Anne Applebaum, You Gotta Be Putting Me On

Henley has today’s edition. IOZ beat me to it as well, but this bit in particular deserves to have its 5-year waiting period waived and be granted immediate induction into the Wall Street Journal Non-Sequitur Hall of Fame:

If there are politicians, academics or journalists anywhere in Germany and France who have better ideas about how to improve the catastrophic state of Iraq, they aren’t speaking very loudly. There is no question that America’s credibility has been undermined by the Iraq war, in “Old Europe” as everywhere else. There is no question that America’s reputation for competence has been destroyed. But that doesn’t mean there are dozens of eager candidates, or even one eager candidate, clamoring to replace us.

I think the problem with the last part is quite obvious: Applebaum for some reason fails to consider the possibility that replacing an (admittedly awful) dictatorship that poses no threat whatsoever to the U.S. or Europe with a theocratic quasi-state is a job that nobody needs to do. Her next column will presumably start with the argument that “sure, people like to criticize David McNally, but who else is going to make movies about hip-hop talking kangaroos? You?”

Similarly, with respect to the first part, the erroneous premise is transparently obvious. EBW has already taken care of this fallacy in detail, but it’s silly to implictly blame “Europe” for not having solutions to an idiotic policy that they correctly predicted would produce insoluble problems.