And There It Is...

You think the New York Times and Washington Post should write a story every time a neocon hawk pens an essay for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page?

Do you think that the NYT and WaPo should write a story every time that an anti-war Leftist rants in front of a studio audience?

Or, more to the point, the media elites who teach the next generation of journalists has no problem with the utter disinterest in Joe Lieberman's comments in the WSJ outlining how the US is winning in Iraq and how we can succeed there while touting Rep. John Murtha's pessimistic take.

Mark Steyn takes down the media elites a few notches. Bully for him.

Meanwhile, Iraq's experiment in Arab liberty has had ripple effects beyond its borders, pushing the Syrians most of the way out of Lebanon, and in Syria itself significantly weakening Baby Assad's regime. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who's spent years as a beleaguered democracy advocate in Egypt, told the Washington Post's Jim Hoagland the other day that, although he'd opposed the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, he had to admit it had "unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon's 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be the midwives."

The Egyptians get it, so do the Iraqis, the Lebanese, the Jordanians and the Syrians. The choice is never between a risky action and the status quo -- i.e., leaving Saddam in power, U.N. sanctions, U.S. forces sitting on his borders. The stability fetishists in the State Department and the European Union fail to understand that there is no status quo: things are always moving in some direction and, if you leave a dictator and his psychotic sons in business, and his Oil-for-Food scam up and running, and his nuclear R&D teams in places, chances are they're moving in his direction.

About the only folks who don't get it are the anti-war Leftists and their acolytes in Congress who are pushing Democrats even further to the Left in anticipation of the 2006 midterm elections. And even the media outlets themselves are starting to realize that the coverage of the war is not only detrimental to the cause of winning the war, but may even be wrong.

Miles O'Brien set up the segment: "The story we get out of Iraq on a daily basis, whether it's through politicians or through the media, is generally a story which doesn't paint a rosy picture of the situation there. A couple of Marines who are just back from some very difficult duty in Iraq would like to tell you a little different story.” Corporal Stan Mayer relayed how “we saw a lot of transformation in the towns we went into. They really kind of, they got a lot safer, we got a lot more smiles after we spent enough time in a certain area." O'Brien pressed: "The big picture analysis here is that, that, militarily, this is a -- it may not be a war that the U.S. can win. Do you disagree with that?" Corporal Jeff Schuller shot back: "Definitely."