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| Iraq |
| Please don't contribute to the negativism. |
| 2006-08-16 |
| A reader writes to Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review: Today you wrote: "It's hard to be optimistic at all about Iraq..." Optimism is for people who believe in progress — in other words, not conservatives. The world sucks, permanently, but let us do our best to bend its suckiness to our advantage, as that is the most we can hope for. I think we have done that in Iraq, with greater and lesser success, but done it we have. Now, let us count the ways we prefer post-invasion Iraq to pre-invasion Iraq. 1) Saddam, not so much a dictator anymore. 2) Uday and Qusay dead — sad to say and not very Christian of me, but sometimes the world is better when really bad guys get iced. 3) Speaking of bad guys, I like that they seem to be attracted to Iraq as a place to come and visit violence on we Americans. We have fine American fighting men and women in Iraq who can shoot them in the face. This is, on balance, preferable to them coming to Hoboken to blow up shopping malls and then lawyering up. Please don't contribute to the negativism. Courage. Life sucks, but we're Americans, and that's still as good as it gets. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #6 And remember that we also culled the cream of the crop of the radical Islamic world, drawing in their very best fighters to Iraq and Afghanistan, concentrating them away from human shields where they fight our soldiers; not our civilians back home. While I believe this to be an overly-optimistic assessment of the so-called "flypaper" effect, I still maintain that if Iraq has shown this world one thing it is this; Muslims will gleefully slaughter each other with endless bloodshed in the exact same fashion that whichever surviving sect will then go about killing all non-Muslim people. The lesson of Muslim on Muslim violence must be spread far and wide so that the outside world gains some comprehension of what awaits once they overcome their crippling internecine differences. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2006-08-16 20:32 |
| #5 --Optimism is for people who believe in progress-- And the eternal question, what do they want to progress to? |
| Posted by: anonymous2u 2006-08-16 18:40 |
| #4 And remember that we also culled the cream of the crop of the radical Islamic world, drawing in their very best fighters to Iraq and Afghanistan, concentrating them away from human shields where they fight our soldiers; not our civilians back home. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-08-16 11:11 |
| #3 Now remember your proper liberal tripe, SC1711. We all KNOW (from our cozy desks in lower Manhattan) that 50% of those killed are wommin-folk, and kids |
| Posted by: BA 2006-08-16 10:44 |
| #2 Yeah, think of it this way. How many bad guys have the boys flamed in Iraq so far? Is there even a reliable body count? Last estimate I read was 50K and that was a year ago. 50,000 nutjobs that would die to kill a few Americans are taking a dirt nap, instead of blowing up shopping malls in Hoboken like the post said. |
| Posted by: Sloluth Chens1711 2006-08-16 10:29 |
| #1 We have fine American fighting men and women in Iraq who can shoot them in the face. Ya just gotta love it. |
| Posted by: 49 Pan 2006-08-16 09:08 |