Talk about a water-tight defense of the Bush administration’s handling of post-war Iraq! Here’s Rich Lowry, rightly pointing out the need to be patient in bringing a turn-around in Iraq, but finding a way to excuse mistakes and failures by the Bushies:
Patience, of course, is now in short supply. By the exquisite standards of today’s media and the critics of the Iraq War, the men who rebuilt Japan and Germany were incompetents. They had to muddle their way to success through policy failures and bureaucratic infighting. Incompetence can achieve the same success in Iraq, if it’s given the chance.
One wonders under what circumstances, if this is the standard, could one criticize the Bush administration? Lowry’s convenient answer: Never! Look, I want the Iraq war to succeed with every bone in my body. But I don’t think it helps the war effort never to criticize the conduct of it. One reason democracies do well in war is that they can indeed air criticism and achieve correction more quickly than rigid dictatorships. But some on the right are now busy saying that any criticism is tantamount to treason, that torture can be justified, that disasters (such as Abu Ghraib) should be kept from the public (Jonah Goldberg’s position), that a vote for Kerry is a vote for Osama, and so on. Such reflexive, brain-dead defensiveness is not a key to success. It’s a recipe for failure.
The Dish 