Biden vs. McCain

Joseph Biden takes issue with John McCain’s “The War You’re Not Reading About” piece in the Washington Post last Sunday and writes a rebuttal in the Washington Post;

McCain wrote that the president’s strategy is beginning to show results but that most Americans don’t know it because the media cover the bad news, not the good news. Of course, reporting any news in Iraq is an extraordinary act of bravery, given the dangers journalists must navigate every day. But the fact is, virtually every “welcome development” McCain cited has been reported, including the purported anti-al-Qaeda alliance with Sunni sheikhs in Anbar, the establishment of joint U.S.-Iraqi security stations in Baghdad and the decision by Moqtada al-Sadr to go to ground — for now.

The problem is that for every welcome development, there is an equally or even more unwelcome development that gives lie to the claim that we are making progress. For example:

So Biden begins by sucking up to the brave journalists who are apparently in greater danger than our troops. Those brave journalists who call reporting explosions from their hotels in the Green Zone journalism. But, see, that’s how Biden makes his point that Iraq is dangerous. Of course it’s dangerous, numbnuts – that’s why its a war.

Old Hair Plugs calls the President’s strategy a “failing strategy”. How’s that possible? It hasn’t even reached fruition, yet. If you want to call the old strategy a failure, go ahead, have at it. But how can you call the current strategy a failure when it hasn’t even happened yet?

The administration hopes that the surge will buy time for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government to broker the sustainable political settlement our military views as essential to lasting stability in Iraq.

But there is no trust within the government, no trust of the government by the people it purports to serve and no capacity on the part of the government to deliver security or services. There is little prospect that the government will build that trust and capacity anytime soon.

In short, the most basic premise of the president’s approach — that Iraqis will rally behind a strong central government that looks out for their interests equitably — is fundamentally and fatally flawed.

So we should just quit, Joey? Just stop? Oh, no. He has a plan;

I cannot guarantee that my plan for Iraq (detailed at http://www.planforiraq.com) will work. But I can guarantee that the course we’re on — the course that a man I admire, John McCain, urges us to continue — is a road to nowhere.

The same old Joe Biden partitioning of Iraq. Is there a reason that Iraqis haven’t arrived at that solution by themselves? Afterall, it’s their government, their constitution. Now if we imposed that plan on the Iraqis, that would be a puppet government, it would be an occupation.

And we don’t need more of your doom and gloom stories from Iraq, Joe, we get them everyday from the Washington Post. In fact, we can hardly call your opinion news at all – it’s more of a “dog bites man” story. It’s not news that you and your buddies have a problem with this particular while a Republican administration is fighting it. And it’s not news that you think a strategy that hasn’t happened yet is failing.

Category: Media, Politics, Terror War