This is what a REAL journalist sounds like

Georgie Anne Geyer has written some excellent columns about Situation FUBAR. It helps that, as a foreign correspondent, she actually visited the Middle East and interviewed many of its leaders. It also helps that she is a real journalist and not a trained monkey of movement conservatism. For this week's column, she notes how fragmented, destabilized countries become ideal breeding grounds for terrorism.

And so, on the one hand, you have weakened societies -- "only spaces" -- that have become vulnerable to the "new answers" of "new insurgencies," and on the other hand, you have Iraq set up as a school for terrorists with American troops and policy providing the constant inspiration for their fight.

This, of course, is not the way the Bush administration -- despite everything that has gone so terribly wrong -- sees it.

They see terrorists as born, not created by history, bearing the mark of Cain, not the mark of circumstance. There is a scarlet "T" written on their foreheads at birth and the only answer is to destroy them. This kind of thinking, of course, relieves the thinker of any responsibility for the presence of the insurgent-terrorist-whatever in our innocent midst.

I'm eager to read Glenn Greenwald's forthcoming book A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. Perhaps it'll touch on this aspect of the Iraq misadventure