One is (almost) tempted to express grudging respect for the way in which this Administration can turn any news into a validation of, or call for, their prescribed policies. During the 2000 election, George W. Bush told us tax cuts were necessary because of the surplus; afterwards, they were the only solution to the recession. Call it "panacea politics." Twisted your ankle? Cat stuck in a tree? Tax cuts will solve it. And so it will be with news today that Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) is decimated.
That is good news, of course. But for years now we've been hearing about how terrorists (not insurgents, outsider terrorists) were the reason we had to fight them “over there, so we don't have to fight them over here.” Surely we're now going to hear that dismantling AQI is evidence that we can leave Iraq and call the civil war we started there and the chaotic destruction we'll leave behind some sort of military and political “victory.”
You can bet this development will be spun by the White House as evidence that this war was the right idea. Only by standards of the post-post-modern logic of the Bush era is a pathology we cured that didn't exist before we created deemed a success.
--Tom Schaller
