A reader writes:
I got a kick out that comment. "Mentally unstable" means, I suppose, searching for truth in reality using the tools God has given us, rather than accepting the version thereof dictated each day by the propaganda needs of the Republican National Committee.
In fact, your analysis of the dilemma in Iraq was the most even-handed and lucid I’ve read. How many other Americans must have spent portions of every day over the Christmas season wondering about Iraq, mentally choosing one direction only to encounter obstacle after obstacle and finally being left with nothing more than a gut instinct? Like you, I sometimes wonder whether a huge escalation of the war (150,000 more troops?) would do the trick. But like you, I finally conclude – based as much on gut instinct as anything else – that Americans can no longer do any good in Iraq, that some version of a civil war and sectarian separation is inevitable given Iraq’s history and current state of disintegration, and that both Iran and Syria are more likely to play stabilizing roles after we are gone.
It’s now been two months since the election, one month since the ISG report, and going on four years since the war began. The 3,000th American death has come and gone (can it really be that we reached this milestone on the last day of the year?). Sadam Hussein has been executed in what should have been a symbol of justice but, like everything else in Iraq, went horribly wrong and now looks like just another tribal killing, making matters even worse. And there is our President, the Decider, still sitting on the sidelines, clueless.
Somehow I take no comfort from seeing pictures of the President huddling with Cheney and Rice about Iraq. Perhaps that makes me mentally unstable, like you.
The Dish 