehow, I don't see him going "All RIGHT!" in the morning and dancing around the kitchen table when he reads about a copter crash in Iraq.

Maybe it's just my own interpretation, but as Robert says, if I am getting this impression from the posts, it's just as important and valid as if the poster intended it.

I want to reprint some excerpts from this bit by James Lileks:

The Strib had a massive editorial today [no longer online] which implied that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld lied, people died. And by imply, I mean that they said this: "in fact, they'd have reason to assert that 'Bush, Cheney, Rumsfelt and Wolfowitz lied and our soldiers died." Got that?

We're not saying Bush et al has sexual congress with goats, only that some would have reason to assert it. I’m not interested in a point-by-pointer tonight; it’s the last true night of summer, and I’d rather spend most of it on the cliff watching planes come in than waste my time trying to convince someone that there were plausible Iraq-Al Qaeda connections.

...Look. I'm a big-tent kinda guy. I’m willing to embrace all sorts of folk whose agendas may differ from mine, as long as we share the realization that there are many many millions out there who want us stone-cold bleached-bones dead. It’s the Andre the Giant philosophy, expressed in “Princess Bride”:

I hope we win.

That’s all. If you can agree with that without doing a Horshack twitch, intent on adding conditions - oh! oh! what about genetically modified soy? - then we understand each other. We know that we have many disagreements, but we agree: I hope we win. Oh, we can argue about every word in that four-syllable statement. But when it comes down to it all, we’re on the same page.

I hope we win.

Now let’s pick it apart. Who’s we? And what does win mean?

Every day I read a piece like the Strib edit. They all have an inescapable conclusion: Saddam should have been left in power. No, they don’t say that. Yes, the writers would surely insist that Saddam was a wretched tyrant, and the world is better off without him in power, BUT, Baghdad’s electricity service is now undependable. No, but. Yes, but. Perhaps, however.

Perfection has not been achieved; the depredations of a three-decade nightmare have not been banished in six months, and that really is the issue, isn’t it. Sorry, what was your question again?

I went back to the editorial archives today, to see what was said around the time of the Dec 1998 “Desert Fox” campaign. (And let us just imagine the panic if the current administration started naming military operations after famous Nazi nicks.) As I trolled back and forth in the microfiche looking for the relevant piece, I was struck by the other things the chattering classes brayed five years ago. "Lift the sanctions" was a popular item. And why? Because it would show Saddam the world was serious about giving him one last chance. Okay, here’s your gun back. But if you shoot us we’re going to take it away. The naivety nearly makes you weep. These people didn’t want Saddam’s body bobbing ass-up in the Tigris. They wanted a world in which the fascist clique that ruled Iraq curtseyed and bowed in the lovely gavotte of international diplomacy. However many people died in Saddam’s gulags was irrelevant; what mattered was that the UN was Concerned, and that the Iraqi Ambassador - clad in a nice Western suit, skilled in many tongues, daubed with a Macy’s cologne - agreed to facilitate the process of calibrating the precise nature of the consquences of failing to live up to the spirit of the letter of the penumbra of the -

Ah, it’s noon; shalll we have lunch sent in, or have our drivers take us to the Village? I understand there is an excellent Tibetan restaurant that’s just opened.

The best case scenario in all the syndicated lift-the-sanction editorials left Saddam in power. Repeat: the best case scenario kept Saddam in power. Nevermind the misery he would wreak on his own people - and they were in the absolute sense of the world his people, his pawns, his possessions. Nevermind that this meant the continuation of the Ba’athist rule to the next generation - Dad kicks the bucket ten years later, and the sons take over. Twenty more years of rape camps and mass graves. More than enough time for the world to weary of peering through the keyhole and guessing what the shadows might be up to. They’d have nukes, eventually. Best case scenario.

Here’s the end of the editorial:

“It’s past time the principals behind this mismanaged war were called to account for their deliberate misstatements.”

This mismanaged war.

Would they be more comfortable with a well-managed status quo that kept Saddam in power than a “mismanaged war” that kicked him out?

Let’s go back to the editorial page the day after the 1998 bombing. Lead edit. Title: “BOMBING SADDAM. Reason is clear; let attack be sustained.” The writer lays out the case: Saddam has not complied with his obligations; he threw away the last chance that President Clinton gave him in November; Tony Blair agrees. Said the editorial: “Neither will the attack be credible if it is limited to a few cruise missiles lobbed at Iraq. This must be the sustained, punishing effort that Clinton has promised.”

The end result of which was five more years of Saddam’s rule. Interesting choice of words, that: “Punishing.” Saddam must be punished, then left in power. He must be hit with a credible attack, then left in power. The punishing, credible attack that leaves him in power must be sustained. And so forth.

...I can’t help but come back to the central theme these edits imply: we should have left Iraq alone. We should have left this charnel house stand. We should have bought a wad of nice French cotton to shove in our ears so the buzz of the flies over the graves didn’t distract us from the important business of deciding whether Syria or China should have the rotating observer-status seat in the Oil-for-Palaces program. Afghanistan, well, that’s understandable, in a way; we were mad. We lashed out. But we should have stopped there, and let the UN deploy its extra-strong Frown Beams against the Iraqi ambassador in the hopes that Saddam would reduce the money he gave to Palestinian suicide bombers down to five grand. Five grand! Hell, that hardly covers the parking tickets your average ambassador owes to the city of New York; who’d blow themselves up for that.

Would the editorialists of the nation be happier if Saddam was still cutting checks to people who blew up not just our allies, but our own citizens? I’d like an answer. Please. Essay question: “Families of terrorists who blow up men, women and children, some of whom are Americans, no longer receive money from Saddam, because Saddam no longer rules Iraq. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? Explain.”

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.

Complain, yes! Carp! Criticize! Bitch! Moan! But there’s a difference between criticizing the particulars of the Normandy invasion, and insisting that Hitler can be contained with bauxite sanctions. (Imagine if these people had been running papers in the 40s: enough troops? Supply line problems? Plans in place for getting the Berlin power grid up? Oh no! Battle of the Bulge! Quagmire! Bastogne is a mess! Roosevelt lied, Private Ryan died!) To those who sniff “this isn’t World War Two,” I’ll agree: it’s worse. It’s going to be longer, meaner, and it sprawls across every map. Its ultimate severity won’t be apparent to some people until a band of god-bothering raisin seekers sneaks a nuke into Baltimore on a cargo container.

God forbid.

But. If it happens three years into President Dean’s tenure, the same people who wanted Saddam kept in a box - where he was free to spoon out the eyes of his citizens and beat them to death for their failings at an Olympic event - those same people will blame Bush for invading Iraq and radicalizing the Arab world. Iraq in 2007 could be stable and free, but that would count for nothing. We erred. We took the UN resolutions seriously. We spent blood and money to establish Beachhead One in that wretched abattoir, and for that we should expect to pay.

Iraq will probably never be nuked because of the actions of its leaders. We can now expect the editorialists of the world to tell us we had it coming if we get nuked for making that future possible.