Hat tip to Instapundit for bringing the following article from The Spectator (UK) [free registration required to access article] to my attention. In the column, Toby Harden relates an encounter he had with an American magazine journalist with impeccable credentials. Here is a key excerpt from their discussion:

Not only had she ‘known’ the Iraq war would fail but she considered it essential that it did so because this would ensure that the ‘evil’ George W. Bush would no longer be running her country. Her editors back on the East Coast were giggling, she said, over what a disaster Iraq had turned out to be. ‘Lots of us talk about how awful it would be if this worked out.’ Startled by her candour, I asked whether thousands more dead Iraqis would be a good thing.

She nodded and mumbled something about Bush needing to go. By this logic, I ventured, another September 11 on, say, September 11 would be perfect for pushing up John Kerry’s poll numbers. ‘Well, that’s different — that would be Americans,’ she said, haltingly. ‘I guess I’m a bit of an isolationist.’ That’s one way of putting it.

I would only add that liberal journalists wishing for increased instability in Iraq are inevitably (if unwittingly) wishing that more Americans would die--Americans in uniform, and American contractors. After all, the Iraqi effort cannot go poorly without casualties. I wish that the abhorent sentiments that Mr. Harden relates were isolated, but experience says they are not. Who can forget the comments on Howard Dean’s blog site after Saddam was caught: an expletive. Anyone who has spent but a few minutes in the press room in Baghdad knows the glee that the mere prospect of bad news elicits among too many in the press corp. As I said of Senator Kennedy’s preemptive declaration of quagmire, the Left is more than willing to declare defeat (and insodoing to suffer the deaths of U.S. soldiers and Iraqis) in their quest for a White House victory.