How can I not quote an editorial that uses "genuflect"?
From Dream to Nightmare
By BOB HERBERT
Published: April 30, 2004
A USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll found that only a third of Iraqis believe the U.S.-led occupation is doing more good than harm. The poll was taken in late March and early April, and it's a safe bet that if the results have changed at all in the past few weeks, they've only gotten worse.
There is nothing surprising about the poll's findings. The U.S. primed Iraq with a "shock and awe" bombing campaign, then invaded, and is attempting to impose our concept of democracy at the point of a gun.
Why would anybody think that would work?
Since then we've destroyed countless homes and legitimate businesses and killed or maimed thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including many women and children. That was a lousy strategy for winning hearts and minds in Vietnam and it's a lousy strategy now.
Equally unsurprising is the erosion of support for the war among Americans. There's no upside. Casualties are mounting daily and so are the financial costs, which have never been honestly acknowledged or budgeted.
Mr. Bush has enmeshed us in a war that we can't win and that we don't know how to end. Each loss of a life in this tragic exercise is a reminder of lessons never learned from history. And the most fundamental of those lessons is that fantasy must always genuflect before reality.
