Our Farsighted, Visionary Leaders

Tony Snow today told the White House press corps that the war is popular in Iraq [emphasis mine]:

Q Tony, when the President and Vice President talk about how insurgents and volatile forces are watching this election, is there an inference there that they would hope Democrats prevail?

MR. SNOW: Well, I don't -- you know, I'll let you draw your own conclusions on that. He's not trying to --

Q Are you guys polling in the Tora Bora Mountains or -- seriously.

MR. SNOW: That's a good line. That's cute. That's why I didn't answer the question. I don't have a clue. I mean, I've said many times I'm not going to know the thoughts of them, which is why I didn't take that extra leap, Dick.

Q But if you assert they're influencing -- influencing to what end?

MR. SNOW: Influencing?

Q The election process. You've said it. The President and the Vice President have said it.

MR. SNOW: Now you're getting into a separate issue here, which is terrorists who have committed certain acts of terror may try to influence elections by, among other things, shaping media coverage, so that we have a concentration not on what American men and women have been achieving in Iraq, but instead, acts of violence that give the appearance of defeat at a time when, again, to repeat what General Casey said, they have not lost a single engagement, and there has been -- at least according to the Prime Minister, considerable progress within Iraq, which is why the war is more popular in Iraq than it is in the United States. So to that -- in terms of a -- but that's as much a discussion of propaganda as a tool in a time of war is anything else. Go ahead.

Sure; of course. The war is more popular in Iraq than it is in the United States, because Iraqis actually get to experience the "... [a]bductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, [and] mysterious weapons. ..." Whereas in the United States, we Americans can only watch these recreational activities on our tv screens and read about them in our newspapers. We aren't lucky enough to experience them directly, first-hand, for ourselves.

Tony Snow is to be congratulated for his ability to see the war -- not from the point of view of a very wealthy man living in a large and beautiful home in an exclusive, all-white suburb of Washington, D.C. -- but from the point of view of the Iraqis who are actually seeing the charred corpses, headless bodies, dead torture victims, scraps of body parts, piles of ashes that once were human beings, and children screaming in pain from shrapnel wounds.

And for those who would say that men like Tony Snow are the smiling face of evil, I say, Nonsense -- they are farsighted visionaries whose imaginative faculties most of us can only admire from afar.