Krauthammer, Hannity and extremists like them cannot stand any one criticizing our policies, whoever criticizes our policies gets shouted by them as unpatriotic. Because of their support for the President blindly, discarding the principles of democracy, we were becoming a fascist and unilaterilst nation. Thanks God the American people woke up.
I have no problem if they don't call themselves journalists and support the President, whoever it may be, so we can identify them as paid supporters. However, as journalists they have failed to crticize and question the President when he said " they hate us for our democracy", the "WMD" and the endless convenient truths. If they were honest journalists, we would not have gone that far, and our freedom would have remained intact.
Thanks to the American public, they are getting routed out. These guys do not have any support in America, the elections and the polls reject these extremists, hope they get the message and speak the truth.
They simply cannot understand that if our President (pretty much unilateral - as our Senators and Congressman did not have the guts to speak up and demand proof) had not invaded Iraq - 650,000 Iraqis, 3000 of our boys and girls, massive destruction of Iraq and civil war would not have happened at all. How dumb are these guys?
Mike Ghouse
Dallas, Texas
In yesterday's Post, Krauthammer tries to put the entire blame of the current Iraqi violence on the Iraqis and compares it to the Hindu-Muslim partition violence of India and asks "Did Britain "give" India the Hindu-Muslim war of 1947-48 that killed a million souls and ethnically cleansed 12 million more?" Who's to Blame for The Killing
By Charles KrauthammerFriday, February 2, 2007; A15
This week the internecine warfare in Iraq, already bewildering -- Sunni vs. Shiite, Kurd vs. Arab, jihadist vs. infidel, with various Iranians, Syrians and assorted freelancers thrown into the maelstrom -- went bizarre. In one of the biggest battles of the war, Iraqi troops reinforced by Americans wiped out a heavily armed, well-entrenched millenarian Shiite sect preparing to take over Najaf, kill the moderate Shiite clergy (including Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani) and proclaim its leader the returned messiah.
The battle was a success -- 263 extremists killed, 502 captured. But the sight of the United States caught within a Shiite-Shiite fight within the larger Shiite-Sunni civil war can lead only to further discouragement of Americans, who are already deeply dismayed at the notion of being caught in the middle of endless civil strife.
There are, of course, many reasons for these schisms. Some, like the fundamental division between Sunni and Shiite, are ancient. Some of the wounds are more contemporary, most notably the social devastation and political ruin brought upon the country by 30 years of Saddamist totalitarianism and its particularly sadistic persecution of Shiites and Kurds.
America comes and liberates them from the tyrant who kept everyone living in fear, and the ancient animosities and more recent resentments begin to play themselves out to deadly effect. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died, the overwhelming majority of them killed by Sunni insurgents, Baathist dead-enders and their al-Qaeda allies who carry on the Saddamist pogroms.
Much of their killing -- the murder of innocent Shiites in their mosques and markets -- is bereft of politics. It is meant to satisfy instead an atavistic hatred of the Shiite heresy. The late al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was even chided by headquarters in Afghanistan for his relish in killing Shiites for the sport of it.
Iraqis were given their freedom, and yet many have chosen civil war. Among all these religious prejudices, ancient wounds, social resentments and tribal antagonisms, who gets the blame for the rivers of blood? You can always count on some to find the blame in America. "We did not give them a republic," insists Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria. "We gave them a civil war."
Of all the accounts of the current situation, this is by far the most stupid. And the most pernicious. Did Britain "give" India the Hindu-Muslim war of 1947-48 that killed a million souls and ethnically cleansed 12 million more? The Jewish-Arab wars in Palestine? The tribal wars of post-colonial Uganda?
We gave them a civil war? Why? Because we failed to prevent it? Do the police in America have on their hands the blood of the 16,000 murders they failed to prevent last year?
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.
Our entire strategy has been to fight one side and then the other to try to prevent sectarian violence -- a policy that has been one of the leading reasons Americans are ready to quit and walk away. 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.
And at the political level, we've been doing everything we can to bring reconciliation. We got the Sunnis to participate in elections and then in parliament. Who is pushing the Shiite-Kurdish coalition for a law that would distribute oil revenue to the Sunnis? Who is pushing for a more broadly based government to exclude Moqtada al-Sadr and his sectarian Mahdi Army?
We have made a lot of mistakes in Iraq. But when Arabs kill Arabs and Shiites kill Shiites and Sunnis kill all in a spasm of violence that is blind and furious and has roots in hatreds born long before America was even a republic, to place the blame on the one player, the one country, the one military that has done more than any other to try to separate the combatants and bring conciliation is simply perverse.
It infantilizes Arabs. It demonizes Americans. It willfully overlooks the plainest of facts: Iraq is their country. We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war.
NYT columnist, God father of all right wing apologists, William Safire once wrote that he thought the Iraqi war would not last more than three months before WE accomplish the mission. Later Bill wisely retired from op ed and now he has treduced himself to his favorite " language" whicg he does well.
ReplyDeleteCharlie Krauthemer refuses the reda the writing on the wall, he refuses to submit for a reality check.
Even though reluctantly admits " we have made several mistakes" his column, just like his boss's ( read GWB) State of the Union Message, lacks intellectual honesty.
Even now these Numero Uno thinkes are in a compulsive wishful thinking fool's paradise.
Frank Rich wrote an article in NYT headlined " Will some one tell this President, this war is over" Yes, yes, this is a war which ended before it started. Go and tell 3000+ American youth who were sacrificed in the name of a war WE CHOSE, Go & tell 600,000 + innocent Iraqi civilians who were massaccered because Numero Uno world power wanted to democratise Iraq, go and tell the 24000+ American soldiers who have been mamed forever, go and tell the Ex New orlean residents that hundreds and hundreds of U.S. Dollars have been wasted in Iraq to democratise that country, Tell the American people that hundreds and hundreds of millions of U.S. Dollars have to be spent for the reconstruction of Iraq which has been demolished for no justifiable reason, then tell us about what Britishers did in India.
At the end of the day , when finally history is written and historians make the final judgement ( it is already done Mr.Krauthemer, it is already done) story will read, an arrogant world super power which replaced diplomacy with brutal, deadly arrogance, attacked another sovereign , independent nation with no justifiable reason against the will of the rest of the world and it is futile to search for parallels in history.
United States has done CUT & RUN before.
Now the question , how long this ordeal will be prolonged?
And it is upto a President whose approval rating is less than you know what, to realise that enough is enough.
Sincerely
DRGHOSH
Krauthammer beats more propaganda into an already war-weary world. The point
ReplyDeleteis, comparisons do not justify the means to any end, especially those of
violence. Blood cannot be weighed with blood.
Did Britain give India the Partition? The British believed in divide and
conquer. Even as they left the subcontinent, they left it writhing at their
feet. Even those who disagree, acknowledge that Britain manipulated it. When
Baburam Bhattarai compared the Maoist movement in Nepal to the French
revolution, there was outrage. Violence cannot be justified nor can it be
compared.
The UN already exists in Iraq and in other conflict zones. Sadly, as the
UNAMI (almost eeriely rhyming with tsunami), all it seems to do is count
the number of dead, break those down into categories and print them as
glossy reports in great print quality to be disseminated at seminars and
conferences held at posh hotels.
Pulling out may not be the answer but it is the best option. If America
truly believes that every individual has equal opportunity to life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness, let it give Iraq the chance to find it's own.
A Bhaeli