The fact-challenged Kristol defaces Memorial Day
The New York Times' William Kristol is at it again.
In his op-ed for Memorial Day, Kristol would have us thank servicemen and women we meet on the street. That's not hard to do, and not expensive. It's also not particularly useful. We might be better advised to give them the what they need and deserve - their lives back, together with whatever services and support they may need. According to the RAND Corporation, 300,000 vets suffer from PTSD or depression. Over 100 are committing suicide each week, 1000 are attempting each month. The VA adopted a fine-sounding plan last year, but it was not funded nor implemented; instead, we now have the spectacle of a VA supervisor telling staff members not to diagnose PTSD, and of veterans forced to live in vermin-infested barracks where sewage backs up into the sinks.
But let's not tarry here. Kristol has never pretended to be a humanitarian. His hat tips to service members are a device, not a call to serious action. He quickly moves on to the meat of his argument, which is that we must continue feeding our citizens' bodies into the meat grinder because things are going so well in Iraq. Violent incidents are down! People are walking the streets at night! The surge worked! We are "on course"!
Kristol has become somewhat infamous in his few months as an op-ed writer at the New York Times; it seems he can't bother to fact-check his pieces, so the Times has to put up "corrections" on a number of them. In this piece, he avoids that problem by not asserting facts, other than to quote a forwarded email. But this piece lies in a different way, by omission.
Just as veterans' real needs and lives disappear from Kristol's sunny admonitions thank them, the causes and context of Iraq's present situation disappear from Kristol's happy exhortations that victory is near. He doesn't bother to mention that we are paying our former enemies, the Sunni tribal sheikhs, not to fight us. He doesn't mention that we are arming the same people who were killing us so recently, and who will do it again when it suits them. He does not mention the surge of stop loss orders - up 40% from last year - the "backdoor draft" required to keep our forces operational. He fails to note that Iraq's most senior Shiite religious leader, Ayatollah Sistani, has now forbidden Iraqis to sell food to Americans, and has been reported to have orally permitted attacks on US troops. He ignores the deepening mess in Afghanistan, where NATO allies are backing off and more US troops are needed. And of course, he completely ignores the question of what this whole never-ending war is for. After six and a half years, are we seriously expected to believe that we are protecting our way of life? Defeating al-Qaeda? Reducing terrorism? Protecting the oil?
It is somewhat remarkable that the New York Times thought it needed to offer space to this person; after all, Kristol gets plenty of airtime elsewhere. In the Weekly Standard and on Fox News, Kristol has learned some very bad habits, it seems; he has become a liar who can't even be bothered to come up with a veneer of plausibility. One would think the Paper of Record could do better.