It may be clear to you, but it wasn’t to CNN, whose exit polls “showed that 42 percent of voters called corruption an extremely important issue in their choices at the polls, followed by terrorism at 40 percent, the economy at 39 percent and the war in Iraq at 37 percent.” I’m sure I’m not as smart as you think you are, but even my meager counting skills put Iraq in 4th place in that list.
I’m glad you threw in that side note. The New York Times managed to interview a couple of those retired generals. Guess what? They want to continue the war, and they want more troops. One of the most resonant arguments in the debate over Iraq holds that the United States can move forward by pulling its troops back, as part of a phased withdrawal. If American troops begin to leave and the remaining forces assume a more limited role, the argument holds, it will galvanize the Iraqi government to assume more responsibility for securing and rebuilding Iraq.
This is the case now being argued by many Democrats, most notably Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who asserts that the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq should begin within four to six months.
But this argument is being challenged by a number of military officers, experts and former generals, including some who have been among the most vehement critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq policies.
Anthony C. Zinni, the former head of the United States Central Command and one of the retired generals who called for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, argued that any substantial reduction of American forces over the next several months would be more likely to accelerate the slide to civil war than stop it.
John Batiste, a retired Army major general who also joined in the call for Mr. Rumsfeld’s resignation, described the Congressional proposals for troop withdrawals as “terribly naïve …There are lots of things that have to happen to set them up for success,” General Batiste, who commanded a division in Iraq, said in an interview, describing the Iraqi government.
Yet somehow media coverage before the election convinced even sophisticated people like yourself that the generals’ position was closer to the Democrats’ than to the administration’s. Do you still think their recommendations are sacrosanct, now that you know what they are? Do you still trust the New York Times as much?
I didn’t miss your point on the foreign press. Your writing isn’t so bad, it’s your reasoning. Australian journalists have views on topics like global warming, free trade, the war on terror, etc. Their views tend to go in lockstep with those of self-styled free thinkers the world over. They can identify which American political party better matches their own views, and color their writing correspondingly. To the extent an Australian paper is critical of John Howard, who’s a strong conservative, it will be critical of Bush.
