Winter lingered longer this year. High winds buffeted our coast, drenching rain-flooded creeks and small streams. It was a gray punishing end, no matter what the calendar said. As the old season roared its final angry challenge, the news came of another senseless massacre, this time on the serene college campus of Blacksburg, Va. In the streets of Baghdad, the bloodletting continued unabated. The nightmare of this world seems to hardly have time for spring.
The bodies of Virginia Tech faculty and students had barely grown cold when the ideologues began shrieking on talk shows. Not enough gun control. Too much gun control. Who is to blame? The school? The police? One venomous "expert" even blamed the victims themselves. Why didn’t they overpower the killer? This expert is the kind who probably blamed the Jews for going too willingly into the Nazi gas chambers.
It took NBC to put a coda on this sorry affair. The network showed the mass murderer’s videotape amidst much hoopla. When the victims’ loved ones shrank in horror from this crass act, the network tried to defend the indefensible. The other news outlets did not cover themselves with glory, either. They tried to have it both ways, criticizing NBC all the while showing the same horrible trash. It was as comedian Bill Maher said, it was a subject of intense debate among NBC executives and then the decision came: "We can make a ****load of money on this." The day after NBC showed the killer’s proclamation, its evening news with Brian Williams scored a massive triumph in the ratings. It’s what is called the upside to bad taste. Nothing is more revealing than this sorry episode of a once-proud news organization genuflecting at the altar of high ratings. Once the major networks made the decision to place news in their entertainment division and insist it pay for itself like any of the other network operations, this kind of sordid fiasco became inevitable.
The Philadelphia Daily News proved circulation woes will drive a newspaper to print anything when it emblazoned a photo of the killer pointing his gun at readers on its front page. It all reminds me of the famous put-down Joseph Welch said to Sen. Joe McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings, "Have you no decency, sir?" The new owner of the Daily News ought to be calling his editor into the woodshed for this decision.
Amidst these stunning events, the sorry news from Iraq almost got lost. But even the campus killings and the inept performance of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales before a Senate committee could not hide the fact the hopes of a successful surge were dashed on the bloody streets of Baghdad. While Gen. Petraeus was saying we would know by late summer whether the surge would work, events had already overtaken that possibility. The Green Zone has never been more dangerous, no matter how many times John McCain and his army of security walks around the marketplace. All that has surged in Baghdad is the killing.
A news organization is reporting we are giving up on training Iraqis to take over their own security. Our policy is no longer, "As they stand up, we’ll stand down." They just keep standing down, and our soldiers are the only ones standing in the line of fire. I wrote a column called "Iraq is becoming Vietnam" and then, compounded my erroneous thinking, wrote another titled "Iraq is still not Vietnam." Guess what, Cardella — you old warrior you — Iraq is becoming Vietnam. Training the Iraqis has gone about as well as when we trained the South Vietnamese and called it "Vietnamasation."
There are those still clinging to the idea we can’t leave Iraq because there will be a bloodbath when we do. Yes, and now it is apparent this will happen no matter when we leave. The difference is, if we leave earlier rather than later, less Americans will die. No matter how the Democrats vacillate on continuing the war’s funding, the price of such hesitation is more American lives lost. Cut off the funding and stop the war.
We are building a wall in Baghdad to stop Shia and Sunni from killing one another. We came to Iraq to build a democracy and began by toppling the statue of Saddam. Now we are leaving Baghdad divided by a wall, an ugly reminder of our failure. There is nothing the president can say that can change this enduring image of a nation blundering into a culture it does not understand. In the place of a united Iraq, we have left them a wall.
April bloody April, be gone with you.
