Priorities

Since John McCain is clearly unable to comprehend basic facts about a war that he’d just as soon have last a century or longer, Spencer Ackerman kindly helps by reminding that what lots of folks were predicting five years ago has turned out to be, you know, accurate.

AQI has a lesson for us. Counterfactual conditionals are always problematic, but in all likelihood, according to MNF-I’s own profile, if the United States were not in Iraq, Mr. AQI would be back in his taxi in Algiers or Jedda. Were it not for Abu Ghraib — which, of course, never would have happened had we not invaded — Mr. AQI would never have felt that it was his religious duty to kill Americans. And were it not for the war, thousands of Americans and possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would be alive, right now, and all without a propaganda windfall that spikes terrorist recruitment for the extremist lurking around the mosque trying to generate new Mr. AQIs. And what is true of our foreign-born Mr. AQI is all the more true of the perhaps 95 percent of AQI that’s Iraqi Sunni. Not one of them would have any reason to be a member of AQI if George Bush did not give him one.

In a different universe this might be a topic of serious conversation, but Ackerman fails to realize that there appears to be a Crazy Negro out there somewhere.