Forget Iraq, What About Spotted Owls?

So very true:

All these politicians and pundits that shake their heads sadly and "tsk tsk" at the thought of Iraq being a voting issue, I have a single question:

There are 2,582 families who have lost a loved one in Iraq. I'd like to see these politicians and pundits tell these families, to their faces, that the loss of their loved ones isn't a valid reason upon which to base one's vote.

There can be no more valid reason to cast a vote than matters of literally life and death.

The generals are even starting to tell the hard truths on this war.

"Iraq could move toward civil war" if the violence is not contained, Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I have seen it," he said, adding that the top priority in Iraq is to secure the capital, where factional violence has surged in recent weeks despite efforts by the new Iraqi government to stop the fighting.

And the American people get the picture on Iraq now as well. And they understand the implications. It's done more to set back the American cause than anything in a generation. I've never been a single-issue voter, but getting out of Iraq is a single issue that makes perfect sense. It affects everything: our federal treasury, the domestic programs that go unfunded because of the money thrown down the drain, our foreign policy, our fight against Islamic radicalism and how to go about it. I wouldn't blame anyone who thought the war was noble and just for voting on that single issue either. I'd try to dissuade them of that notion with facts, but I wouldn't say "the war's just one thing." Because it's not.

P.S. I keep forgetting to recommend Michael Hirsh's Newsweek article about how Bush has (deliberately, I think) confused the issue on "terrorists," treating Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and Hamas and Iraqi insurgents and now even Iraqi Shiites the same way when in fact they are all different. When you start conflating anyone with brown skin as "a terrorist" it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy:

The Bush administration has fought the "war on terror" as a series of Jerry Springers, one lunatic leap of logic after another based on unreliable sources, linking up enemies that had little to do with each other. The White House's failure to understand counterinsurgency in Iraq is, writ large, its failure to understand the radical Muslim enemy as a whole. The president has used Al Qaeda to gin up the threat from Iraq, just as he is now conflating Hizbullah and Hamas with Al Qaeda as "terrorists" of the same ilk. Actually these groups had little connection to one another—or at least they didn't until America decided to make itself their common enemy. Al Qaeda was always, in truth, the only "terrorist group of global reach" in the world—which is how Bush accurately defined things back in that long-ago fall of 2001. Both Hizbullah and Hamas had publicly disavowed any interest in backing Osama bin Laden's goals. Al Qaeda was Sunni, Hizbullah is Shiite. Even within the Muslim world these groups had scant support, although Hamas and Hizbullah had a lot more than Al Qaeda did because they were providing social services in Lebanon and Gaza.

Read it all. A really good piece that tries to address some fundamental truths.