Wednesday, February 02, 2005
“THEY WERE RIGHT”
Some left-leaning journalists are experiencing second thoughts. Here’s Mark Browne of the Chicago Sun-Times:
Maybe you’re like me and have opposed the Iraq war since before the shooting started—not to the point of joining any peace protests, but at least letting people know where you stood.
You didn’t change your mind when our troops swept quickly into Baghdad or when you saw the rabble that celebrated the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue, figuring that little had been accomplished and that the tough job still lay ahead.
Despite your misgivings, you didn’t demand the troops be brought home immediately afterward, believing the United States must at least try to finish what it started to avoid even greater bloodshed. And while you cheered Saddam’s capture, you couldn’t help but thinking I-told-you-so in the months that followed as the violence continued to spread and the death toll mounted.
But after watching Sunday’s election in Iraq and seeing the first clear sign that freedom really may mean something to the Iraqi people, you have to be asking yourself: What if it turns out Bush was right, and we were wrong?
It’s hard to swallow, isn’t it?
Browne’s conclusion: “If it turns out Bush was right all along, this is going to require some serious penance. Maybe I’d have to vote Republican in 2008.â€? And here’s the NYT’s John Burns being interviewed on PBS:
I must say, I’m sure in the chow halls across the country today American troops were feeling a tremendous sense of satisfaction after all that they have gone through here. And I have also no doubt that in the command centers, stories written by people like myself that had been posted, commanders would have taken a good deal of satisfaction.
I think that we… those of us who took a rather dire view of the possibilities of this election—not the election itself, but what might happen—have to say quite honestly that they got quite a lot about this right, and we got quite a lot about it wrong. They always said that we can do this.
They were fearful, of course, that there could be major insurgent actions. And there were. They were eight or nine suicide bombings in Baghdad alone. But they also said we can get this done, and you’ll see, there will be a very substantial turnout. Well, they were right.
Among the wrong were The Age, the New York Times, and, as usual, Aaron McGruder. These people need editors or something. Burns also has news for the civil war boosters:
How many times did voters say to me—and I believe to many other reporters who began their interviews with them by asking them, as we so often do, are you Shiite, are you Sunni or are you Kurd—they would say to us, what is that to you? Why are you people so obsessed with that?
I must have heard that several dozen times yesterday—people who said, can’t you get it straight in your mind that we are Iraqis first, and then Sunnis or Shiites second? And this is really very interesting. There is a sense amongst Iraqis that Americans arrived here with an obsession about the ethnic breakdown of this country.