Now With Substance

For a more substantive take on today's edition of Michael O'Hanlon's "prominent newspapers can't stop letting me write op-eds" gravy train, read Ilan Goldenberg's detailed effort at a rebuttal. To sum up Ilan's points, however, I would just note that it's hard to rebut an argument that doesn't feature a real argument. O'Hanlon lists six things that it would be good to see happen in Iraq, and then proclaims those six things to be a good reason to keep 140,000 American troops in Iraq at a cost of billions per week for the next 90 weeks or so, but he doesn't explain why doing this will actually help resolve any of those problems.

This, though, has been the time-honored debating ploy of the Iraq forever crowd for years. I recall in 2005 when the troops needed to stay or else there would be ethnic cleansing. So the troops stayed and guess what happened in 2006? Ethnic cleansing. Then when the ethnic cleansing ended, that proved our deployment was working and had to be continued.

U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. William Greer