NYT Cut and Paste: As Iraq falls back, our fight here is over control of the narrative

As the threat from Sunni militants in western Iraq escalated last month, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki secretly asked the Obama administration to consider carrying out airstrikes against extremist staging areas, according to Iraqi and American officials.

But Iraq’s appeals for a military response have so far been rebuffed by the White House, which has been reluctant to open a new chapter in a conflict that President Obama has insisted was over when the United States withdrew the last of its forces from Iraq in 2011. (read more)

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I used to be a polemicist. I was an editorial cartoonist, and wrote what I called “artist’s statements” to accompany my cartoons each week, which over the two terms of the George W. Bush administration lengthened and sharpened from rants into something more like essays. I became practiced at using language as a weapon. My role models were hilarious, elegant and brutal humorists from Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken through Hunter S. Thompson and Matt Taibbi, who raised American invective to an art form. This is a fine and honorable tradition when practiced with a certain amour-propre and panache, but in the last couple of decades it’s become our dominant mode of public discourse, degraded by hacks and amateurs who ape its cruelty but are rhetorically illiterate and tone-deaf to humor. They’re just parroting talking points with profanity.

I’m no longer an active combatant in that fight. As the grim, endless decade of the War on Terror dragged on I began to get a bad aesthetic conscience about my screeds, and grew concerned that I might be doing cirrhotic damage to what let’s call, for old times’ sake, my soul. I found a second career as an essayist, and made a conscientious effort to be more intellectually honest, fair-minded and empathetic, to get out there and try to help instead of just cheerfully jeering from the bleachers. (read more)