Faerie Tales and the Modern Neo-Con
Bill Kristol just can't for the life of him stop talking about Iraq and how it's all sunshine and rainbows and the surge is working and they're totally just about to greet us with flowers and ticker tape parades and I think, perhaps, he will never stop. But it's his bedtime story, and we just get to read about it.
To recap: Hillary Clinton was right to support the Iraq War and wrong to stop; Obama was wrong to oppose it all along; the surge is working; and it's all to Bush's credit. Naturally, the surge is not, say, temporarily working to stem a modicum of the violence in the areas that have been blanketed by additional troops; nay, the surge is a temporary strategy to round up insurgents and end the nascent sort-of-like-but-totally-not-a civil war, after which we will occupy the country at much lower troop levels and the violence will not return because we'll have rid the country of bad actors. This you can see, of course, by the reduced number of Americans and Iraqis killed since we added more troops to blanket the ground to stop the increasing violence.
Naturally, not once does he cite any evidence that the additional troops haven't just caused the bad guys to lay low for a while, or any increased intelligence or law enforcement efforts to actually rid the country of the guys that are causing the problems, but that's kind of a hefty intellectual charge for a short piece. Oh, wait.
The Democrats' Fairy Tale [NY Times]