Susie Madrak at Surburban Guerrilla neatly illustrates the educational clout blogs bring to the masses when she links to this post at Boing-Boing, which explains the genesis of the Bush-Cheney policy toward Iran. The vice-president, under the bedsheet, with a flashlight …

The Guardian published a story on Sunday detailing concern about Afghanistan among Britain’s military, who think the situation there is both going south in a hurry and could potentially lead to much graver consequences than the ultimate implosion of our grand Iraq adventure. Several bloggers commented on it, and I found the contrast between the first two I read, one left and one right, instructive.

Cernig at The Newshoggers quoted at length from the story and had this to say.

The debacle in Iraq, which has taken essential resources and squandered them, is the primary reason Afghanistan is teetering and withdrawal from Iraq is a necessary part of ensuring Afgfhanistan doesn’t fail. It’s become a question of priorities, of the lesser of two evils, thanks to the Bush administration’s getting the West into Iraq in the first place. It isn’t a pleasant choice but nevertheless it’s a choice that has been forced by Bush’s decisions and must now be made. The priority should be Afghanistan and it has reached the point where those who back Bush’s stubborn and wrong-headed insistence in “staying the course” have become enablers of the greatest disservice ever done the West by an American leader.

You’ll note that the thrust is cutting our losses in Iraq and focusing our remaining resources on Afghanistan. At Peace Like a River, Jeff Koubla’s two-fold emphasis is to downplay the Brit concerns and announce that the Taliban are bad people.

… the concerns mentioned above are legitimate. But catastrophic failure?

The Taliban kill children. They attack schools. They attack Afghan security forces. Suicide attacks are on the increase. They are getting killed by the hundreds by Coalition forces. [...]

What do the Taliban offer the citizens of Afghanistan? Nothing. The US and NATO are there working to rebuild the country. Yes, there’s room for more investment, but that’s a different issue than “catastrophic failure.” And at a recent conference in Rome, hundreds of millions of dollars were pledged.

The Afghan national army is performing well, though the police force does need work.

Just like Iraq, let’s not abandon the effort too soon. The Taliban is happy to hide among civilians, and invite collateral damage. They know headlines about civilians being killed create pressure that favors them. Let’s not boost their confidence by admitting defeat.

No one suggested abandoning Afghanistan; quite the opposite. What the Brits are saying is that the situation there is bad, that failure would be catastrophic and that to prevent failure, the country needs far more support than it’s getting. Koubla apparently thinks that recognizing a bad situation and calling for the additional resources necessary to ameliorate it amounts to defeatism; the prudent course, in his mind, is to stick our collective fingers in our ears and continue doing what we’re doing, because doing something different involves admitting that what we’re doing now isn’t sufficient. And, as is common on the right, he misses the point that the primary negative impact of civilian deaths at our hands arises from the deaths, not from the headlines about them.

And speaking of civilian deaths … for some reason, hardly anyone is talking about the story by Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian in The Nation which gives painful chapter and verse on the nature of the US occupation of Iraq. Richard at American Leftist does so at some length.

The story is at once illuminating, infuriating, depressing and essential. Read it, and if you’re

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