“Ace in the Hole” wa…
“Ace in the Hole” was Drudge’s headline this morning announcing that the Ace of Spaces, Saddam Hussein, was captured yesterday in a village near Tikrit, in a hole in the dirt cellar of a farmhouse. Certainly, this is fantastic news.
Or is it?
Let’s see what the lefties have to say. On daily Kos, DHinMI writes,
Capturing Saddam is good news (although not as exciting or important as would be news of capturing the guy Bob Graham called “Osama Bin Forgotten”). But capturing him alive might not have been the best news for the Bush administration.
When a Republican is in the oval office, every silver lining has a cloud. In this case, it’s a veritable mother lode of silver, and all DHinMI is a conjured-up thunderstorm. OK, I’ll grant getting Hussein isn’t as big as getting bin Laden, but I daresay that if it was bin Laden we’d picked up, he’d be saying, “Yeah, well what about Hussein, hmmm?” At least some of the commenters on the dKos site have a bit more perspective. From PSoTD:
I’m not sure Bush could have politically survived killing Saddam without an incredible amount of independently-verified evidence that it was unavoidable. The outrage from both outside and inside the U.S. would have been intense.
It’s truly amazing how short DHinMI’s memory is. In general, the comments on this post show that lefties are having a tough time dealing with this. Some say it’s incredibly good news in general, while some can’t bring themselves to say (or perhaps even believe) it. I like this line: “Presumably, it will be used to show the effectiveness of the Bush policies.” Correct, sir. Credit where credit is due.
Atrios finds himself in the same thunderstorm.
But, it really doesn’t change much. Capturing Saddam isn’t going to end the resistance to the US occupation in Iraq. It may improve things slightly, or it could even make it worse, but the net effect will probably be negligible. Saddam was a bad guy, but it isn’t clear he’s any worse of a guy than some of the folks who are a part of our “Coalition of the Willing,” so this pretense of moral clarity, etc… is ridiculous.
No mention of what other country in the Coalition of the Willing has mass graves.
Atrios called his comments “just some unorganized idle thoughts before I’ve had a cup of coffee”. His first commentor said, “Yeah, you should have had the coffee first.” Other comments range from calling the capture a good thing (although you have to read down quite a bit to actually find that) all the way to folks suggesting that we are the real enemy. Take down an evil, murderous dictator, and you yourself get called “evil”. Cynicism at its worst.
CalPundit can’t bring himself to acknowledge how good this is. The best he can bring himself to say is, “At a minimum, there are a lot of people in Iraq who are breathing a sigh of relief that at least he won’t be returning, and that’s got to help.” All he can see is the minimum. His follow-up post later on is in fact his take on the cloud rather than the silver lining. “American is very good but we still want salaries,” he quotes an Iraqi from a NY Times article (surprise, surprise). He continues, “But it’s also a reminder that good news aside, the real work in Iraq is still a long, hard slog.” He puts aside the good news to tell us something that’s been common knowledge, hoping it will somehow reflect badly on Bush, but he sounds like he’s milking the “long, hard slog” bit far too much.
Commenters to the first entry are following the same pattern they did before the war. Back then it was, “Of course Saddam is a monster, but”, which was followed by reasons we should let him build more mass graves & palaces. Today, they’re saying, “Of course Saddam’s capture is good, but”, followed by how bad they think things are going to be in Iraq. One poster in the minority sums these folks’ outlooks up quite nicely. Gracho said, “You people have a very ‘glass half empty’ outlook don’t you?” JP agrees. “I agree that this doesn’t erase any of the underlying problems with this war by a long shot. But let’s talk about the politics tomorrow. In and of itself, what happened today was a very good thing.” (Emphasis his.)
Hesiod fares a little better than others, barely. He calls Saddam’s capture “an unqualified good, whatever impact it has here.” Nice to hear, but that’s an odd line in a blog entry titled “BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR” and is followed by qualifications to that good.
But, I want to caution some people. It is hard to predict what impact this will have on the Iraqi insurgency.
His points are all reasonable, but other than one line on the silver lining, he goes searching out all possible clouds that may or may not appear.
The majority of his commenters seem to be in the “half empty” camp as well, and it takes going about 1/3 of the way down the list (when I looked at it) before someone mentions that this capture might be a good thing. Even then, it’s a follow-up post to a much longer Bush-bashing post. Gotta get that in first, doncha’ know?
TChris of Talk Left sticks pretty much to the facts in his initial entry; a bullet list of facts about the capture and a quote from a NY Times article. He makes a couple of points about Bush probably getting a bump in the polls, and that it remains to be seen whether things will improve as a result. True enough.
However, commenters on the site really are in a state of denial. “No matter what, this war is wrong and cannot be won – no matter how many members of the Deck of Cards are killed or apprehended,” says John Mann, first on the list. How open minded of him. Wonder what he thought about the Kosovo situation, where we also went in without UN approval. This is followed by a completely ludicrous statement from one “letharjk” who emotes, “I am glad Saddam has been captured. Now at least we can say we’ve done some good in Iraq.” See my previous remark about mass graves, and the cessation of the reasons for them. However, a few voices of reality make their presence known, starting with a knowledgeable comment by “Poker Player”. “I just love it. I can just smell the disappointment in your comments that something went right today.”
Some commenters on all boards seem to think Hussein’s been hiding here this whole time, and thus don’t think he could really have been directing attacks on the Coalition from there. Short attention spans have won out again on the liberal blogs, apparently. Months ago we were hearing intelligence that Hussein was moving every few hours. Even if that wasn’t entirely accurate, he certainly has been running around to keep from being caught, and no one seriously believes he’s spent months in that hole. How convenient, though, that so many lefties have forgotten this.
This is generally the view of the left, then. Either “This is good news, except there’s all this bad news that we’re predicting” (never mind their host of previous failed predictions) or “So what?” You gotta wonder what these folks said when Milosevic was captured. Ah, but you see, that was a non-UN-sanctioned war run by a Democrat. Therein lies the whole story. Leftists are showing their true, extreme partisan colors all over the blogosphere.
