The Rake Magazine

One could not ask for a clearer distinction between what newspapers should be and what they are becoming than today's paper editions of the New York Times and the Star Tribune.

The featured photos on the front page of The Times were a series of three which perfectly illustrated the frustration that is Iraq. A Sunni grandmother who had been threatened by Shiite men was shielded by American and Kurdish soldiers, and the Shiites were arrested and taken away by the Americans. The third photo was of the woman's granddaughters crying because their grandmother had just been shot dead by Shiites after the Americans left. (Here is the entire NY Times slideshow.)

The front page of the Strib featured a large movie still of the execrable Will Farrell in his latest assault on the intelligence of America, and a heart tugger of a man who wants to keep the memory of Jackie Robinson alive 60 years after he integrated Major League baseball.

Both front pages made me ill.

In the remarkable mini-series Band of Brothers, the story of one company of the 101st Airborne Division in World War II, episode nine is titled "Why We Fight". The episode is about how the company discovered a German concentration camp. If it hadn't been clear up to that point why the Americans were fighting the Germans, it certainly was made so by the sight of the camp and the realization that the local Germans had acquiesced to this horror just outside their town.

This came to mind today with the revelation that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had confessed to being the mastermind behind 9/11 and various other attacks and plots against the U.S. and other countries and leaders.

Aside from having the effect of knocking the debacle at the Gonzales Justice Department off the front page for the moment, (one wonders if the release of the "confession" now was designed to do just that) it reminds us of why we fight, and the original rationale for war with Iraq.

In case you need reminding, the Iraq war was fomented originally because the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triumvirate cynically blamed Iraq for 9/11. Only after that was proved false did they move on to Weapons of Mass Destruction. When that proved to be false, they came up with other reasons--and we are now in a situation in which we are losing the war we should have been fighting in Afghanistan against the minions of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden because we are squandering our resources on the war in Iraq.

So, perhaps this confession by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed can stand as the real "Why We Fight" reminder, and let us turn our attention where it belongs.