A little war perspective for a mid-day Sunday...

We need a new word - sort of perpedicular to schadenfreude - to describe the feeling many of us have about the anti-war left's gloom and doom warnings about the war in Iraq.  I take the New Yorker and the latest issue (April 14) is a prime example of how wrong the naysayers really were.  I know things haven't gone perfectly in Iraq; there is much left to do, and many chances for things to go wrong.  But it surely hasn't gone anywhere near as badly as the left feared.

The New Yorker is a marvelous magazine, by the way, notable for its great cartoons as well as great writing.  But it definitely leans left...

[ Update: Andrew Sullivan is handing out "Van Hoffman" awards to anti-war prognosticators who missed badly. ]

Where was the BBC news?  An interesting survey of the Beeb's problems with its Iraqi war coverage, from the Telegraph.  Interesting especially when considered next to CNN's similar problems.

Looks like the results in Iraq are continuing to have a beneficial effect on the situation in North Korea.  Fox reports North Korea Hints it Would Accept Multilateral Talks Over Nuclear Dispute.  Maybe the Bush administration's foreign policy team isn't quite as incompetent as some would have you believe, eh?

Finally - Gut Rumbles notes: "Every 90 seconds, a child is killed or injured in a motor vehicle in the U.S.  In 2000, 2,343 children under 15 were killed in motor vehicle crashes."  We all abhor any deaths, of course, but this helps put the 146 coalition causualties from the Iraqi war in perspective.  IraqiBodyCount - a strongly anti-war website - lists a maximum of 1620 Iraqi civilian war deaths.