Iraq War: Is Karl Rove secretly a Monty Python writer?

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

Gene Lyons thinks that the Bush administration's public positions on the Iraq War are starting to look an awful lot like a Monty Python skit: The Iraq war debate slipping into silliness Daily Dunklin Democrat 06/01/05

Despite the column title, it's not so much the debate as the administration's side of it that he's highlighting. He has some worthwhile things to say on the WMD fraud, the Newsweek brouhaha, the Pentagon fakery over Pat Tillman's death, and the torture scandal:

Elsewhere in the news, The New York Times broke yet another story about an under-trained and poorly supervised group of soldiers who allegedly decorated their tent with a Confederate flag and called themselves the "Testosterone Gang," systematically beating and torturing prisoners to death at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. Even worse, Army investigators believe, some victims were innocent civilians caught up in the chaos of war. It's estimated that 85 percent of Bagram detainees were released without charges.

Atrocities happen in all wars. Two things, however, make the reported American transgressions at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram Air Force Base particularly appalling: first, the way they appear to confirm everything Islamist propagandists say about the "crusaders' contempt for Islam"; second, that they proceeded directly from the administration's country club tough-guy rhetoric.

Classic psychology experiments have repeatedly shown that, absent stringent discipline among their captors, isolated groups rendered helpless and defined as the "other" often fall prey to sadism and brutality--a phenomenon hardly unknown to U.S. military authorities. Instead of proper training, however, inexperienced American Reservists were encouraged to treat the captives as "terrorists" to whom the president naively determined the Geneva Conventions did not apply.

In effect, if not intent, George W. Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who signed off on memos validating torture for "enemy combatants," declared open season on detainees.

The part about the Confederate flag particularly caught my eye, since the neo-Confederates are one of the themes I return to repeatedly here.  I wonder if the Testosterone Gang, the ones who treated prisoners like they were re-enacting what they heard about the Klan from the good ole days, also had a sign that said, "Heritage Not Hate"?

Of course, Lyons is working down in Arkansas and is apparently not terribly worried about fitting his observations into the scripts and conventional wisdom that the Big Pundits observe faithfully. Which means in his case that he normally has more sensible things to say in one column than most of them do for the entire year.