Aren't I a proud alum

I got my (first) degree at Carleton College, in Northfield Minnesota. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and would go there again in a heartbeat.

It is very much a left-leaning school, however. It's the place where I learned some people spell "women" with a "y". On Easter mornings when the Christian group would have a sunrise service up on the Hill of Two Oaks, there would be eggs and fruit left on rocks the night before by "Druids". At the time I was there, divesting in South Africa was all the rage. Paul Wellstone was a professor there when I attended. All typical academia stuff.

In the latest issue of The Voice, the alumni magazine, there is an article on Craig Nelson, class of '77. Nelson is a correspondent for Cox Newspapers and a freelance journalist. The blurb said he formerly worked for the Associated Press and NPR, which should've been a warning flag right there.

The article contains snippets of things he's written from places around the world, but I just had to share what he wrote on Iraq. It sums up the anti-war Left's biases as perfectly as anything you can read. And I'm so glad it showed up in my mailbox in my alumni magazine.

I'll let you read it without comment, except to say it won't be hard to notice the pejorative terms. And you tell me if you think Nelson believes freeing Iraq of Hussein's regime was a good thing.

Dateline: Bahgdad, Iraq April 9, 2003

"If it takes the Iraqis a week, let them do it alone," I muttered. "They'll figure it out." Nonetheless, after two jubilant Iraqis wielding hammers had failed to budge the 25-foot-high statue of Saddan Hussein in Firdos Square, a U.S. armored-personnel carrier was backing up to it, cable extended. Soon a U.S. Marine was wrapping Saddam's chest in the cable and cinching it tight. The APC gunned its engine and with the screech of shearing metal, the statue bent forward at the knees and tore free of its base. Finally it crashed to the ground, hollow inside.

"We just gave them a little help," a smiling Marine colonel later said with a wink. The wink was illustrative of "liberation" day in Baghdad. Iraqis had not lined the avenues of Baghdad and showered American troops with flowers, as Bush administration officials had predicted. Nor had they crowded Firdos Square by the thousands--there were perhaps 600 people there, a group of people not uniformly elated to see U.S. troops roll through their capital. Indeed, some wept in humiliation as Baghdad was once again trampled by a Western army.

Despite these inconvenient facts, it was hard to defy the day's canned story line. The toppling statue of Saddam was an iconic moment. Period. "Freedom's taste is unquenchable," White house spokesman Ari Fleischer gushed. Throughout the night I stood on the roof of the Palestine Hotel, doing interviews for CNN. One network talking head prodded me for descriptions of the great welcome bestowed by Iraqis on U.S. troops. When I said there was none, he pressed me again. Finally he gave up.

Writer's note, 11/05: Today, more than two years later, Western journalists cannot leave Baghdad's fortified Green Zone without fearing for their lives. To date, nearly 2,000 U.S. soldiers have died in aaction, and the deaths of several dozen Iraqis on any given day is no longer deemed worthy of much coverage.

Little wonder, then, that the Bush administration recently retired the phrase "war on terror" in favor of a new designation--"the global war against violent extremism." This new catchphrase perpetuates the notion that both the war in Iraq and the precipitous decline in America's popularity can be fixed with an image makeover and improved packaging.