BCT Editorial – 10/15/04

This page was last updated on October 15, 2004.

Jogging around - Different time lines; Editorial; Beaver County Times; October 15, 2004.

The editorial takes two compatible statements and wants us to believe they are incompatible. To pull this off, the editorial writer hopes you don’t read closely. The editorial says Sec. Rumsfeld is talking about when we can start to remove troops from Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld doesn’t say we plan to remove all troops within a short period of time. He’s saying we can expect to be able to gradually remove coalition troops as Iraqi security forces become more capable. That does not contradict the Iraqi defense minister.

Finally, the editorial concludes with “We broke it; we bought it.” I’ve lost count of how often the editorial writers have used this hackneyed phrase over the last several months. The Times editorial board apparently lives in a fantasyland – or partisanland – in which Iraq hadn’t been broken for decades. In the real world, Iraq has been broken for decades and we’re finally getting around to fixing it.