...which is a hell of a lot more than you can say, Joan. You claim you're debating but I see an awful lot of non-responsiveness and namecalling.

When I say you're crying I mean you're acting upset and surprised that you got a bunch of negative reactions to your piece. I posted several quotes from you demonstrating that you had reacted in that way. I further explained that I consider that whining because you had deliberately provoked people and then made a bunch of weasel worded statements that tried to have things both ways (i.e. pretend maybe the surge succeeded and the Dems were wrong while giving yourself an out to say you didn't really mean that).

In other words, I'm presenting evidence and makingreasoned arguments. You, on the other hand? Not so much.

Face it, Joan. You provoked the exact response you got. If those kind of responses were going to get your panties all in a bunch then you shouldn't have provoked them. Or quit whining about people allegedly "not reading" your piece and quit snapping at people to "snap out of it" and defend yourself.

Do you deny that you deliberately provioked your readers? Do you deny that tried to have it both ways in your piece? Do you deny that you couched and qualified over and over again?

BTW: do you have some problem with me being anonymous here? Is there some reason why you would need to know my name? Why then do you offer the option of anonymous commenting?

People have been lied to over and over and over again about Iraq. Our country still hasn't faced up to what it has done. Many people still can't psychologically accept that Bush ran a big lie propaganda campaign around WMD. Even fewer want to face up to the fact that hundreds of thousands -- plausibly a million -- Iraqis got killed based on those lies. And we tortured -- and people got lied to about that as well.

People are in no mood to hear apologetics -- even weaselly worded ones -- about Bush's surge. The surge was a bunch of bullshit. The additional 30,000 troops meant nothing but Bush's finger in the eye of public opinion, which wanted to get out.

Even if the surge "worked" what can it achieve? Can it erase the fact that we should have never been there in the first place? Can a working surge give a million people their lives back? Can it give us the trillions of dollars back (that we need to bail out our economy) that we threw down the Iraq rathole? Can it change the fact that no matter what happens now in Iraq we have traded a secular, anti-Iranian, power-balancing regime for an Iran-friendly regime of religious fanatics who treat women like subhumans?

No, the surge was just another Bush propaganda ploy. Many of us are beyond having lost our patience with those who want to argue that Bush is not so bad or that we are actually "winning" or could have "won" in Iraq.

Your little exercise in contrarian button pushing plays right into the hands of those who a few years from now will be claiming that we could have won in Iraq if Obama and the Democrats hadn't stabbed them in the back -- after all the surge was working. Don't play into those hands, Joan. if you want to be a rank contrarian then go become editor of Slate.

Starting the War in Iraq was unjust. It was started without sufficient reason. Bush lied and told us stories about WMD and relationships with al Qaeda -- but they turned out to be false. We were left with a war that we had no business starting in the first place. So what if someone comes up with a tactical change that has some modest success in this unjust war? So what? You have succeeded in doing a little better the thing you shouldn't have been doing in the first place!

Hypothetically, imagine if if Pakistan attacked Israel on some false pretext and succeeded in occupying the country, which became a scene of intense bloodshed, with hundreds of thousands of dead Israelis as a result. And if Pakistan did a poor job of quelling the Israeli resistance at first because they were killing so many civilians and if it came out that Pakistan's pretext for war was exposed as an utter fraud, would we praise Pakistan if they adopted a policy of escalating their war against Israel, sending even more troops?

Once it was shown that Pakistan's pretext for war in Israel was bunk, you'd have to be crazy to support a Pakistani escalation that gave them some kind of limited tactical success just because it helped them ocuppy Israel more efficiently.