Eyes on the prize, part II

Charles Krauthammer explains why the Abu Ghraib scandal is largely irrelevant to the big picture in Iraq and the war on terrorism. As Krauthammer puts it, “The prize in Iraq is not praise for America from the Arab street nor goodwill from Al Jazeera TV. We did not have these before Abu Ghraib. We will not have these after Abu Ghraib. The prize is a decent, representative, democratizing Iraq that abandons the pan-Arab fantasies and cruelties of the Saddam regime. That remains doable. What will make it undoable is panic at home.” And, as I noted here, panic over Abu Ghraib seems to be a phenomenon associated mostly with our elites.