A clarion call for sanity

When I lived in Los Angeles, many of my friends and co-workers would sneer at the very mention of the "conservative, reactionary, right-wing" Orange County Register. They much preferred the left-leaning Los Angeles Times.

So I'm delighted to learn that on Sunday the "right-wing" Register, not the so-called "antiwar" Times, became perhaps the first newspaper in a Top 25 market to call for a full U.S. pullout from Iraq.

Marking the second anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq, the Register's editorial declared:

"We opposed this war from the beginning and we believe the United States should withdraw its troops sooner rather than later, under a sensible exit strategy. While some argue that chaos would follow an American withdrawal, it is also true that U.S. troops have become a lightning rod, attracting the very attacks they are working to prevent.

"Saddam Hussein is out of power, which is good. Now it is time to leave Iraq, for better and for worse, to the Iraqis."

I find it amusing that peace and anti-interventionism -- left-wing values when I was a kid in the early 1970s -- have today been generally abandoned by the mainstream Left and taken up by the "Neanderthals of the Right."