Meet the Fockers

Picture credit: RH Sager
The endlessly disappointing Bob Herbert reprised the Iraq war in a Times' Op-Ed piece this morning. I'll save you the time and effort of reading his diatribe, which can only be characterized as a complete waste of fourteen column-inches. Here are the key sound-bites, which I'm pretty sure were stolen from John Kerry's dustbin sometime in October:

...war in Iraq has been an exercise in extreme madness...

...amateurs and incompetents have run the war from the start...

...Abu Ghraib was not an aberration. It was a symptom...

...clownish, disastrous war...

Even putting aside his vicious, unwarranted insults of the US Military, it's stunning that Herbert has neither the eloquence or intellectual honesty of even, say, the virulent Barbra Streisand.

Here's what Herbert fails to mention: 9/11. The innocents slaughtered in the Madrid Train Bombings. The promises by terrorists to kill three million Americans through any means possible. The Global War on Terror. The elections frenzy sweeping the Mideast.

Think about it: even the senseless Barbra Streisand, in the recent open letter posted on her site, was willing to mention 9/11 and the implication of WMDs on American soil.

Of course, her statement likening President Bush to Nazi Germany's Hermann Goering, was rendered unintentionally comic through its record-setting levels of irony.

Consider the analogy: an immensely wealthy, ultra-liberal entertainer criticizes the Third Reich in, say, 1936. The outcome? She is either deported, executed, or sent to a concentration camp. Streisand's willingness to minimize the horrors of Nazi Germany would truly be ludicrous were the implications not so tragic.

That Herbert could attempt a Reader's Digest version of the Iraq War without mentioning the war on terror, the lives lost on 9/11, Afghanistan, the elections sweeping the region, and the general topography of life in the early 21st century is proof of either utter bias or stupefying ignorance. I'm betting on the latter.