So, I'm confused: is it Muslims or Arabs that you think are sub-human creatures, whose behaviour we should analyze like that of wild animals? Or both Muslims and Arabs, perhaps? If you could clarify that would be very helpful. Thanks.

His name is Kraphammer, damn it!!!

Very poor analogy. How is it possible that it didn't occur to you that the very idea of comparing animals with people would override any other point you wanted to make? Were you in a hurry, or what?

And I thought bad analogies were a staple of conservatives...

A rather tin-eared attempt to argue the obvious: the U.S. is guilty of at least criminal negligence on a massive scale in Iraq.

Got a feeling this is gonna be a richly deserved pile-on.

...appropriate title for the post, T.A. The underlying point of "how could we have foreseen the blindingly obvious consequences of our actions" is valid, but bad, bad, BAD analogy.

Good Dr. Krauthammer is right out in front on the "Let's Blame Iraq" bandwagon. Next week, he'll be on the "Let's Blame the Cowardly Appeasers" bandwagon. They both work.

Yeah, I read that screed at a Starbucks (from the 'already read' bin; I won't pay a nickel for the WaPo any more). Krauthammer at his lying-sack-of-shit best.

Oh come on, folks. Anyone read Animal Farm? Using a parable to illustrate a point isn't the same as saying that any human is an animal.

Ah, hey, Tiny Monster -- you've studied at the Krauthammer Academy of Disingenuous Bullshit yourself. The master would be proud of your little performance -- huzzah!

You'd think that wouldn't need to be explained, eh, Lucy? I thought Mr. Drum's metaphor was very good -- definitely on target.

It was Mr. Frank's metaphor and a shitty one at that.

I must admit that prior to this article I have never before read anything by Charles Krauthammer.

I can now safely say that I will never read any of his drivel again.

That was truly pathetic.

Neither "parable" nor analogy is necessary here: one instead should respond directly to Krauthammer's idiocy:

Thousands of brave American soldiers have died trying to counter, put down and prevent civil strife. They fight Sunni insurgents in Fallujah, Ramadi and Baghdad, trying to keep them from sending yet one more suicide bomber into a crowded Shiite market. They hunt Shiite death squads in Baghdad to keep them from rounding up random Sunnis and torturing them to death. Just this week, we lost two helicopter pilots who were supporting the troops on the ground fighting the "Soldiers of Heaven" outside Najaf to prevent the slaughter of innocents in a Shiite-Shiite war within a war.

And where do the Sunni insurgents come from? Why, as a direct result of the war we started—with no valid casus belli—against the previous Sunni led regime, and in which we failed to force the supporters of that regime to submit, and, when he had some control of the apparatus of the state, proceeded to disband the army and engage in radical deBaathification with the predictable consequences.

And where do the Shi'ite death squads come from? From the very same Shi'ite extremists groups, like SCIRI and its militant wing, that we put into power immmediately upon having displaced the prior regime.

Where does the Shi'ite-on-Shi'ite strife come from? A deliberate US policy of supporting and promoting select Iranian-linked Shi'ite extremist groups (like SCIRI) and excluding and attacking others (like the Sadr movement).

All the evils Krauthammer says the US is doing good by fighting to prove that we aren't the source of the civil war are directly traceable to the US invasion and deliberate choices the US made during the invasion and occupation. Each of them, contrary to Krauthammer's attempts at propaganda, directly demonstrates the claim of Zakaria's the Krauthammer strives to rebut, that the US brought the civil war to Iraq.

And the Krauthammer has the unimaginable idiocy to write: "Our entire strategy has been to fight one side and then the other to try to prevent sectarian violence." Well, yeah. As if fighting one side and then the other was likely to prevent sectarian violence, rather than fueling it.

Then he insults the American public, saying: " They can understand one-front wars, but they can't understand two-, three- and four-front wars, with Americans fighting any and all in sequence and sometimes in combination." No, idiot, the American people can perfectly well understand the consequences of "two-, three-, and four-front wars with Americans fighting any and all in sequence and sometimes in combination", and can see that what that means is that the US is trying to act as an occupier imposing its will on a fragmented society that only agrees on one thing—while any faction may occasionally find the US temporarily useful, none have any reason or inclination to trust or support the US.

And that's why they want US troops out of their now; they've seen how this story ends before.

hyenas eat lions?

Krauthammer is once more at his incisive best. America is trying its best to bring democracy to Iraq, but Iraqis are biting the hand that feeds them.

