Holman Jenkins, Jr. addresses the Kerry-Cheney disagreement in today's Political Diary (best $3.95 a month you can spend, folks!)
Mr. Kerry calls the Iraq occupation a "failed policy." The newly elected Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero calls it a "fiasco." Huh? Anyone with a detached view of events will mainly wonder how two such dopes managed to achieve their positions of present eminence.Iraq's oil production is already above its pre-war levels. Iraq's economy is stronger than it was pre-war through U.S. and international aid spending and Iraqi entrepreneurship. Mr. Kerry and Mr. Zapatero's remarks come as two major news organizations, ABC News and the BBC, have issued results of the most far-reaching poll yet of Iraqis. Their survey concludes that an overwhelmingly number are optimistic about the future, and even about their present condition. Only 19% of Iraqis say life has gotten worse since the war.
[...] Bad news can be found in abundance, especially because now somebody is there to cover it. But what Mr. Zapatero ignorantly calls a fiasco is a country where no new mass graves are being manufactured, where Iraqis who incur the wrath of Saddam or his sons are not being tortured to death in the basements of office blocks.