It was you idiots’ idea to drive drunk. Our idea was to not. Now that you’ve smashed headfirst into a tree, we are supposedly idiots for not having a good plan.

Except you’re still the idiot who drove headfirst into a tree.

If Iraq falls back under a dictatorship, how exactly does that make things worse in the region than they already are?

Will Iran instantly become a model citizen in the world’s nations? I don’t think so.

Will Iran stop work on nuclear weapons? I don’t think so.

Will Saudi Arabia be so frightened, they become democratic and start giving oil away? I don’t think so.

Will the Palestinians suddenly make peace with Israel? I don’t think so.

Will Arab extremists suddenly find terrorism a bad strategy against the West? I don’t think so.

Have all terrorists bent on attacking the United States been and will continue to be tied up in Iraq? Given that the 9/11 terrorism was carried out with a few hundred thousand dollars and a few dozen men, I don’t think so.

The cataclysms envisioned by the few Iraq war backers left have little basis in reality. Wolf has been cried a little too often.

Of course some very bad things will happen in the Middle East when we leave Iraq. Very bad things are happening while we are IN Iraq. Very bad things happened in the Middle East BEFORE we went to Iraq. The United States did not start the warring factions in the Middle East and despite decades of effort and numerous peace accords, have not stopped major activities of warring factions in the Middle East.

If we want to be held hostage to the notion of sustaining an active military conflict until the Middle East makes nice with each other and the rest of the world, you have more stomach for stupidity than most sane people do.

A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention.

“The Costanza doctrine
Posted 10:17 am | Printer Friendly | Spotlight

Seinfeld fans no doubt recall a 1994 episode called “The Opposite.” George Costanza realizes that life is filled with choices, and he always foolishly chooses the wrong one. It occurs to him that the answer to his problems, therefore, is to make a decision — then do the opposite. As Jerry tells his friend, “If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.”

It’s surprisingly effective. George even comes up with a counterintuitive pick-up line — “My name is George. I’m unemployed and I live with my parents.” — which works.

Michael Fullilove writes in the Financial Times that “The Opposite” seems to serve as a model for the Bush administration’s foreign policy, particularly on Iraq, because “it is the opposite of every foreign policy the world has ever met. ”

The Costanza doctrine is most closely associated with President George W. Bush and his first-term confidants: the wild-eyed neo-cons and the dead-eyed ultra-cons. But there is a wider group, which includes most presidential candidates and many of Washington’s foreign policy elite, who are not fully paid-up subscribers to the doctrine but went along with it nonetheless. Allied governments in London, Madrid and Canberra also signed up.

In “The Opposite”, George breaches the most fundamental laws in his universe – for example, the age-old principle that “bald men with no jobs and no money, who live with their parents, don’t approach strange women”.

Similarly, in its geopolitical incarnation, adherents to the Costanza doctrine cast aside many of the fundamental tenets they learnt at staff college or graduate school.

The comparison holds up frighteningly well — except the doctrine was far more reliable on a fictional television show.”

I was ready to “throw in the towel” last October, so despairing I was of Bush ever facing up to the reality of what was going on in Iraq. And I don’t think it any accident that once Rummy was gone, things that should have been done a year or even two years ago began to happen.

I don’t know if it’s too late to do much good. I believe that we should try. We owe it to our dead and wounded as well as the Iraqi people. It is we after all who have caused them such great pain - largely as a result of our mistakes and blunders the first three years of the war. If this surge can give Maliki some breathing room to enact some reforms (while giving Iraqi security forces some much needed leavening) then it will have been worth it.

BTW - I think even Republicans will start agitating for withdrawal by early next year. So I’d say we have about 9 months to improve the situation as much as we can before we start withdrawing the troops.

“The game”?

Americans exiting would improve the situation a great deal. No more Americas would be being killed or maimed in Iraq. That’s an improvement, right?

By doing so, after a period of violence, maybe, just maybe the state could rebuild itself in a form that can work in Iraq. By staying you just prolong this bloodbath and support a system that obviously doesn’t work over there.

I find the idea that we should ignore anyone who disagreed with this idiotic adventure in the first place, and listen more carefully to the people who started it amusing.

Tell you what. I’ll suggest solutions if you accept that the invasion was a bad idea in the first place. No caveats, no extraneous language, just say “We should never have invaded Iraq” and we’ll start from there.