We should have left them alone.

No, wait, that's not what I meant...

"We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war."

Indeed.

Can we go now?

hyenas eat lions?

IIRC, spotted hyenas will deliberately attack and kill lions, particularly drawing off lionesses to kill the young, though more to secure their hold on territory as the main predator than to eat the lions (whether they eat the lions they kill, I don't know.)

The analogy is faulty: at the start, the antelopes and the lions were in the cages, and the hyenas were in charge. We killed the top hyenas and let the other animals free. The next step is to divide the zoo into three parts, with the species separated.

Why does the WaPo let the likes of Krauthammer soil the pages of their newspaper?

Hmmm - Kevin's analogy equates Iraqis to animals. Consider the fact that Kevin was mocking Krauthammer who seems to have such utter disdain for the Iraqis that he can dismiss them as some subspecies - and me thinks Kevin picked a very good analogy. Krauthammer's oped was disgusting. Don't blame the messenger.

So, if I pass a rundown zoo and I see jackalopes being gassed and dumped into a pit I should just mind my own business? Do I bother to wonder why PETA hasn't worked as hard as they could to correct the conditions, prefering instead to try to tie the hands of other rescuers? Do I fail to note that setting the animals free would be a worthy goal, the problem is in, among other things, the implementation?

-- Click here

Nice disingenuous twit pile-on. What happened, did someone open the cages at the zoo?

A very important lesson. Never interfere with tyrants.

What's really sad is that he doesnt even consider what it's doing to our country. I guess that's what comes of being a visionary. History's greatest villains were as deluded.

Pile on if you wish, I fail to see why the analogy is any more offensive than Spiegelman's Maus series, in which Jews are mice, Poles are pigs, and Germans are cats. What is offensive is walking away from the carnage we created with a shrug.

Ah, Kevin.

More anti-American bashing. Does America ever do right in your eyes.

Look, we may not always get things a hundred percent right, but we do a sure fire better job than anyother country.

Being the world's only hegemon is a thankless job. Just wish the cowardly liberals wouldn't pile on and offer aide to the enemy.

You'd think that someone like Krauthammer, who puts together words for a living, would have recognized the awkwardness of putting together paragraph that includes this:

It infantilizes Arabs. . . We midwifed their freedom.

Who's doing the infantilizing, now? Oh, but our midwifery is of the Arabs' freedom, not the Arabs themselves (and why "Arabs" and not "Iraqis", I have no idea). Somehow I think that Krauthammer would not stand for such hair-splitting anywhere outside his own writing.

As others have said, these Just So Stories imply that intercine warfare is simply "in their nature." I imagine we're all past these kinds of characterizations.

Why does the WaPo let the likes of Krauthammer soil the pages of their newspaper?

Liberal bias.

yeah, the ungrateful savages, they don't have the decency to put aside their political, religious, and social differences for a few years to become a democracy like us. The nerve!

Krauhammer went off the deep end years ago, and is now completely looney tunes, even if he does possess an M.D. in psychiatry.

People aren't reading the post correctly, it's Krauthammer making the animal zoo (farm) analogy. Passions run deep on both sides. Oh and egbert, I didn't ask or vote to be part of an hegemon, I voted to be part of a republic. You neocons tell liberals we have to face the awful world the way it is, well it doesn't have to be that way, people like you make it that way. So fuck you very much, and go kill yourself some godless Muslims. Chickenshit.

At the Johns' Hopkins School of International Studies, Edward M. Kennedy said two years ago that we had reached a point that a prolonged American military presence in Iraq is no longer productive for either Iraq or the United States. The US military presence has become part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Never before in our history has there been a more powerful, more painful example of the saying that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
Conservative voices were alarmed as well--as Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation, said two Novembers ago, we are stuck in a gureilla war with no end in sight.

Hmmmm...

making a shocking error, seemingly unaware of the obvious consequences...

to illustrate the point that the administration made a shocking error, seemingly unaware of the obvious consequences...

using a metaphor for making a shocking error, seemingly unaware of the obvious consequence.

Is this meta-punditry?

T.A. FRANK: Pile on if you wish, I fail to see why the analogy is any more offensive than Spiegelman's Maus series, in which Jews are mice, Poles are pigs, and Germans are cats.

That's the new repubic talking point. We really won the war. The Iraqi's just didn't react properly.

Desperation, thy name is Bush&Co.

