The Washington Times

One gets some sense of the heavy political weather President Bush was flying in Monday night by the pre-speech observation of a cable news anchor. He condescendingly observed that it must have escaped the White House’s attention that the war college where Mr. Bush was to speak was close to Gettysburg, Pa., where Abraham Lincoln delivered his magnificent Gettysburg Address, compared with which Mr. Bush’s speech would doubtlessly be found wanting. Talk about a tough audience. What is worse, that comment was on Fox News Channel – which passes for friendly journalism in Mr. Bush’s Washington today.

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The Washington Times

So, ask yourself this question: In the absence of the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison, how much credence would you have attached or did you attach to reports of abuse of the detainees there? How credible did you find the complaints of mistreatment? Asked to guess how the U.S. military was treating prisoners, in your wildest imagination would you have conjured up the image of a female U.S. soldier leading a hooded, naked Iraqi around on a leash?

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The Washington Times

As a siren and flashing lights stream past an outdoor cafe here, my Israeli dinner companion, an acute observer of manners, tells me to watch the way our Israeli fellow patrons’ heads turn – first in the direction in which the emergency vehicle was going, next in the direction whence it came. Why look back? Well, my dinner companion explains, if other emergency vehicles aren’t following the first one, it’s routine, maybe a heart attack or something. Only if more are following could it be a terrorist attack.

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The Washington Times

Forget about the “fog of war” for a while – that is, the inability to know what’s going on in the heat of battle. Let us turn our attention instead to the “fog of occupation.”

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