Mister Green

Reader Love

A commenter named "jackofnice" commented last week on an old Ted Rall post of mine. He asks/notes:

"Thanks Mr Green for what? Ignorance? Rall's trying to make a point here. American and Iraqi lives are being wasted. Bush and his hillbilly advisors have no idea what the hell they got us into. And anyone who thinks that only "terrorists" want us out of Iraq is either truly ignorant, or truly despicable."

I respond:

Yeah. I'm not as positive about the war as I was last November. Not as sure it is an essential part of the overall effort against terror, not as positive about our ability and willingness to see it through, not as sure the Bush administration had an idea of why we were doing it that would make any sense or had any idea that we would be committing most of our military force to a protracted exercise in nation building - an activity that Bush had in the past explicitly disavowed. I'm also not sure that bringing democracy to a nation where most of the population would like to vote themselves into an Islamist theocracy is such a hot idea. I'm starting to think this was a colossal misjudgement.

But, having said that, Ted Rall is still an asshole. We still aren't there for the oil, Iraq still isn't an American colony, Iraqis who kill U.S. "collaborators" are still murderers, and most of the people who are fighting us there really don't have the best interests of the Iraqi people at heart. And did I mention that Ted Rall really, really is an asshole? That part of my post, I think, has withstood the test of time. I'm pretty sure the observation that Ted Rall is an asshole is as close to eternal truth as I've come on this blog.

Posted by Mr Green at May 3, 2004 10:08 PM