RADIO TIDBITS

Slots Bennett read with approval two op-ed pieces today, one by Jeff Jacoby, the other by Mark Steyn, both about Iraq.

Here's some of the nonsense Jacoby has to say:

Far from drawing down the number of troops in Iraq, Bush should increase them. ... The violence in Iraq is surging precisely because Iraqis fear that the Americans are getting ready to throw in the towel.

Ok, Jeff, where are we going to get the troops from? The Army and the Marines are near the breaking point as it is. BTW, sectarian violence started even before Saddam's statue fell, so it has no connection with any supposed Iraqi fear that we will leave. In fact, over 70% of Iraqis want us out in a year or less.

Now, for the other idiot, Steyn:

...as one Baker Commission grandee told the New York Times, ''We had to move the national debate from whether to stay the course to how do we start down the path out.''

An ''exit strategy'' on those terms is the path out not just from Iraq but from a lot of other places, too -- including Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela, Russia, China, the South Sandwich Islands. For America would be revealed to the world as a fraud: a hyperpower that's all hype and no power -- or, at any rate, no will.

It's news to me that we are IN Venezuala, Russia & China but perhaps Steyn is using hyperbole to make a stupid point: Iraq is the key to the entire world. This is the neocon's "Son of Domino" theory and makes less sense than the original.

Steyn should ask himself whether or not the lack of WMD has hurt American prestige instead of making profundly ignorant remarks like this one about the size of the insurgency:

Yet it's not big enough to see off an insurgency confined to a 30-mile radius of a desert capital?

Slots has lots of agit-prop on his show but today I think he outdid himself in citing unreliable people. It's a good thing no one ever made him Secretary of Education. (Oops!)