Foreign Policy Blogs

Editorial round-up plus our very own news anchors

Here's an interesting op-ed by Fouad Ajami in today's Wall Street Journal. An ardent supporter of the Iraq war since the beginning, Ajami harshly criticizes Scott McClellan's accusations towards the Bush administration. He also says, “With the luxury of hindsight, the critics of the war now depict the arguments made for it as a case of manipulation and deceit. This is odd and misplaced: The claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were to prove incorrect, but they were made in good faith.”

Another piece in the Christian Science Monitor by Monica Duffy Toft argues that Iraq's civil discord is, at its core, religious. She points to the Shi’ite-Sunni divide, and the intra-Shi’ite rivalries that this blog has chronicled. She goes into more detail about the possible end-games for how the majority Arabs could be able to unite, but in the end, she says, “The idea of victory versus failure is really a false dichotomy, however. The real choice for US and British policymakers is between the more costly failure that will obtain from current policy and the less costly failure that might obtain from a well- thought-out and well-executed withdrawal.”

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This video is a few days old, but it's still very interesting. Thank you to Robert Nolan of FPA for pointing this out to me. It's several of our beloved news anchors such as Katie Couric and other NBC anchors discussing Scott McClellan's accusations that the media did not do their job in properly asking enough questions of the Bush administration. Ms. Couric points out that the White House Press Secretary told an executive producer at NBC that they didn't like the 'tone’ of the interview that Couric had conducted, and that the White House would block NBC's access to the Iraq war. Couric, in the video above, refers to this as ‘insidious pressure’. I would say that's more than just ‘insidious’ pressure, Katie. That's astounding and disgraceful.