According to David Brooks, the U.S. government’s little nation building exercise in Iraq worked because, among other reasons:
…833,000 Iraqis had phones before the invasion. Now more than 1.3 million have landlines and some 20 million have cellphones. Before the invasion, 4,500 Iraqis had Internet service. Now, more than 1.7 million do.
Brooks admits, though, that the “success” is “fragile and incomplete.” Thus President Obama will have to be straight with the country in his upcoming speech and acknowledge that the U.S. can’t withdraw completely from Iraq lest we squander “an American accomplishment that has been too hard won.”
What makes Brooks more despicable than even the most rabid war boosters is that he attempts to bring an air of reasonableness to the whole sordid business. Instead of frothing about freedom-hatin’ “Islamists” who need to be killed before they kill us, he tells us, in his characteristically bland and mild-mannered tone, how many more Iraqis have internet access. Well, at least he didn’t raise his voice! Here we have a morally bankrupt cretin, an apologist for murder and conquest on a grand scale, in the guise of an insurance agent.
I’m sure all of the Iraqis whose friends and family members were killed by the forces of liberation will be glad to hear that their loved ones didn’t die in vain, that their deaths resulted in much-improved phone service and were a boon to America’s self-esteem.
Pissing in the wind 