T.A., why didn't you let the monkeys out?

Instead of the wretched analogy, you might have mentioned that Krautenstein spends his column celebrating the Najaf clusterfuck as a great victory. I guess at this point he has no reason to care that he'll look like an ass again when the full story on that drips out.

As FDR said - people aren't cattle.

T. A. Frank and all others that think Animal Farm or Maus actually do compare to the analogy the post was based on:

Are you aware that there's a fundamental difference between a setting in which all the compared characters are animals and one in which some are animals (ones kept in cages, no less) and some people?

I'd like to think you're capable of grasping that difference on your own, but I'm not holding my breath.

Sheesh!

Mr. Frank,

Not to worry about your metaphor. Your point is well-taken by me anyway. There is no excuse, no intelligent rationale, no morality tale that can justify the devastation that the US of A has brought upon the Iraqi people.

PS: And really, the metaphor is quite apt too. The war planners and war hawks did consider themselves superior to the Iraqi masses, very much like a human might feel towards zoo animals. "Well, if worse comes to worse and many of them die, at least Saddam will be gone. On with Shock and Awe."

Shorter Charles: It's just natural that Bush had a fiasco in Iraq?

I mean, what the hell else were we expecting from the idiot child for Preznut? That somehow, Iraqis would throw flowers? Yeah, right, Jeebus, the things we have to expect from Repug Preznuts.

Dumb, unhelpful analogy.

In an effort to perpetuate the metaphor, I will apply it a different way:

T.A. didn't merely open the zoo cages. He eliminated the zoo keeper, who was himself murdering the antelopes, orangutangs, wombats, etc., either directly or by depraved indifference.

Whether you agree with T.A.'s metaphorical actions or not (and I do not), it wasn't just a question of "not minding his own business".

Pile on if you wish, I fail to see why the analogy is any more offensive than Spiegelman's Maus series, in which Jews are mice, Poles are pigs, and Germans are cats. What is offensive is walking away from the carnage we created with a shrug.

Well, of course Krauthammer's bullshit is offensive.

The issue is that yours is, too.

1) There is a long tradition in European and American racist literature of comparing colonized peoples to animals. There is no comparable tradition with central europeans.

2) As pointed out above, it is very different to create a parable is which everyone is represented by animals, and one in which Americans are people, while Arabs are animals. That distinction is the difference between racism and not racism.

Gosh, that's odd. Some little elf mangled my link above. I'll be sending a nastygram to Kevin about this forthwith.

Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory blog fame is moving to Salon.com.
He mentioned Kevin Drum successfully made a move in the past.

Shorter Krauthumper: Who knew that people who have hated each other for thousands of years would fight if we removed the strongman?

Dumb ass.

T.A.: This battle of the analogy buffs is really a clash of paradigms--Deconstruction vs.New Criticism. As an old New Critic, I think that your Objective Correllative was damn straight.

The analogy stands. There's some over-sensitivity going on here. The zookeeper was Saddam and his group (human), and one of the animal groups is Sunni (part of Saddam's people). Where it falls apart is finding 3 animals that both are social themselves and hunt the other two.

I've been trying to think of any trio like this and cannot come up with one! You? Just us humans and our tribes and ethnicities. Oh, yeah. We really are better than animals . . . NOT!

As proved by some of the comments above.

To clarify, I think the US has shown itself to be dismissive of the humanity of the peoples of Iraq and have subourned their best interests to the unrealistic political interests of a small group of US politicians in power.

In that sense, the US has treated the Iraqis as no better than animals. The analogy stands.

The problem with the whole "We don't owe the Iraqi's anything; we're giving them their freedom and that's enough" excuse for willfully refusing to plan for the aftermath is that, for all their supposed knowledge and intelligence, these criminal fools seem to have no understanding whatsoever of the social and cultural prerequisites for establishing viable, constitutionally limited self-government, prerequisites the Iraqis have never in their history had the chance to develop.

It's like taking a toddler out to the middle of the ocean, tossing the kid overboard, and saying, "There! I've given you the ocean. At last, you can swim!"

"Criminal?" Doesn't begin to cover it.

The right wing has made it so that they have someone from their ideology represented in every forum possible, about every subject. No matter if their authors are, um... crazy or just from the fringe. We get William Rusher in our local rag, and I can't recall the last time he was right about anything. Can't the press have at least ONE standard? If you lie, say, three times in a year, you can't appear in the paper for 5 years. Just a thought.
DK2

Pile on if you wish, I fail to see why the analogy is any more offensive than Spiegelman's Maus series, in which Jews are mice, Poles are pigs, and Germans are cats. What is offensive is walking away from the carnage we created with a shrug.

