CAKEWALK?
I skipped over Ken Adelman’s piece on RCP this morning but VodkaPundit says it was Required Reading, so I clicked through. It’s pretty good:
On Feb. 13, 2002, I wrote a sleeper-cell op-ed for this page. It lay dormant, being virtually ignored, until springing to life more than a year later. Its title, “Cakewalk in Iraq,” contained that “c” word (also found in the piece), which was scantly speakable one week ago.
Granted, that word carries a connotation that the piece itself explicitly dismissed: “No one favors a ‘casual march to war.’ This is serious business, to be treated seriously,” I wrote then. Having served in the Pentagon and knowing full well that any loss of life is grave, I intended nothing but the most serious treatment of a serious matter.
The piece was “taking exception” to one of the host of fear-mongering articles then being put out, this by Brookings Institution analysts Philip H. Gordon and Michael E. O’Hanlon. They had concluded, among other dire warnings, that “the United States could lose thousands of troops” in any war in Iraq.
Other commentators were far scarier. Any U.S. attempt at “regime change” would, they warned, trigger Scud and other missile attacks to obliterate Israel and U.S. troops stationed in the region; provoke the igniting of hundreds, no thousands, of Iraqi oil fields; prompt a wave of terrorism across America; impel mobs into the Arab street to foment revolution against “friendly regimes”; cause flooding across Iraqi plains; induce Saddam Hussein, his back against the wall, to attack us and his own people with chemical and biological weapons.
More reminding the critics of their own words follows. Good stuff.
By the way: Stephen keeps playing with his site logos and I like the latest one. The previous edition appears on the archive pages.
