The NY times praises John Kerry for his ideas on Iraq.

This feature of the Kerry proposal draws on the pattern of international oversight in Bosnia. While far from perfect, Bosnia's transition has worked out a lot better than Iraq's and elicited far wider international cooperation.

The funny thing is that if you look at the list of countries participating in Bosnia's reconstruction, it's a shorter list than the number of countires in the Iraq coalition. I guess the Times just doesn't like our current list of friends.

And about those "torture" pictures:

The Bush administration, meanwhile, clings to the unworkable notion of an American-controlled transition, an idea that grows ever more out of touch with reality as the news of the revolting abuses at Abu Ghraib prison overwhelms any remaining Iraqi faith in Washington's good intentions.

What interests me here is that it is indeed "the news of" the abuses in Iraqi prisons that is causing the problem, not the actions themselves becuase we don't really know what really happened yet. While we don't know how or why the various news organizations came to obtain these photos, it is certainly worth asking about the decision to publish them. Journalist egos aside, if you knew that publishing these photos (wrong as some of the actions were) would undermine the war effort psychologically, reflect badly on the country as a whole and perhaps put our troops in harms way, what reason do you have to publish them? To get to the truth about these isolated incidents? Tell that to the Iraqis after they lose their only chance at freedom and revert to anarchy.

And honestly, if these Iraqis are guilty (informally speaking) of taking up arms in support of radical Islam or want to go back to the good ol' Saddam days, putting women's underwear on their heads and taking pictures of them naked is the least they deserve. In the olden days of war, they would have just been killed. The nicer we are, the more we open ourselves up to criticism on things like detentions or that we're not giving out enough humanitarian aid.

Another funny thing is that for those who complain about how much money the war effort costs, it's precisely because we are trying to operate morally. If we just carpet bombed the holdout cities until everyone surrendered, we'd be done in a few days and everyone could go home. Instead we spend money on detention facilities, door-to-door urban fighting technologies and building schools. I agree with doing things this way, but let's not be hypocrites. It costs money and American blood to fight nicely.