The problem with your analogy is not that you use animals exactly. It is that the underlying logic of it suggests that civil war is inevitable in any context in which sunnis and shiites are allowed to freely associate. In other words, what you are really saying is that bloody conflict is in their nature. This is, of course, describes the fallback position of conservatives like Krauthammer whose neocon fantasies have collapsed. I don't think it is what you really mean to argue but its difficult to see how your analogy could be interpreted otherwise.

DK2 --

"...lie, say, three times in a year, you can't appear in the paper for 5 years...."

Now that is a good idea!

But would it lead to rationing to 2 1/2 lies per year to maintain elligibility? From there a proliferation of ghastly right-wing writers?

OK. That's a good idea. We'd almost ALL get pissed off at that, wouldn't we?

Mmmm.

Propaganda has worked here recently and in the past. I guess nothing is predictable.

What a killer line: 'They chose civil war.'

Did they just up and vote one day to start a civil war? All of them? Most of them? How many thugs does it take to start a civil war?

Could it be that most Iraqis initially wanted peace but, in the absence of a responsibly led occupying force, soon found themselves in a chaotic, violent setting in which everyone felt compelled to take up arms?

The Geneva Conventions are clear: the occupying power has a duty to provide security. It failed to do so in Iraq.

Krauthammer should've said, "We smashed their security and infrastructure. They resorted to civil war."

I agree with Brent. That animal comparison, contrary to your intent, suggests the paleo-con view that they're just not ready for democracy.

Mr. Krauthammer,

Every single thing that has gone wrong in Iraq was predictable, and was in fact predicted in great detail by those of us who knew that we were opening a can of worms by invading. The ethnic, religious, and cultural complexities within Iraq were known to even the most casual observer of that country. The Bush administration ignored all of this, and barged in. Now we are stuck with an unsavory choice; we either walk away and risk a horrifying bloodbath, or we stay for an indeterminate amount of time and expend more American lives and billions of $$'s.

We went into Iraq as a consequence of faulty intelligence and lies. Planning for the aftermath of our invasion was non-existent. Inadequate troop levels in the early going worsened the situation. Our arrogance and incompetence led to the departure of all of our allies. And all the while pundits like you cheered the administration onward.

At this point, you should have the decency to just remain quiet and hope that some adult supervision in Washington can bring about a satisfactory solution to this catastrophe.

*********
US Army Sgt.E-5 (Ret.)

otherpaul --

I don't know. I read it as the outside (US) intent was to dehamanize the problem. In that way the analogy carries from the war through to the present because, even tonight, I listened to US people talking about maybe splitting this nation to 3 provinces as if they can still impose the solution. In that sense, even today, even among those outside the Bush circle, there are those who think they have the Iraqi solution in their US hands.

I can't even begin to tell you how colonial/empire-minded this is. Not a surprise, though.

The analogy only works if you were at the zoo because you believed the hyenas were somehow involved in the attacks of 9/11 and the lions were developing weapons of mass destruction.

Remember this was no humanitarian mission. It was an illegal pre-emptive war.

Krauthammer is conveniently ignoring the fact that the civilian leadership of the war (i.e. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bremer) made the blunders that enabled the bloodletting. By mindless de-Baathification, disbanding the Iraqi army, encouraging torture of innocent Iraqis, etc. they set the stage for this relentless civil conflict. Read Fiasco by Thomas Ricks and the mistakes, miscalculations and sheer stupidity of neocons like Krauthammer becomes abundantly clear.

Mmmmm, antelope!

pgl: Why does the WaPo let the likes of Krauthammer soil the pages of their newspaper?

For the same reason stores sell pre-torn Levis. It's a designer bird-cage liner, pre-shat upon.

So you're saying we should have known the Iraqis would fall on themselves because it is in their very nature.

Wow. Didn't expect to see THAT on this blog.

Not a great analogy, but hey. Give it a rest. It probably would have been better to just point out that Muslim culture is incompatible with democracy, and leave it there.

An affront to the animals - At least they attack one another for nourishment in order to survive. They do not attack for revenge. They do not torture their prey.

thirdPaul apparently has never seen a common house cat kill a terrified mouse in a long, drawn out manner, in an effort to amuse itself. Always amazing how people sentimentalize the natural world.

