WHAT ABOUT BUSHHITLER?:

Kanan Makiya (Open Source, June 22nd, 2005)

Not sure if this interview is available on-line--the website stinks--but it was just hilarious listening to the host and every casller tell Mr. Makiya that he had to be wrong about his own country of Iraq because George Bush can't be right.

MORE:
Iraq Appeals for Help to Build a Democracy Amid an Insurgency: Interim leaders set out their political and economic development goals at aid conference. (Tyler Marshall, June 23, 2005, LA Times)

Leaders of Iraq's transitional government appealed to a gathering of more than 80 nations and international organizations Wednesday for help to build a democratic state and defeat the virulent insurgency gripping the country.

Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari described battling the insurgency as "a struggle between the forces of good and evil."

"We must stand together against terrorism," Jafari told delegates to the session, which was co-sponsored by the United States and the European Union.

After a day of hearing Iraqi leaders set out their political and economic development goals, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said: "Today, Iraq and the international community have turned a page together. We've promised each other we will be full partners in supporting Iraq."

The War is Over, and We Won (Karl Zinsmeister, July 2005, American Enterprise)

Your editor returned to Iraq in April and May of 2005 for another embedded period of reporting. I could immediately see improvements compared to my earlier extended tours during 2003 and 2004. The Iraqi security forces, for example, are vastly more competent, and in some cases quite inspiring. Baghdad is now choked with traffic. Cell phones have spread like wildfire. And satellite TV dishes sprout from even the most humble mud hovels in the countryside.

Many of the soldiers I spent time with during this spring had also been deployed during the initial invasion back in 2003. Almost universally they talked to me about how much change they could see in the country. They noted progress in the attitudes of the people, in the condition of important infrastructure, in security.

I observed many examples of this myself. Take the two very different Baghdad neighborhoods of Haifa Street and Sadr City. The first is an upper-end commercial district in the heart of downtown. The second is one of Baghdad’s worst slums, on the city’s north edge.

I spent lots of time walking both neighborhoods this spring—something that would not have been possible a year earlier, when both were active war zones, where tanks poured shells into buildings on a regular basis. Today, the primary work of our soldiers in each area is rebuilding sewers, paving roads, getting buildings repaired and secured, supplying schools and hospitals, getting trash picked up, managing traffic, and encouraging honest local governance.

What the establishment media covering Iraq have utterly failed to make clear today is this central reality: With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over. Egregious acts of terror will continue—in Iraq as in many other parts of the world. But there is now no chance whatever of the U.S. losing this critical guerilla war.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 22, 2005 9:04 PM