'Was Iraq the way it was because of Saddam, or was Saddam the way he was because of Iraq?'
I listened today to the local Baptist minister's radio program and he said, "This shows what a poor judge of newsworthiness I am, but if you'd have told me a week ago that the pictures of Iraq prisoner abuse would still be the number one news story, I'd have said you were crazy." I thought it'd be a two-day story too. The pictures are abhorrent, as everyone is quick to point out as if to show their bona fides, but what can you do besides severely punish the people & supervisors involved and move on? If you're interested in deterence and not partisanship, what will deter future prisoner abuse is harsh punishment of those involved & their supervisors, not a media frenzy. (Although credit goes to the media for discovering the abuse and fulfilling their watchdog role.)
If the networks & the NY Times want to help Kerry, you'd think they'd have enough ammo as it is. The underlying point about the war is that it was iffy in the first place and the post-war "nation-building" exercise smells more and more of failure. (Liberal pundit Margaret Carlson made an interesting comment on CNN's Capital Gang: "Was Iraq the way it was because of Saddam or was Saddam the way he was because of Iraq?")
It seems that the tissue-thin (or meters thick?) difference between this war being considered just and its current status is that the United Nations didn't approve it, and they had the right to since the agreement ending the Gulf War (and subsequently broken by Hussein ad nauseum) was a U.N. one. That the Gulf War fell mightily on U.S. shoulders and that key nations in the U.N. began doing business with Saddam (and thus have a financial incentive to oppose us) makes it more interesting.
In a way, the Bush Administration interpreted the years of resolutions as meaningful documents requiring serious consequences. But what Germany, France and Russia knew was that the vote matters, not the words. The Bush people were "strict constructionists" while the European nations knew that words could be massaged and interpreted and that the power lay in the vote, not the wording. President Bush decided that words in resolutions have meaning, but then voting has a meaning too so there's enough fault to go around.
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