Nice that Frank sees Americans as full fledged human beings with responsibilities and the moral imperative to fufill them, while viewing the wogs as animals that need to be tended to.

"Hey, who knew that lions liked to eat antelopes?", asks the good Doktor.

Just about everyone on the ME desk at State, plus any ME academic you might run into. For that matter, Molly Ivins had it pegged way back before the war when her man "Shrub" started to go off the tracks.

Of course, the neocons were attacking skeptics of the idea we could introduce a functioning democracy in Iraq as racists, hypocritical (if liberals) cultural chauvanists, etc. They neglected even then to appreciate that many folks weren't thinking in terms of "Arabs" having such problems, but the Sunni/Shia in Iraq. (As if complaining that a place like Northern Ireland might have troubles was being "racist" about Caucasians.) Krauthammer also completely evaded the issue of the MisAdmin. doing a bad job there. He is "beneath contempt."

Hey - a motto suggestion for Hillary or similar:
"Replace a Misadministration with a Ms Administration."

TLB: You've got a point, the implementation is the main problem. I for one couldn't have looked Iraqis in the eye, if things had turned out reasonably well and they were grateful, "I still don't think we should have done it." BTW, Kenneth Pollack has the best run down on what went wrong, IMNSHO: http://www.brookings.edu/views/articles/pollack/20061214.htm

Mr. Frank, you should be ashamed. This is a truly disgusting post.

Consider my relationship with Krauthammer as European-American vs. European-American.

Yeah, we midwifed their freedom, in the same way that a hack doctor decides to do a c-section well before the due date, doesn't sew up the mother or provide medicine, looks at the starving kid and says, "give him a steak and he'll be fine," looks at the dying mother and says, "clean this mess up," and then lights up a cigar and says to himself, "damn fine job."

I like it Brojo - or I would, if Krauthammer weren't a Canadian. Those reasonable folks couldn't help him across the border fast enough.

Will Allen, You pedantic oaf - Speaking of animals in the wild and there is nothing sentimental about that reference. Not referring to well fed house cats, twit.

The Krauthammer column was terrible, but that doesn't excuse this clumsy analogy.

First of all, we didn't so much set the Iraqis free as put them in new cages and expose them to simulated drowning and sodomy with blunt objects.

A terrible column and a worse analogy.

Mr. Frank, I simply expect better from you.

The analogy you chose was not only feeble, it was inapt. Those who are saying you should be ashamed are spot on.

I am sure this is tiresome but I wll indulge myself once more.

Since before this stupid, stupid idea was put into action I said it was going to end disasterously and the right wing would blame the Iraqis themselves. The phrase I expected to hear was "We brought freedom and democracy to the Iraqi's and they blew it."

I was totally right, and it required no special knowledge or abilities. Anyone with a hint of common sense not clouded by emotion could see this coming.

But NOOO, we had a woody for war - manipulated and exploited by Bush who saw this as his big chance to finally have a "special purpose."

At this point Bush's biggest hope for a legacy is to be the 'bad' example, the 'goofus' and 'don't be' that the rest of us can shy away from.

T.A. Frank's analogy is perfectly valid because it is commentary on the nature of human beings in general, as applied to a particular situation. I don't read it as a critique of Iraqi culture, but of humans under dictatorships.

In a similar vein, here's a quote from Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy:

"Infinite examples read in the remembrances of ancient history demonstrate how much difficulty there is for a people used to living under a prince to preserve its freedom afterward, if by some accident it acquires it, as Rome acquired it after the expulsion of the Tarquins. Such difficulty is reasonable; for that people is nothing other than a brute animal that, although of a ferocious and feral nature, has always been nourished in prison and in servitude. Then, if it is left free in a field to its fate, it becomes the prey of the first one who seeks to rechain it, not being used to feed itself and not knowing places where it may have to take refuge. The same happens to a people: since it is used to living under the government of others, not knowing how to reason about either public defense or public offense, neither knowing princes nor known by them, it quickly returns beneath a yoke that is most often heavier than the one it had removed from its neck a little before."

I am wondering at what point we're going to start blaming welfare mothers and environmentalists for the problems we're having in Iraq, I mean, the right seems to want to blame everyone except for the people who actually planned, supported and oversaw the invasion and occupation.

