You gotta stop relying on the NY Times. If Bush cured cancer, the NY Times headline would be "Bush Cure Ignores Heart Disease". See Steyn's take on the current situation in Iraq (ya, I know, I gotta stop relying on Steyn!) at
<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/09/19/do1902.xml"</a>this link.</a>

You cannot select your news sources and suggest that it is authoratative. I will link up the report you cite if you promise to read the NY Times for a week. The truth always lies between.

Here is the problem with an article like Steyn's:<blockquote class="smalltext">Do you remember that moment of Fallujah-like depravity in Ulster a few years ago? Two soldiers were yanked from a cab in the wrong part of town and torn apart by a Republican mob. A terrible, shaming episode in the wretched annals of Northern Irish nationalists. But in the rest of the United Kingdom - in Bristol, in Coventry, Newcastle, Aberdeen - life went on, very pleasantly. That's the way it is in Iraq. In two-thirds of the country, municipal government has been rebuilt, business is good, restaurants are open, life is as jolly as it has been in living memory. This summer the Shia province of Dhi Qar, south-east of Baghdad, held the first free elections in its history, electing secular independents and non-religious parties to its town councils.</blockquote>That simply does not work in the realm of fact received people who I read who are there like Salam Pax, Patrick Graham (who I went to undergrad with and trust implicitly) and Christopher Allbritton. Has Steyn been there? Has Krugman for that matter? <p>More importantly how do we choose what to know? It cannot be based on our preference for what the facts should be or we are kidding ourselves.

I expect that Steyn is in some ways correct and Krugman is also correct. Their points are not mutually exclusive.

In most of the country life does go on. Markets are open, destroyed building are repaired and in the absence of any real government local caretakers are established: sometimes by virtue of tribal heirarchy sometimes by a popular vote.

The same was true when Saddam was in power - except their was no absence of central government - but other than that life went on.

Krugman is also right. The US is not in control of the country and security is terrible. Iraq is becoming exactly what the US alleges they set out to save themselves from - a failed state where terrorists operate freely.

Still, life goes on.

Of course, life went on in when Germany occupied France as well. Markets were open, jobs were worked, school was attended and local communities established local leadership - sometime working with the Germans, sometimes against.

I guess the point of my point here is that Steyn is, for the most part, full of shit. You can't conclude from the observation that life goes on, that the situation isn't dire.

Sorry for the multiple comments - I guess Steyn's artful rhetoric gets up my nose. Juan Cole presents a little what-if analysis that demonstrates why Iraq is not like the UK a few years ago.

Thank you, Kevin. It is interesting how humans generally get on with life. I recall another reporter pal from undergrad days (Kings in Halifax has a journalism school) covered the Ethiopian famine in 1984 and he was flabbergasted by the smiles and laughing of the people.