When you Turn More Than 3 Corners, You're Going in Circles

Via Keith of the Sader Family blog, I was directed to this fantastic article, which is so good and contains so many good points that I hate to single a couple out. I'll go ahead and pull a few quotations so you can get the flavor, but please click on the link and read the article.

We should remember that these numbers are not actual numbers of anything - no one at any point took a head count of the "insurgency", they do not indicate that the actual number of anti-US fighters has increased by 2-3 orders of magnitude over the last year (although it may be so) - these are figures pulled out of someone's ass, massaged for political expediency, and then released into the wild. So while this tells us nothing quantitative about the actual size of the insurgency, it's a useful way of measuring the anxiety in official quarters. The point of the 200,000 number is not that there are 200,000 insurgents, it's that things are going so poorly that it's no use saying anything less.
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Appreciate this. Understand that the people killing us in Iraq aren't motivated by Gore Vidal or inspired by Susan Sontag or organized by Michael Moore or in cahoots in any way with any of the right's celebrity piñatas - not literally, not metaphorically, not if you look at it in a certain way, not to any infinitesimal degree, not in any sense, not in any way at all. They do not lead a clandestine international conspiracy of Evil which has corrupted everything in every foreign country plus everything in America not owned by loyal Bush Republican apparatchiks; nor are they members of such a conspiracy; nor does a conspiracy remotely matching that description exist. To think otherwise is, literally and to a very great degree, insanity. It is insane.