I agree with what AJ said, but that Andrew Sullivan quote is awful.
Watching scenes of people celebrating the killing of soldiers, soliders who just liberated them from one of the worst tyrannies on the planet, is enough to make anyone want to leave the place in disgust.
I don't get to see TV news very often, but I haven't seen any scenes of Iraqis celebrating the killing of Americans like we saw in Mogodishu. So unless I just missed it, I don't see why that analogy is relevant.
He also talks as though the attacks are being directed by Saddam, which I don't see any evidence of. That kind of coordination would risk exposing Saddam, and would make for a more simple and effective counter-strategy, which isn't apparent either. The phrase "the Sunni dead-enders now combined with Islamist terrorists" is a more likely explaination, but Sullivan is more focussed on Saddam, for whatever reason. And "The slow collapse of American credibility in the 1990s will take time to reverse."? Come on! How transparent is the displacement strategy of blaming Clinton for throwing away US credibility, when this administration obviously lied us into the war, deluded itself about what we would face in the aftermath, and is so secretive about the exit strategy that even congressional republicans have no clue what the plan is? Nobody outside the US believes a word the administration says and it has nothing to do with Clinton.
We have to stay the course, but we don't have to tow the party line to do it. Insead, we the American public need to demand a transparent and thorough accounting of how the administration plans on restoring Iraq to a functioning state that has both the security strength to deal with a terrorist onslaught that it is guaranteed to face for the next generation, while assuring there's a strong enough civil society that will prevent the security institutions or a dominant political faction from taking over and imposing a new authoritarian regime on Iraq once we're gone. Frankly, I'm starting to see way too much pie-in-the-sky rhetoric and not enough honest accounting of how this massive challenge is being addressed to maintain any optimism at all. I'm ready to start predicting a Vietnam-like failure - one that the leadership responsible for it can call a success and avoid responsibility for it, but that will have real long-term consequences for generations to come.
<img src="http://scripts.cgispy.com/image.cgi?u=bonedaddy5">
TEAR THE BITCH APART!