I heard one of the second-tier presidential candidates (sorry I forget who) say on a Sunday talk show that the people who are pounding the table hardest on Iraq's "imminent collapse" and descent into chaos (presumably worse chaos than currently exists) if we leave are often the *same* people who said things like we will be "greeted as liberators" and "insurgency is in its last throes" etc. Why are so many of us willing to believe what these people say now?

There were some very intelligent military and state department people on NPR this morning making the case that perhaps Iraq won't be as bad as certain people think if we do pull out.

The idea that the current chaos in Iraq (or the future chaos) is all our fault is patently absurd. When Thomas Jefferson was a wee tot, Sunnis and Shiites had already been fighting for many hundreds of years.

Separately, Tony Snow said something that was astonishingly offsenive the other day. He was making excuses for the Iraqi parliament taking August off...one of his main points was that its gets extremely hot in Baghdad in the summer so we can't really expect them to work. As has been pointed many times already: how about our soldiers, who are OUTSIDE in the heat, with heavy body armor and other gear making them even hotter? I have had about enough of Tony Snow.