Liberals - this is your newspaper

The New York Times finally acknowledges that there is a genocide they could live with!

The paper is still haunted on why we even went into Iraq and seems to be too disingenuous to query its own archived articles from the last twenty years to lend some guidance. Would some adult at the Times please write a reasonable anti-war proposition that:

• isn’t infected with forty years of New Left dialect (references to inherent struggle, anti-Americanism, populism, refugee plight, etc)? Where were the champions of Iraq’s downtrodden in 2002? 1995? Why the concern now?
• acknowledges that multilateralism in 2002 didn’t necessarily have to mean “France, Germany, and Russia are on board”? If they were on board now, with the same situation on the ground today, would the Times have a different position? Would we all have rushed to war?
• discards the deliberate misconception the war was somehow illegal and that we cooked intelligence just for some diabolical opportunity to waste trillions of dollars and intentionally waste thousands of American lives?
• acknowledges a familiarity with and respect for the work of long-term embedded reporters who have seen transformation happen on the ground? And not rely on anonymous stringers or otherwise partially trustworthy sources?
• considers published data from the Iraq MNF as an equally valid source of information?
• dispenses with the political, faux sympathy for our troops, who happen to be the most experienced, professional, coordinated, and fearsome military in the world?
• acknowledges that quantifiable progress has been made in some areas? Just not to the media cadence!
• can discard the need to map the war to our election cycle when our enemies have made it clear that they a) will attempt to directly and indirectly influence our media and elections and b) are preparing for a decades-long struggle?
• acknowledge that the UN was criminally incapable and unwilling to prosecute Hussein’s dereliction before the war and there is little they can do now except maybe distribute STD pamphlets and condoms? We might throw them a baby food contract or grain warehouse. Or maybe not, since it didn’t work before either.
• isn’t impaired with the retarding effect of reading and watching mainstream news for four years straight? (Another car bombing? We have lost!)
• concedes that the demons we fear most after withdrawing from Iraq are already on the ground and fighting us in Iraq — and thus our continued presence. This includes meddling “allies”, criminal gangs, and assorted scum you haven’t even imagined yet.

More:

“The United States will have to pay a large share of the costs, but should also lead international efforts, perhaps a donors’ conference, to raise money for the refugee crisis.”

A donor’s conference? What a great idea! Wait—can’t do it. We just blew our wad with Live Earth, an asinine event sponsored and promulgated by political thumbsuckers who otherwise would have a burning passion for assisting displaced refugees–that is, non-Iraqi refugees. Has there been a single relief concert for displaced Iraqis? Either the artsy wing of the activist Left doesn’t care about displaced Iraqis, or there really aren’t that many displaced Iraqis. I tend to think the latter is less likely.

Washington also has to mend fences with allies. There are new governments in Britain, France and Germany that did not participate in the fight over starting this war and are eager to get beyond it. But that will still require a measure of humility and a commitment to multilateral action that this administration has never shown.

Yes, now that voters have thrown out corrupt socialists in France and Germany - formerly Hussein’s most influential allies - things certainly are a little different, no?

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage - with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.

If Bush has the ability to drag this war out, he would also be equally capable of terminating it outright, or at the very minimum, being able to spin the news cycle to his favor. There is no evidence of any of this happening. Since nobody else is viewing it this way, accusing Bush of prolonging the war for political reasons means simply that the Times itself prefers viewing the war through a political lens, and further bolstering itself and its allies for rhetorical combat of epic proportions during the 2008 Elections.