'Wash Post' Backs Invasion and 'Endless' Occupation Over Air Strikes

By Glenn Greenwald

(May 03, 2008) -- Glenn Greenwald, who blogs at Salon.com and has written three popular books in recent years, regularly reviews editorials at The Washington Post, under opinion editor Fred Hiatt, taking issue with their hawkish views on the Iraq war.
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Long-time war cheerleader Fred Hiatt of The Washington Post has a truly incoherent Editorial this morning in which he cites the problems he says are created by air strikes of the type the U.S. just carried out against an alleged Al Qaeda leader in Somalia in order to argue that it's better, instead, to invade and occupy countries such as Iraq. Here are the problems that he says arise when we merely bomb -- rather than bomb, invade and occupy -- other countries:

"But Thursday's U.S. operation had a distinct downside: At least two dozen other people were killed in the attack, some of them apparently civilians. Al-Shabab responded defiantly, and Somalia-watchers said new leaders for the militia and al-Qaeda will quickly come forward, while fresh recruits may be gained through a backlash against the American intervention. . . .

"Somalia itself, meanwhile, has grown steadily more dangerous. The government, which is backed by Ethiopian troops, has lost ground to Islamist and tribal insurgents, and fighting has destroyed a large part of Mogadishu, the capital, while displacing up to 60 percent of the city's population, or 700,000 people. Famine is a distinct danger: The United Nations says that 2.6 million Somalis are in need of food aid and that the number could rise by the end of the year to 3.5 million -- half the country's population."

Hiatt then says that problems like these -- chaos, civilian deaths, population displacement, and the prospect of helping Al Qaeda's recruitment efforts -- are reasons that we should, instead, pursue and prolong policies like the one we've undertaken in Iraq: "Somalia is a cautionary example for those who, like Barack Obama, favor rapidly withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq and managing any threat from al-Qaeda with an "over the horizon" strike force. Such forces indeed have the ability to target and kill leaders. They do nothing, however, to change the conditions under which al-Qaeda finds refuge and recruits."

It's hard to recall a more incoherent argument than this.

Self-evidently, every problem that Hiatt argues is created by "mere" air strikes against other countries is magnified by many magnitudes by the types of invasions and long-term occupations which Hiatt cheers on for Iraq. Unlike the handful of civilians killed by the Somalian air strike, Hiatt's Glorious War in Iraq has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians (though the exact number is debated because we don't really bother to count).

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