The NY Times lead editorial today (The U.N. Go-Ahead on Iraq) deserves an uber-fisking today. It begins:

At a time when not much has been going right in Iraq...

For who? The insurgents/rebels/militants?

*In the last month hundreds of them have been killed and the al-Sadr insurgency has been defeated.

*With UN assistance, a new Iraqi government was appointed and plans for a June 30 handover have not been postponed

*U.S. military casualties have dropped significantly from 150 in April to 88 in May to only 15 in the first ten days of June.

Then there's the everyday stuff that has improved as a direct result of U.S. involvement in Iraq (via FrontPage):

*Hundreds of thousands of children who had not received proper medical care now have up-to-date immunizations and other medical care.

*School attendance, by some estimates, is up 80% from levels before the war. Among those being educated are young girls who previously may not have received proper education.

*Despite much publicity early in the war that power plants had been bombed or sabotaged, what hasn't received wide publicity is that today Iraq now has more electrical power than it did before the war.

*Hundreds of thousands of people have telephones for the first time ever.

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"While the outcome was inevitable..." and "There was never any chance that the Security Council would not support a motion..."

That's very interesting considering the Times own reporting on June 6:

"American and French officials said the understanding reached between the United States and Iraq's interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, could remove a big hurdle to approval" and

"Mr. Chirac suggested that France still had concerns about the resolution that must be addressed before it could be completed"

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"Nor, unfortunately, will it substantially broaden the international oversight of Iraq's passage to elected government in the ways that Senator John Kerry and others have recently proposed."

As if Senator Kerry would be able to dictate international action as President! Maybe it's possible that they don't want to get more involved at this stage and the wording of the resolution was an effective balance of American, Iraqi and International interests. Does the Times think a Kerry administration could have done better than a 15-0 vote?

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"Unfortunately, this progress cannot undo everything that went before: President Bush's disastrous decision to rush into the invasion without Security Council endorsement, the ineptly planned occupation and all the damage those policies have done to Iraq and the Middle East, and to American relationships around the world."

Let's ignore that fact that Bush did not invade Iraq until more than 2 years into his presidency and 1 1/2 years after 9/11. (He was supposedly planning this invasion from day one, right?) And let's ignore the fact the "damage" of a Taliban-free Afghanistan, Saddam-free Iraq, fewer people being killed on both sides in Israel and a return of Libya to the international community. Let's also ignore that this resolution itself proves that American relationships with it's allies are not permanently damaged and we are creating new ones.

Even ignoring all that, what is the purpose of dwelling on the past if things are headed in the right direction (if not to Bush-bash before the reader leaves the page)? The fact of the matter is that worse decisions that these can indeed be undone. Should we not have tried to become allies with Germany and Japan after WWII because we could not undo the damage we caused by fire-bombing cities and dropping atomic bombs? Should Israel not try to build it's relationship with Germany which cannot undo the horrors of the Holocaust? Can we in this country live life with an attitude that we shouldn't push for racial equality because we can't undo the damage done by slavery?

What a depressing world the Times editors must live in!

UPDATE: NY Times website reports in a new article "Bush and Chirac Break Any Tension With a Joke About Food"

The two world leaders looked like and proclaimed themselves friends today, with hardly a hint of the deep differences that divided them over the invasion of Iraq last year.

And by the way, what makes Chirac a "world leader"? His country is no longer powerful either militarily or economically and has just a fraction of the territory and population of the world's largest nations. If Chriac is a "world leader" based on France's position on the Security Council, then that makes Sudan a "world leader" in Human Rights.