Northern Valley Beacon

With all the Bush administration hype about bringing democracy to Iraq, real assessments of the war and the future role of the U.S. are obscured by the propaganda static. The generals, who have been part of that hype, are revising their outlook statements.

Critics of the war on Iraq have two major points to assert. The first is that the war was mounted on contrived information, the evidence for which continues to pile up, and we should not be involved in the first place. The second is the incompetent planning that failed to consider the political and cultural resistance to an American presence or ideology. In a New York Times story today, the generals report bleak chances for withdrawing American troops anytime in the foreseeable future.