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Thursday, October 18, 2007

Getting Closer to What Sanchez Said

Daniel Henninger appears to be one of the few people who has actually read LTG Sanchez's speech that has given such joy to the anti-war side.

As Henninger notes, Sanchez did not just take a swipe at the Iraq campaign:

Over the past weekend there were front-page accounts everywhere of Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez's description of the war in Iraq as a "nightmare." ...

By now I was curious to see what Gen. Sanchez actually did say. The full text is an indictment all right, of everyone connected to this war--the president, the press, Congress, the bureaucracy and maybe the country itself.



What Henninger does not notice is that Sanchez flipped between talking about the Iraq War and the Long War on terror. So although he does a service by pointing out all that Sanchez criticized, Henninger fails to set the record straight on the "nightmare" quote that is getting so much attention.

As I've noted, that quote applied not to the Iraq War but to our failure to unite as a country and wage a total war on Islamist extremism using all elements of our national power.

Am I the only one to understand the context of that quote?