From the London Times
From the LONDON TIMES . Right on the money. IRAQ IS JUST A COMMA, NOT A DEATH SENTENCE by: Gerard Baker The remarkable creative strength of America will ensure that its present travails are soon left far behindGEORGE BUSH got in trouble recently for saying the tragedy of Iraq over the last year will come to be seen, in the long narrative of history, as a mere comma. It sounded to his critics a little callous to dismiss the war as one of the commoner punctuation marks. Tens of thousands of casualties, the discrediting of a superpower’s foreign policy, the destabilisation of the world’s already most volatile region? You’d think that might at least merit an exclamation mark. But no. Just another dull comma, the notoriously overused dab of a penstroke separating much larger, substantive thoughts. And yet commas, and their placement, as Lynne Truss has cleverly and lucratively demonstrated, can have large consequences. They can change the entire meaning of sentences. They can, on the one ha