JS Editorial: That 'other' war

I don't know where to begin.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editorial Board has outdone itself with today's editorial, "That 'other' war."

Now that the surge has been deemed a success and 15 of the 18 benchmarks set out by Congress to measure success in Iraq have been met, the Left is shifting gears and focusing on Afghanistan.

For instance, the latest issue of TIME has a cover story on Afghanistan, "The Right War." It promises to explain "Why to the West is failing there and what to do about it."



Blah, blah, blah. When the libs can't proclaim disaster in Iraq, they switch to Afghanistan.

Following the national lib media's lead, the JS Editorial Board has decided to give attention to Afghanistan.

Much of the debate on Iraq has centered on whether the surge “worked.” But correctly getting more attention these days is the “other” war — the necessary one in Afghanistan.

Future discussion should take into account the ability of the United States to prevail over those who would return Afghanistan into the hands of those who harbored Osama bin Laden while simultaneously waging war in a country that didn’t.

...On Friday, President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki agreed to set a “time horizon” for withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq. The Bush administration insists this is an “aspirational goal,” and not a timetable of the type demanded by Democrats. Whatever.

The point is that the withdrawals need to occur based not just on conditions on the ground in Iraq but on the needs in Afghanistan.

Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain seemingly disagree on whether Iraq has diverted resources and attention from more necessary work in Afghanistan. Obama says it has. Of course, it has. But both say they want to commit more U.S. troops to the war in Afghanistan.

Good. But this will be most possible with a strategy that plans for an end to the U.S. occupation in Iraq, a plan of the type Obama favors and which the Bush Administration now is leaning toward while insisting it isn’t.

...Yet, until Friday, it appeared the administration was still resisting a withdrawal timeline. What part of the word “sovereign” did this administration not understand?

Iraq was a war of choice. Afghanistan isn’t. A plan that includes a true Iraqi withdrawal strategy makes the words more than just a matter of lip service.

Dems overwhelmingly did NOT consider Iraq to be a war of choice. Must we go back and detail all the quotes from the Dems saying that Saddam Hussein and his regime presented a grave threat to the region and the U.S.?

Morever, it is an insult to the U.S. military to describe our presence there as an "occupation" and a violation of Iraq's sovereignity.

Saddam Hussein's reign of terror was a sovereign exercise. His slaughter and torture of Iraqis was sovereign. Being a sworn enemy of the U.S. was a sovereign move. Not cooperating with UN inspectors was also a sovereign choice.

Furthermore, it has ALWAYS been the goal of the Bush administration to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq when it became possible to do so without allowing a humanitarian crisis to occur and throwing the entire region into chaos.

Troop withdrawal and the goofy sort of timetables that Russ Feingold has advocated for years are different things. Feingold and others kept pulling completely arbitrary dates for troop withdrawal out of thin air, based on nothing but the calendar and political expediency. The dates were not based on conditions on the ground in Iraq.

That's not what's happening now. The difference is night and day.

The Editorial Board looks utterly foolish by disregarding this fact.

Bottom line: The lib media wouldn't be shining the spotlight on Afghanistan if things were going poorly in Iraq.

It's as simple as that.