How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration? The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of "missing" Iraqis, to support Iraqi women's battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East? Is Abu Ghraib really the only subject that interests our humanitarians?
I don't get it either. It's not as if the coalition effort is perfect, or that Bush is always smart and wonderful, or that people aren't profiting from the war on terror. But none of those are the point of what's going on in Iraq. If you can't sift through all of it and come to the conclusion that what's going on there is far better than what was going on before, you're missing the point.
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