Friday, August 11, 2006

Asked and answered

Friday's Wall Street Journal editorial page features rants by the usual suspects arguing that the interruption of the Heathrow liquid bomb plot demonstrates the greater glory of George W. Bush. The worst performance is put in by Daniel Henninger (subs. req'd; alt. free link), who tell us

... it is becoming increasingly fantastic to argue that in Iraq, with its apparently limitless supply of suicide bombers, hasn't much to do with the terror threats manifest elsewhere.

but later lists those other threats:

Yesterday brought an Islamic plot to blow up people on airliners. The news cycle before that brought Hezbollah's Katyusha rockets into Israel and a war in Lebanon. Before that, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran would give the West its reply to demands to halt nuclear bomb-making on Aug. 22, the anniversary of Muhammad's flight to heaven on a winged horse. Before that, in July, North Korea fired ballistic missiles toward the Sea of Japan (a little-noticed assessment by U.S. and Japanese technicians concluded this week that six of the seven missiles fell within their targets).

Note the obvious: that Iraq, tying up 160,000 UK and US troops, hundreds of billions of dollars, and the rapidly diminishing stock of Western goodwill in the Muslim world, features nowhere in the latter list.

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