Andrew Sullivan takes on BBC

"Good" news:

There was something wonderfully strained about how various news organizations dealt last week with the news of the deaths of Qusay and Uday Hussein. From the BBC to Reuters, there was palpable - if sternly repressed - dismay. One of the first headlines that the Baathist Broadcasting Corporation put out on the news was: "US celebrates 'good' Iraq news." The quotation marks around "good" did not refer to any quote or source in the text. They were pure editorializing on behalf of the BBC, whose campaign to undermine the liberation of Iraq is now in full swing. It was not clear to the BBC that the deaths of two of the most sadistic mass murderers on the plant was in any way a good thing, especially if they redounded to the credit of Tony Blair or George Bush. And immediately, of course, pundits started to criticize the U.S. action as "extra-judicial," as a violation of the law against assassination, and so on. Their immdiate impulse on hearing this terrific news was: how can we spin this against Blair and Bush?

...Why, I keep asking myself? It's perfectly legitimate to question - aggressively - the fallible intelligence that was used in part to justify the war. But to use such an inquiry to undermine the current attempt to rebuild Iraq is to compound forgivable government failure before the war with the desperate need for allied success after it. To replay the war debate now is a fatal distraction from the vital work at hand. Even if you disagreed with the war, it is utterly unfair to the Iraqi people now to use their future and their lives as pawns in a domestic political squabble. Yet some would try to do exactly that. Their agenda needs to be resisted just as firmly as the cowardly attacks by Baathists in Iraq. For they serve the same purpose: the demise of democratic promise in Iraq and the collapse of the West's long and difficult war against terror. We can afford neither. And it's past time petty politics ceased in the face of that reality.

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