The IJN is MIA

I religiously read the InterMountain Jewish News (IJN) and until two weeks ago, I don’t recall that paper editorializing that outgoing Def. Sec. Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration were intellectually inept in their pursuit of Democracy in Iraq.
A few democrat congressmen get elected in November and suddenly the one local newspaper that had consistently supported the overthrow of Saddam and America’s efforts to stabilize a free Iraq throws the President overboard and pretends to have been a clairvoyant critic all along.
Neither the IJN nor any other critic has any idea whether the Administration “understood the Middle Eastern mentality” or “had any plan for the aftermath of the War”. Even with the ‘wisdom’ of hindsight, no one knows that Iraq would be any better off, even if President Bush, the Military Command and the Iraqi government had done the exact opposite of every action they’d undertaken. And while the IJN now berates the decisions and intelligence of the Bush Administration, it fails to advance even one idea on how to make things better.
The real surprise in Iraq is how innovative, adaptive and determined our enemies there have fought against our best efforts for Iraqi Freedom. Just because we are fighting Arabs doesn’t mean it’s supposed to be easy. As I recall, we had our troubles beating the Japanese and Germans too, only back then we didn’t blame our leaders, we blamed theirs. Instead of getting angry that our enemies; Al Qaida, Iran and Syria have succeeded in disrupting reconstruction and inflaming ethnic tensions in Iraq, the IJN has now jumped on the “Bush is stupid’ bandwagon and is taking out its frustration by bashing the ‘good guys’.
The IJN is right about one thing – our nation is uneasy about confronting an (imminent) nuclear Iran. And every time another individual or institution (like the IJN) forgets who we’re actually fighting against and why, it becomes more and more unlikely President Bush will have a strong majority of Americans behind him when he stands up against another (and even greater) foe of Israel and the Jewish people, not to mention the rest of the Free World..