Coulter editorial

Quote:



IRAQ WAR GOING BETTER THAN MEDIA PORTRAYS
by Ann Coulter
6/13/2004
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Abu Ghraib is the new Tet offensive.
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By lying about the Tet offensive during the Vietnam War, the media managed to persuade Americans we were losing the war, which demoralized the nation and caused us to lose the war.
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And people say reporters are lazy.
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The immediate consequence of the media's lies [regarding the 1968 Tet Offensive] was a 25 percent drop in support for the [Vietnam] war.
The long-term consequence for America was 12 years in the desert until Ronald Reagan came in and saved the country.
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Now liberals are using their control of the media to persuade the public that we are losing the war in Iraq.
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Communist dictators may have been ruthless murderers bent on world domination, but they displayed a certain degree of rationality.
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America may not be able to wait out 12 years of Democrat pusillanimity now that we're dealing with Islamic lunatics who slaughter civilians in suicide missions while chanting "Allah Akbar!"
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And yet, the constant drumbeat of failure, quagmire, Abu Ghraib, Bush-lied-kids-died has been so successful that merely to say the war in Iraq is going well provokes laughter.
The distortions have become so pervasive that Michael Moore teeters on the brink of being considered a reliable source.
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If President Bush mentions our many successes in Iraq, it is evidence that he is being "unrealistically sunny and optimistic," as Michael O'Hanlon of the liberal Brookings Institution put it.
O'Hanlon's searing indictment of the operation in Iraq is that we need to "make sure they have some budget resources that they themselves decide how to spend, that are not already pre-allocated."
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So that's the crux of our challenge in Iraq: Make sure their "accounts receivable" columns all add up.
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Whenever great matters are at stake, you can always count on liberals to have some pointless, womanly complaint.
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We have liberated the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator who gassed his own people, had weapons of mass destruction, invaded his neighbors, harbored terrorists, funded terrorists and had reached out to Osama bin Laden.
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Liberals may see Saddam's mass graves in Iraq as half-full, but I prefer to see them as half-empty.
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So far, we have found chemical and biological weapons -- brucella and Congo-Crimean hemorrhagic fever, ricin, sarin, aflatoxin-- and long-range missiles in Iraq.
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The terrorist "stronghold" of Karbala was abandoned last week by Islamic crazies loyal to cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who slunk away when it became clear that no one supported them.
Iraqis living in Karbala recently distributed fliers asking the rebels to please leave, further underscoring one of the principal remaining problems in Iraq --the desperate need for more Kinko's outlets.
Last weekend, our troops patrolled this rebel "stronghold" without a shot being fired.
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The entire Kurdish region --one-third of the country-- is patrolled by about 300 American troops, which is fewer than it takes to patrol the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach on Easter weekends.
But the media tell us this means we're losing.
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The goalpost of success keeps shifting [shifted by liberal reporters] as we stack up a string of victories.
Before the war, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof warned that war with Iraq would be a nightmare: "(W)e won't kill Saddam, trigger a coup or wipe out his Republican Guard forces." ("Unless", he weaseled his way out, "we're incredibly lucky.")
We've done all that!
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How incredibly lucky.
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Kristof continued: "We'll have to hunt out Saddam on the ground, which may be just as hard as finding Osama in Afghanistan, and much bloodier. "
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We've captured Saddam!
And it wasn't bloody!
Indeed, the most harrowing aspect of Saddam's capture was that he hadn't bathed or been de-liced for two months.
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Kristof also said: "Our last experience with street-to-street fighting was confronting untrained thugs in Mogadishu, Somalia. This time we're taking on an army with possible bio- and chemical weapons, 400,000 regular army troops and supposedly 7 million more in Al Quds militia."
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And yet, somehow, our boys defeated them in just six weeks!
Incredibly lucky again!
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And just think: all of this accomplished without even having a "Plan."
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Now we're fighting directly with Islamic loonies crawling out of their rat holes from around the entire region. Which liberals also said wouldn't happen.
Remember how liberals said the Islamic loonies hated Saddam Hussein --hated him!-- because he was a "secularist?"
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As geopolitical strategist Paul Begala put it, Saddam would never share his weapons with terrorists because "those Islamic terrorists would use them against Saddam Hussein because he's secular."
Well, apparently, the crazies have put aside their scruples about Saddam's secularism to come out in the open where they can be shot by American troops rather than fighting on the streets of Manhattan (where the natives would immediately surrender).
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The beauty of being a liberal is that history always begins this morning.
Every day, liberals can create a new narrative that destroys the past as it occurred.
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
To be sure, Iraq is not a bed of roses. As the Brookings Institution scholar said, we have yet to give the Iraqis "budget resources" that "are not already pre-allocated."

I take it back: It is a quagmire.
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Ann Coulter is a syndicated columnist.

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I couldn't agree more. Liberal coverage hypes relatively small losses (as compared with other wars), while liberal coverage simultaneously downplays the vast progress.

Through liberal coverage, wars are expected to be fought without bloodshed. But only wars begun under Bush.

While wars under Clinton (Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, no-fly zones over N. and S. Iraq under Saddam, etc. ) are not given the same scrutiny, and these prior Clinton wars are instead labelled "wars of liberation". And no mention is made of their cost, or of the morale of troops who were under Clinton --and are still there, post-Clinton, far past the dates Clinton said these other police actions would last-- were pushed to the limit by extended periods overseas with undefined missions.

No liberal coverage questions how long troops will be in Bosnia or Kosovo (wars begun under Clinton). No network coverage highlights that Clinton said these troops were only to be abroad for a year.

And despite U.S. troops having been there 5 years (Kosovo) and ten years (Bosnia), no media questions if there is an exit strategy from these two countries, or when our troops will be called home.
And no liberal coverage questions the tens of billions spent on reconstruction of these nations.
According to TIME, it cost 10 billion to rebuild Kosovo, post-war in 2000, a nation of 1 million people. So proportionate to population, a reasonably proportionate reconstruction cost in Iraq and its population of 25 million would be 250 billion. If liberals had no problem with Kosovo's reconstruction cost, they should have none with Iraq. But they do, and the biased double-standard is clear.

As I said in prior posts to other Iraq and Bush-bashing topics:
I'm glad Clinton intervened in Kosovo and Bosnia.
And I'm glad Bush intervened in Iraq.

I'm just pointing out the liberal double-standard.

As Coulter said before, liberals in knee-jerk fashion leap to support whatever position is least advantageous for our nation. And after 40 years infiltrating our media, universities and other institutions, they are presently in unique position to corrupt and undermine the rest of the nation with their poisonous partisan liberal rhetoric.

For liberals to generate --through skewed and one-sided argument-- widepread sympathy to U.N. and European Union perspectives, over what the United States is doing precisely because of the self-serving inaction, impotence and apathy of those two organizations, is a dangerous first step toward loss of U.S. sovereignty.

Condemn America, undermine American popular resolve, take the side of our enemy, and then dare to call it patriotism.
Today's liberalism.
Just amazing.