Predictable Reaction to President Bush's address

Nothing but what was expected came from the big three the morning after. You can read their views of the speech here, here, and here: although you can probably get a verbatim account of the Grey Lady's response from here.

Ed Morrissey of Captain's Quarters has this in response:

In one year after the transfer of sovereignty, we've watched the Iraqis create an interim government, hold elections, form an elected representative government, negotiate with their old enemies to push them into the political process, and begin work on a new Iraqi constitution for a permanent democratic government. The Iraqis did all that in less time than we've taken to fix a welfare program heading for bankruptcy. In fact, they've done all of that in less time than it's taken Minnesota to come up with a state budget -- and we still don't have one! Should we send in the 82nd Airborne to rescue Minnesotans from the obviously failed experiment in democracy we have here in Saint Paul?

The dominant theme today will be the complaints that Bush exploited 9/11 -- complaints that will once again reveal how critics can't remember what 9/11 actually meant. It showed that we cannot afford to wait for terrorists to wave their flags and tell us where they are, because the only time they'll do that is when they're raising those flags over the ruins of American cities. That day taught us that we can no longer ignore serious threats like Saddam Hussein, especially in the Middle East. It showed us the folly of appeasement in exchange for the illusion of stability, which really meant the consignment of tens of millions of people to brutal tyrannies that produce radicals willing to die for no other reason than to kill innocents to promote their ideology.

It showed us that we are at war. We can choose to fight that war here, in the US, or we can choose to fight that war where the terrorists and their state supporters live. I'd rather we opted for the latter, and beat them there before they come over here. Building democracies in their midst creates powerful allies for us in that fight against radicalism, and Iraq's population and geography provides a strategic key to that success. Too bad that the nation's newspapers and the critics can't see past the bloody flag.