Blogoland

In his column today, David Brooks (TimesSelect) tells us that the insurgents and militias in Iraq are really quite bad people. Of course, his windup, which takes eight paragraphs out of a 13 paragraph story to get to its point, is really an apologia for whatever happened at Haditha.

Some excerpts:

"When you have to deal with barbarians, you must behave like a barbarian yourself," a Greek officer in the Balkan wars of 1912-13 declared. But Americans, to their credit, have been unwilling to rationalize barbaric action so easily. Because American troops come from the culture they do, they have not become the sort of people they would have to be to defeat the insurgents at their own game.

Hm. Looks like Brooks tiptoes right up to the edge there.

And then he jumps:

A dissenting minority is furious that so many Americans are willing to betray the decent Iraqi majority in order to preserve some parlor purity. And the terrorists no doubt look at our qualms not as a sign of virtue but of weakness, and as evidence that savagery will lead to victory again and again.

Read that again. I had to. Parlor purity? It's "parlor purity" to not execute (allegedly) women and children? That's crazy. And which "decent Iraqi majority" wants us to execute women and children? If Brooks really believes that's who we're fighting for, he's way far gone.

And that last sentence seems to be part of a growing chorus of nimroddery, one that we've covered here previously.