The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Trouble in Paradise
Now this really takes us back. The New York Times leads its front page today with the latest bad news from Iraq:
As the American military prepares to withdraw from Iraqi cities, Iraqi and American security officials say that jihadi and Baath militants are rejoining the fight in areas that are largely quiet now, regrouping as a smaller but still lethal insurgency.
There is much debate as to whether any new insurgency, at a time of relative calm in most of Iraq, could ever produce the same levels of violence as existed at the height of the fighting here. A recent series of attacks, however, like bubbles that indicate fish beneath still water, suggest the potential danger, all the more perilous now because the American troops who helped to pacify Iraq are leaving. . . .
Detainees, some innocent, but many of them former insurgents long held in American military custody, are being set free every day, potentially increasing the insurgency’s numbers. The American-Iraqi security agreement requires the release of all detainees in American custody unless there is sufficient evidence to bring charges in an Iraqi court. . . .
“In most places there isn’t an insurgency in Iraq anymore,” said an American military intelligence officer in Washington, who was not authorized to be quoted by name. “What we have now is a terrorism problem, and there is going to be a terrorism problem in Iraq for a long time.”
It seems as though this story debunks many liberal myths about Iraq (although it doesn’t spell out that that’s what it’s doing). It turns out there are terrorists in Iraq, retreat does embolden the enemy, the U.S. military was not just locking up innocent Iraqis for no reason, and American troops have improved the situation in Iraq considerably, not made it worse, at least over the past couple of years.
Now they tell us! What’s changed, of course, is that Iraq is no longer the partisan flashpoint it was between 2003 and 2008, when opponents of the Bush administration saw American failure there as the key to their own political success. As it turned out, they were able to succeed politically even as America was at last succeeding militarily in Iraq. But now the tables are turned. It is President Obama’s responsibility to ensure that success does not turn to failure.
If journalists had an anti-Bush bias and now have a pro-Obama one–and how much of a leap is it to imagine that, by and large, they do?–one can expect to see less reflexive naysaying and more straightforward reporting on the situation in Iraq–including the dangers of Obama’s already-curtailed plan for hasty withdrawal.
Well, hooray for responsible reporting. If only we could count on it regardless of which party is in the White House.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
