The Iraq Study Group report has freed the left to describe Iraq in a new way, as worse than a civil war. On Meet the Press, Tom Ricks of the Washington Post said:
Right now it’s…the pure Hobbesian state, the war of all against all at this point. It isn’t a–it’s worse than a civil war in many ways. It’s in a state of meltdown. The country is falling apart.
Yesterday at CAIR, Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador to the U.S., said the situation in Iraq was moving from “disastrous to catastrophic” and appealed for Americans to work with Iraq’s neighbors simply to end the suffering. His theme was similar to a forum on Monday at Congress, to air the Lancet study on 600,000 deaths in Iraq (led by presidential aspirant Dennis Kucinich.) Epidemiologist Les Roberts lost his composure as he described the degree of suffering in Iraq, the number of families affected. Then Roberts spoke in spiritual terms. What is needed before anything, he said, is a full accounting of the losses brought on by this visionary war, a public acknowledgement followed by acts of American “contrition.”
Roberts is going to be waiting a long long time for that. It’s not the American way to apologize. Ask the Tuskegee airmen. Ask Leo Frank.
The Obama boom is the American way of turning the corner. The hero-worship Barack Obama experienced in N.H. and the endless references to JFK are, as the senator said, not about him, they’re about us. It’s a spiritual reclamation.
Americans like to think of themselves as idealists, yet our country has been dragged in the moral mud for years by this filthy war. The neocons can talk forever about the necessity to knock off Middle East heads of state as a sniper takes out a hostage-taker (Perle & Frum); but Americans don’t like to think of themselves as the authors of assassination, devastation, disease, emigration, etc. They want to think of the world in more hopeful ways. That’s what Obama is all about, reimagining the U.S. as a country that embraces progress and idealism. More power to him.
