WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA?

This editorial in today's Register calls the Iraq war a "war of imperialism," analogizing it to the Phillipine/American conflict just after the Spanish-American war in 1898, where Phillipine forces resisted the US annexation of the Phillipines after they were wrested from Spanish control in the 1898 war. Implicit in this comparison is the idea that Iraq is just another "land grab" by an imperialistic, expansionist government. The Register notes that Mark Twain called that war a "quagmire" and states:



"The imperial view won out, driven by the Kiplingesque notion of "the white man's burden," the duty to "civilize" native peoples - and by the supposed commercial advantages of having overseas possessions. . .This neo-imperialist thinking about democratizing the Middle East is a lot like the old imperialist notions of civilizing the natives. History will judge whether the new imperialism turns out any better than the old."



What the article conveniently forgets is the whole 9/11 incident. You know, that little attack against us that we might be defending ourselves against even as we speak? It also ignores the terms of peace imposed on Iraq during the 1990 war - terms to which it agreed and the UN gave final approval, and the terms which Iraq failed to fulfill, providing ample grounds for today's war. It even ignores what caused the peace terms in the first place, Iraq's own annexation of Kuwait and war against Israel. It occurs to me that the land grab Iraq tried might be a better fit for the analogy?



I do believe that there should have been further attempts to garner UN support, coerce Iraq to comply with the terms of the treaty, and build the evidence for or against WMD's, and if suddenly made president I would have handled quite a few things differently. But to read this editorial, one would believe that George Bush and the entire Congress just woke up one morning, saw it was a sunny day, and thought "I think we should go to war. The weather's nice enough. We could use a little desert property."



And the final sentence - "history will judge?" C'mon. You drew the picture of an annexation for material gain. You shaded the facts to suit the portrait. Now you're going to pretend just enough neutrality to not be able to title it?