Quotes du Jour on the War

Those who support remaining in Iraq increasingly can be heard invoking the specter of genocide as grounds for staying. . . . [But] many of those who say U.S. troops should stay in Iraq to prevent genocide are the same people who for political reasons refuse to acknowledge the gravity of the calamity unfolding on our watch. The same people who modeled a war on best-case scenarios are now resisting ending a war by invoking worst-case scenarios. But after years of using the alleged needs of the Iraqi people to justify U.S. political postures, it is long past time to use the leverage we still have to actually advance Iraqi welfare.

-- SAMANTHA POWER

Last night’s nightmare was about car bombs. I was in a well-known street walking among people looking at shops and enjoying a beautiful sunny Friday in Baghdad. It was like a mixture of time. It was normal at first. People were shopping, me walking, cars passing by in the street but all of a sudden I couldn’t feel but glass, shrapnel and flesh falling over my head. I opened my eyes and looked around. A relief sigh. I am not in the emergency room.

I got up and washed my face. It must be one of the streets of Baghdad that I love is attacked, I said within myself. I turned on the computer and read the news. My nightmare didn’t let me down. It was al-Mutannabi Street, one of my places in Baghdad ever.

The Book Market which I spent most of the best times in my childhood, teenage and youth was burned by a car bomb that mixed the blood of readers, buyers and sellers with papers and fire just like Hulago who once burned the Grand Library of Baghdad and threw the books in the Tigris mixing its water with the ink of the books.

-- TREASURE OF BAGHDAD

The Democrats want to force an end to the Iraq theater of the war without having to accept any consequences for their actions. They don't have the political courage to take the one action allowed them, which is to simply end the funding for the deployment. Democrats know that they risk a huge political backlash if they strand troops under fire, and rightfully so.

Instead, they have busied themselves with strategies to force Bush to call off the war and take responsibility for their own defeatism. . . .

All of this maneuvering takes place because the Democrats lack the courage to actually take the one step that could do what they want and end the American military involvement in Iraq. And they wonder why the American people don't trust them on national security.

-- CAPTAIN ED MORRISSEY

Photograph by Khalid Mohammed/The Associated Press