If It's Sunday . . .

It's time for another Frank Rich column. I'm late with this tonight because I've been having trouble accessing the Truthout site tonight. I've normally been linking to Truthout's reprint of Rich's Sunday comments because I like Truthout's one-stop shop for a lot of interesting progressive writing. I'm sorry for the tardiness of this post, but it's worth the wait. In "One War Lost, Another to Go," Rich looks at the growing dissatisfaction with the Iraq war and the calls to pull out and contrasts that with the more important War on Terrorism that's also been losing public confidence. Here's his point in a nutshell:

One hideous consequence of the White House's Big Lie - fusing the war of choice in Iraq with the war of necessity that began on 9/11 - is that the public, having rejected one, automatically rejects the other. That's already happening. The percentage of Americans who now regard fighting terrorism as a top national priority is either in the single or low double digits in every poll. Thus the tragic bottom line of the Bush catastrophe: the administration has at once increased the ranks of jihadists by turning Iraq into a new training ground and recruitment magnet while at the same time exhausting America's will and resources to confront that expanded threat.

We have arrived at "the worst of all possible worlds," in the words of Daniel Benjamin, Richard Clarke's former counterterrorism colleague, with whom I talked last week.

Can we thread the needle and keep up effective counterterrorism efforts while pulling out of the negative consequences of our Iraqi adventure?