Troubled Debris

"All around me, liberal London descended into the radical chick of the ultra-right... I can see now that going along with the fascistic ideas to some degree was a way of subliminally coping with the Islamist threat, or of letting Bertrand Russell's fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed turn anger at the treatment of the Palestinians into sympathy for the Devil. The desire to appease terrorists by agreeing with their prejudices and outrage at oppression in the West Bank and Gaza shepherded the herd of independent minds to the extreme right, and you can't deny that many enjoyed the trip."

Nick Cohen.


They were tired, horrified, the cars kept whizzing past and in his head was the high tide mark of previous troubles, a rim of old bottles and sticks and garbage that marked all the chaos of before. He missed the moments of inspiration, he missed the benighted call when everything seemed of purpose, when the gift was strong. He made mistakes and told people things he should never have revealed. His own lapping consciousness was full of contradictions and uncertainties; and the purposeful gait that had so recently been his had dissolved. There was nothing to look forward to.

The pointlessness of assignments that never ran; stories that were never published; people who were inconvenienced for no reason; for a newspaper proprietor light years away from the concerns on the ground - there were days when going through the motions just didn't make sense anymore.

He wanted relief; release; he fought self-consciousness and fought disgrace. Why, why, had he made these awful mistakes? Why had he said things that could never be undone; revealed vulnerabilities that would only be used against him? He wanted relief, that was most certainly true; and he wanted peace, the same peace and sense of purpose he had known drunk as a skunk in the early hours; caught in intense conversation with strangers; the morning a long way off. There was nothing left but that debris along the shore line; the salt air; voices whipped away in the wind. At the end of the day, absolutely no one cared. The gulls squealed in the glinting air; and his own purpose had dessembled to almost nothing, a fossicker along the beach, like his grandfather, picking up the detritus of other people's lives in order to survive.


THE BIGGER STORY:

The American death toll in Iraq has now hit 3700.

Voice of America:

The Bush administration continues to defend the war in Iraq ahead of a report to Congress next month on progress there. VOA White House Correspondent Scott Stearns reports that, two days after truck bombings that killed at least 400 Iraqis, presidential spokesman Tony Snow defended the war in an address in New York.

With President Bush on his Texas ranch, White House Spokesman Tony Snow went to New York to again outline the administration's plans for success in Iraq.

In a speech to the Hudson Institute think tank, Snow said the debate in Washington should not be about how to leave Iraq but how to win there.

"The establishment of a stable democracy in Iraq would serve as the ultimate refutation of the philosophy, the means, and the methods of the terror movement," he said. "There they will have tried their very best using weaponry, using the instruments of terror, trying to argue throughout the world that they have a better way, and they will have been humiliated because people will have said to them, 'Sorry. You were wrong.'"

Snow said the president's decision to send more troops to Iraq this year is beginning to show signs of progress despite what he acknowledges are considerable political and security challenges.

Truck bombs Tuesday's in two northern villages were the deadliest coordinated attacks in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion more than four years ago. Iraq's interior ministry says at least 400 people were killed in those attacks. The U.S. military command in Baghdad has blamed al-Qaida for the bombings, saying they are meant to undermine a sense of progress that U.S. and Iraqi forces are creating.