hat tip FrontPage magazine.com
By Amir Taheri
Americans have long made fun of the French love of finding solutions before knowing what the problem is. Yet the U.S. political and media elite has itself taken up the habit - with a quest for "elegant solutions" in Iraq.
The sense that unhappiness on Iraq led to losses by President Bush's Republicans has opened the floodgates for all sorts of ideas, some fanciful, others derelict. Two such ideas appear to be the talk of the town in Washington.
The first is to "cut and run" - or, more palatably, "whistle and walk away." Supporters of this idea don't care what might happen to Iraq or the Middle East as a whole. For most, the toppling of Saddam Hussein was a secular version of original sin, which nothing short of the political destruction of Bush (and Britain's Tony Blair) can expiate.
The trouble is, "cut and run" is easier said than done: It is always easier to send an army in than bring it out.
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