So, the New York Times says leave Iraq now.

At a time when PollingReport.com shows that President Bush has a 70% disapproval rate on Iraq, when the American Research Group is reporting that 45% of American adults favor the impeachment of President Bush and 54% favor the impeachment of Cheney, and The Onion is reporting that 73% of Americans can’t believe this shit, it seems very easy to be against the war now.

It’s sad that this supposedly liberal paper was so willing to carry the Bush administration’s water in the months leading up to the war. It’s like Colin Powell now saying he tried to talk President Bush out of the war:

The former American secretary of state Colin Powell has revealed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade President George W Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.

“I tried to avoid this war,” Powell said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. “I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers.”

Two and a half hours. I didn’t realize the President had that kind of attention span.

Hey, you know what’s a cool word? Ombudsman. Ombudsman is a cool word. Here’s what the ombudsman for the New York Times had to say today:

Why Bush and the military are emphasizing Al Qaeda to the virtual exclusion of other sources of violence in Iraq is an important story. So is the question of how well their version of events squares with the facts of a murky and rapidly changing situation on the ground.

But these are stories you haven’t been reading in The Times in recent weeks as the newspaper has slipped into a routine of quoting the president and the military uncritically about Al Qaeda’s role in Iraq – and sometimes citing the group itself without attribution.

And in using the language of the administration, the newspaper has also failed at times to distinguish between Al Qaeda, the group that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, and Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, an Iraqi group that didn’t even exist until after the American invasion.

There is plenty of evidence that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is but one of the challenges facing the United States military and that overemphasizing it distorts the true picture of what is happening there. While a president running out of time and policy options may want to talk about a single enemy that Americans hate and fear in the hope of uniting the country behind him, journalists have the obligation to ask tough questions about the accuracy of his statements.

Middle East experts with whom I talked in recent days said that the heavy focus on Al Qaeda obscures a much more complicated situation on the ground – and perhaps a much more dangerous one around the world.

“Nobody knows how many different Islamist extremist groups make up the insurgency” in Iraq, said Anthony H. Cordesman of the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Even when you talk about Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the idea of somehow it is the center of the insurgency is almost absurd.”

See, I told you it was a cool word. I’m going to have to get “ombudsman” into an anagram one of these days.