More on Iraq

There's a theme in my last few posts on Iraq: Progress. It's something we don't hear enough about in the lamestream media. In his column in the Chicago Sun-Times, Mark Steyn discusses some of this progress.

In Iraq right now the glass is around two-thirds full, and those two thirds will not be drained down to Sunni Triangle levels of despair. There are 1 million new cars on the road since 2003, a statistic that no doubt just lost us warhawks that Sierra Club endorsement but which doesn't sound like a nation mired in hopelessness. A new international airport has been opened in the north to cope with the Kurdish tourist and economic boom. Faruk Mustafa Rasool is building a 28-story five-star hotel with a revolving restaurant and a cable-car link to downtown Sulaimaniya.

Steyn points out how the media are continuing to present a one-sided view of Iraq, particularly as it relates to the ongoing negotiations in drafting the Iraqi constitution.

As the deadline approaches, we read that the whole magilla's about to go belly up, there's no agreement on the way forward, Washington's going to have to admit it called things disastrously wrong and step in to salvage what it can by postponing the handover to an Iraqi administration/the first free elections/the draft constitution/whatever.

Steyn argues that the divisive nature of the three parties to the negotiations (Kurds, Shia, and Sunni) is actually a boon for the process.

If you want to start an experiment in Middle Eastern liberty, where better than a nation split three ways where no one group can easily dominate the other two?

If you'd been asked in 2003 to devise an ideal constitution for Iraq's very non-ideal circumstances, it would look something like this: a highly decentralized federation that accepts the reality that Iraq is a Muslim nation but reserves political power for elected legislators -- and divides the oil revenue fairly.

Unfortunately, as we've pointed out before, the MSM (mainstream media) constantly slant headlines and coverage to promote a sense of failure and despair in hopes to undermine our efforts in Iraq. Steyn beautifully summarizes the state of affairs in America.

To be sure, we shouldda done this, and we shouldda done that. Yet nonetheless Iraq advances day by day. The real quagmire is at home, where the kinkily gleeful relish of defeatism manifested by Cindy Sheehan, Joan Baez, Ted Kennedy et al. bears less and less relationship to anything happening over there. Iraq's future is a matter for the Iraqis now -- which, given the U.S. media, Democrat blowhards like Joe Biden and Republican squishes like Chuck Hagel, is just as well.