Krauthammer is still there!

For the first time in ten months I read the Opinion pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post today. I sipped my first cup of coffee as I took in David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer. I should have waited until my second cup.

Krauthammer is still there on the Washington Post’s Opinion page lying to America. Today he was offering John McCain campaign advice, really though, he was lying about the state of affairs in Iraq. His aren’t big lies; he just applies a high polish to reality in such a manner as to obscure indisputable truths.

The fact is that our public forum is no longer, and may only in my imagined memories have been, equipped to handle the nuanced debate required to discuss the War in Iraq. Rather than a debate about the manner and conditions that will accompany the withdrawal our nation must see, it has been a debate about staying for 100 years or leaving immediately. Neither of these hyperbolic positions duly addresses the problems we face. But our national problem in this discussion goes beyond this, we have commentators who dominate the public sphere that willfully ignore, or lie, about the nature of events on the ground in Iraq, to wit: Krauthammer lists the various successes that the Iraqi government has witnessed since last September. In these he includes, “6. Parliament passed the other reconciliation benchmarks.”

Yes, the Iraqi Parliament has passed some of the reconciliation benchmarks. It has not, however, passed all of them: namely, the Iraqis have still not passed the election reform law so that the status of Kirkuk can be resolved. Nor have they settled on the distribution of petroleum resources. In fact, while the attacks on US and Iraqi forces have subsided, the Maliki government has been unable to take advantage of the so-called surge and achieve the political reconciliation the surge was designed to allow. That government has left the most difficult decisions before it unresolved.

Krauthammer also states that Maliki’s government has taken on Shiite militias, but implies that he has taken on all Shiite militias. This is of course nonsense. While there can be no denying the improbable success the Iraqi Army has enjoyed in Basra – and yes, that was a success – and Sadr City, the government has simply become reliant upon the Badr brigade, the Shiite militia loyal to Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who spent his time in exile in Iran and whose militia has been responsible for private prisons and torture chambers as well as death squads.

Iraq is not and has never been a simple place, nor from our perspective a simple problem. Our nation will soon be faced with many such and more complicated, intractable problems. Our political leadership and our media are ill-equipped for the fast approaching future – it does us no good to yet have the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post dominated by Charles Krauthammer and his half-truth telling ilk.