Tuesday, September 30, 2003 :::
 
In the really weird department, the indispensible Wall Street Journal reported yesteerday that a former German cabinet minister has just written a book claiming that 9/11 was staged by the US government so we could launch the war on terrorism. France has already had such a book. Who said that 250+ years of the kind of Romantic, navel-gazing philosophy that began with the Enlightenment hasn't had a seriously warping effect on the European mind?

The problem with refuting this kind of nonsense is that you can't: if a person is capable of believing it in the first place, they are usually incapable of understanding why it is so stupid when they have it explained to them.

Fred Barnes has a very good article on the op-ed page of the Journal this morning explaining why W. is not in trouble: the economy is beginning to take off, and Iraq may be stabilizing. He cites every visitor to he Iraq that he knows--and Fred Barnes probably knows a fat lot of them--as saying Baghdad is returning to life. The Administration has finally started explaining what is going right in Iraq--after months of silence--and they have quickly marched in the opposite direction from a horrifically silly plan to start withdrawing troops, announced just two weeks ago. They are now talking about increasing troop presence.

Secretary Rumsfeld, in a piece that ran yesterday in the same space, also finally tried to defend what happened. He compares it to the rebuilding of Germany and France after World War II, which took much longer. May A Mind The Suits point out, first of all, that Europe has given us a LOT of experience in rebuilding countries whose leaders took them down the socialist road to complete horror, and that should have given us A LOT of pause before going in? Once the decision was made, A LOT of planning should have happened, which didn't, according to everyone. Proving himself at least brave, he cites the speed with which authority to print money was established. He left off the part where the first money that was printed came out with the image of Saddam Hussein.

The National Review, finally admitting that things had gone very wrong in May and June, said that perhaps the most we can hope for is for the Administration to learn from its errors without admitting it made any. Perhaps. And perhaps the trend in Iraq is good. We shall have to see. This writer certainly hopes so.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 9:35 AM


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What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.