Opinion: In today’s pages: Leaving Iraq, La Niña returns
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The editorial board tells Congress to look beyond benchmarks in Iraq:
[H]owever you tote up the report’s conclusions, its significance shouldn’t be overstated. As Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, correctly observed, ‘We have to look on a wider scale than the benchmarks themselves.’ Such a broader view leads to the conclusion this editorial page reached in May: that Bush and his military advisors should already be planning to draw down U.S. forces, a process that should be deliberate, not abrupt, and that should commence no later than this fall. Further delaying plans — even until September, when Army Gen. David H. Petraeus is to deliver a status report — complicates the logistics of redeployment and provides a disincentive for Iraqis to compromise.We would like to think that Bush recognizes this reality.
The board also praises L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca for his plan to expand house arrests to ease jail overcrowding, and thinks installing hundreds of security cameras around lower Manhattan is fine, as long as privacy concerns are addressed.
On the op-ed page, columnist Joel Stein goes speed-dating for the writing partner of his dreams. Arthur Carmona, recently freed after a wrongful conviction, argues for a fix. UCLA’s Glen M. MacDonald wonders if we’re at the start of a decades-long dry spell, and columnist Rosa Brooks reacts to the Iraq report and answers some common arguments against withdrawal.
Letter writers react to Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzook’s explanation of his party’s goals. Chatsworth’s Philip Pearl puts it starkly: ‘Someone needs to tell Marzook that the world he so touchingly longs for, and aspires to for his people, is as dead as the Holocaust’s 6 million Jewish victims.’