While we're at it, perhaps the cause of the insurgency isn't the Shia-Sunni conflict but rather a fear on the part of Iraqis that they may be forced into an American-style Social Security system. Perhaps the way to solve the conflict would be if we announced a privatized Social Security system for Iraq?

Its the trifecta for TAF's analogy: dumb, self-serving and incomplete.

"We midwifed their [Iraqi] freedom," is an interesting choice of words. In the film Rosemary's Baby, I recall an evil midwife was used. That is what America has become to the people of Iraq. My advice to Iraqis is to cast out these Satan worshippers.

Mr. Frank may not be a Twenty-first Century Aesop, although I understood his point easily. I did not see any reason to take offense at his analogy for dehumanizing Iraqis. It is Americans who are doing that with their military, media coverage, and attitude towards Iraqi religion, history and society.

Hedley Lamarr: Molly Ivins had it pegged way back before the war when her man "Shrub" started to go off the tracks.

I think Molly Ivins pointed out that Shrub never was on the tracks.

As to hyenas and lions, an equal weights of hyenas and lions are about equal in battle. 1 lion can kill 2 hyenas, but 4 hyenas will kill 1 lion. And the carcasses certainly won't go to waste.

As to cats playing with mice, many other predators will injure a prey so that their young can practice hunting and attacking. House cats retain that behavior.

These shit-for-brain bootlickers, like Tiny Penis and Going Down on Frazer, latch onto anything they can find to discredit a message. Like they give a shit about human beings or wild animals.

That's what they do and it's all they do—oh, aside from willfully participating in the destruction of the constitution, the country, and the planet.

In any case, Frank is firmly in the Stuff Happens camp. Hey don't look at us. Wha'd we do? And notice that Bush looks more like Alfred E. Newman every day. Without the smile, lately.

The Bush-Cheney Administration obviously believes that if it worked once, it will work again.

Remember those news stories at the run-up to the Iraq War floated by Bill Gertz in The Washington Times and others like Fox News from unnamed DOD sources on the location(s) of the WMDs?

The WMDs were hidden in the desert, the WMDs were hidden in caves, they were concealed in warehouses at Iraqi military installations, they were aboard railway cars, the WMDs were in Syria, in Jordan, in Iran and finally the WMDs were aboard a "ghost" ship on the high seas that was being closely monitored by the U.S. Navy. (But don't ever think we won't find them.)

Now the blame game. Blame the situation in Iraq on the CIA, blame it on the generals, blame it on the Shias, on the Sunnis, on Al Qaeda, blame it on Muqtade al-Sadr, on Al Maliki, the Syrians, Iran. (But don't ever blame the situation on us.)

Yes, and they still can blame Syria for the inevitable failure in Iran. So now we know what Germany was like in 1938.

thethirdPaul: An affront to the animals ... They do not torture their prey.

Depends on the animal. Cats certainly play with their food in a way that if humans did it would be called torture. Killer whales do somethings to seals and gray whales that would be called torture if people did it. As in most cases, we are different from other animals in degree rather than kind.

Don't bother with thirdpaul, anandine. It makes him feel good to imagine the noble wild animals, who don't amuse themselves with violence, or only do so when they have been domesticated. What a dunce.

Actually the more intelligent the animal, the more likely it is to entertain itself by inflicting violence on other animals. Hell, pods of dolphins have been observed doing it to their own kind, which reminds one of what other mammal?

I'm disgusted by their conditions, so I attack the zookeepers and set the animals free.

Oh, so that's why you invaded Iraq? Seriously, as I'm sure you did support the invasion of Iraq before it became uncool (what else would a TNR-style, serious-minded "liberal" do?)...what was your reason? Humanitarian concern for the blighted people of Iraq?

Would you be as quick to drop bombs on populations of non-Arabs, if they lived in similarly adverse conditions? To rescue the Kurds in Turkey? The Uighurs in China?

Tom's point is fine. The manufactured attempts at outrage are silly. When conservative Bush apologists try to become defenders of cultural sensitivity it just doesn't work well for them. And half of them couldn't even figure out who wrote the post.

what an evil man. his rhetoric is rapidly approaching the nazis and hitler's mein komf. disgusting...

It makes him feel good to imagine the noble wild animals, who don't amuse themselves with violence,

Well, what I want to know: where be the capitalist insects?

"Remember those news stories at the run-up to the Iraq War floated by Bill Gertz in The Washington Times and others like Fox News from unnamed DOD sources on the location(s) of the WMDs?"

No.