FUBAR

The situation in Iraq is FUBAR. From The Washington Post:

The ferocity of the latest attacks complicates the prospects of major progress at the talks in Amman, U.S. experts warned.

"This summit is an act of desperation. The White House doesn't know what it can do," said David Rothkopf, a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow and the author of "Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power." "The situation is deteriorating more rapidly than anyone anticipated and to an unending depth.

"I don't think, in modern American history, there is another example of such egregious failure of policy and execution. We're really seeing something unprecedented here. Even Vietnam was a slower decline, and the military forces were more in balance. . . . I don't know anyone who thinks there is an outcome in Iraq now that is hopeful."

If the first rule when you're in a hole is to stop digging, the second rule might be to stop listening to the people who told you to dig the hole in the first place.

People, and that means journalists, politicians, talk radio hosts and right-wing bloggers, need to get their heads around a very simple concept. This is not going to end well. The only question now, sadly, is how badly it is going to end, and under what circumstances. Pretending otherwise is not the act of rational people. It's not a football game, and there are no speeches by the Gipper (or Ronald Reagan playing the Gipper) to be had.

Idle talk from certain quarters, whether via a microphone or a keyboard, about "defeatism" is not only unhelpful, it misses the key point: whatever chance there ever was to build a "democratic Iraq," however one defined it, is long past. It was washed away in a sea of incompetence and arrogance, the chief offenders being the Young Republicans' Tigris Office and their corporate partners Theft R Us, known respectively by the formal names the Coalition Provisional Authority and Haliburton. The PNAC plan was both childish and insane, the work of fools. Yet these fools came to dominate the debate in the U.S., and to this day their supporters insist on attacking those who disagree with them using idiocies about how the "terrorists are glad Democrats won."

Glenn Greenwald makes an important point about Republican perfidy:

So, to recap: when insurgents engage in violence before the elections, that's the fault of Democrats because it's done to help them win (and credit to Republicans because it shows how tough they are on The Terrorists). When the insurgents engage in violence after the elections, that's also the fault of Democrats because they are excited by the Democrats' success (and credit to Republicans because Republicans want to stay forever, which makes the insurgents sad and listless). And when there is no violence, all credit to Republicans because it shows how great their war plan is.

Put another way, no matter what happens in Iraq (violence increases, violence decreases), and no matter when it happens (before the election, after the election), it is the fault of Democrats and it reflects well on the Republicans. Isn't it fair to say that that's the very definition of the mindset of a cultist?

There are disturbing signs that U.S. foreign policy is badly adrift. From the BBC this morning:

The killing of Lebanese politician Pierre Gemayel may be the "first shot" in a coup against the government, a top US official has said.

John Bolton, the American ambassador to the United Nations, said recent probes into political killings in Lebanon suggested Syrian involvement.

He told the BBC that if Syria was deemed to have been involved, the implications were serious.

So on the one hand Syria better, as Bolton put it in the BBC interview "listen" to the U.S. On the other hand, the U.S. hopes that Syria will assist in stabilizing Iraq. I'm not quite sure what to make of this mixed message. It could be a fiendishly clever plot inspired by Dr. Strangelove Henry Kissinger, or it could be further evidence that the neo-cons have zero idea what they are doing and are simply making stuff up as they go. My money is on the latter.

Things are pretty bad when Dick Cheney goes to Saudi Arabia, presumably to beg for help, and while he's there, they have Bolton spouting trash. Nice.

Our uniformed military personnel are now at risk of being caught in an ever widening sectarian civil war in Iraq. Whatever American conservatives think of their political opponents, it is past time for them to accept that basic fact. Calling for U.S. backed assassinations or demanding this thing or that thing from Iran or Syria is grasping at straws. But when one constructs a fantasy world it tends to all come crashing down at once. Our military personnel continue to suffer further losses due to wishful thinking.

The debate in the United States continues to center around domestic politics rather than the situation in Iraq. Somehow, this factor must be lessened. For starters, the U.S. media can stop regurgitating the lies and spin put forth by the very people who created and supported this fiasco. The inanity of "stay the course" and its offspring are a testament to how unserious and untrustworthy the conservative movement has become. It's well and good to consider both sides of an argument when both sides act in good faith; it's not helpful to consider arguments that lack grounding in fact, reason or comity.

It's probably too much to wish for, but if we are to have a reasoned debate the right wing noise machine needs to be turned down several notches in this country. If elected Republicans, in their minority status, wish to be taken seriously, they will start to act in a serious manner. Continued attempts to paint Democrats as somehow "soft on terror" will not stop the new Congress from exposing, through hearings, the corruption that became a hallmark of Republican rule and has been a serious problem with the war effort.

In the tradition of the efforts made by then-Senator Harry S. Truman during World War II, Democrats should ask tough questions and make sure our troops get what they need and those who have acted unscrupulously get what they deserve.

This is not a time, of course, for glee on the progressive side, although doubtless that accusation will be hurled. It is time for a cool assessment about what constitutes the national interest of the United States, and what is to be gained and what is to be lost by staying in Iraq.

There are no easy answers. But the new Democratic Congress must assert itself and demand accountability from the executive branch. At the rate things are going in Iraq, the situation could be even more severe by January 4.

MORE---Chuck Hagel generally gets it. From a guest editorial in tomorrow's edition of The Washington Post:

We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam. Honorable intentions are not policies and plans. Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there. They will decide their fate and form of government.

That's some straight talking maverick-type stuff there from one of the few Republicans who still make any sense at all. Better than the non-straight talking and non-maverick stuff that comes from a certain Senator from Arizona.

EVEN MORE--- Apparently there has been a move afoot among some military historians to revise history:

In historical assessments and the American recollection, Vietnam was the unwinnable war. But to many in the armed forces, Vietnam, as a war, actually was on its way to succeeding when the Nixon administration and Congress, bowing to public impatience, pulled the plug: first withdrawing U.S. combat forces and then blocking money and supplies to the South Vietnamese army.

If they hadn't, the South Vietnamese army, which had been bolstered by U.S. advisers and a more focused "hearts-and-minds" campaign in the later stages of the war, could have fended off the communist North, military thinkers have argued.

Still fighting the last war. Maybe if we mine Iraqi harbors and bomb them at Christmas...