« If You're Going to Swipe a Premise, Please, Dearheart, Do Something With It |
Main
|
Sharapova def. Williams, Takes Wimbledon Title »
July 03, 2004
Iraq Round-Up
David Brooks has a good piece on how the accelerated transfer-of-sovereignty came to be (key insight: it's not a bug-out strategy, but rather a stay-in strategy) and the new hopefulness it's engendered.
The transfer-of-sovereignty results in this delicious fix for our "allies" the French and the Germans: Now they're forced to say no to Iraqi requests for assistance. It's tough to claim you're struggling virtuously on behalf of the Iraqi people when you refuse to aid them in even their smallest requests.
And yet Chirac continues to try.
A big factory in Baghdad for making car-bombs and roadside-bombs has been captured, along with 51 evildoers. Oh, wait. That's judgmental and not nuanced enough. Let's just call them "thugs," "assassins," and "mass-murderers" in order to appease the left's sensibilities over the "e" word.
Polish troops discover warheads containing cyclosarin and say they've foiled a terrorist effort to buy these very weapons. The US military says the cyclosarin was too degraded to have more than a "limited" effect. I suppose that means the "limited" number of US troops that might have been killed by these weapons have no cause for thanking their Polish allies.
MEMRI reports that in neighboring Iran a reformist is making the case that Islam is not incompatible with democracy and freedom, and the mullahs really ought to stop claiming it is.