A Stern Line In The Avocado Dip

Wolcott uncorks that brilliant jab at conservabot über-tool Billy Kristol, who offered his sage assessment on Faux News that we have simply not been "serious" in our prosecution of the Iraq War. Untrue, Billy. That's the whole problem -- this was the best your gang could do. Every single policy measure or emergency response they've mustered since, from Medicare to Katrina, has only confirmed it. They're incompetent chumps who have cluttered the decision-making process -- that damned Beltway bureaucracy they so loudly declaim -- with their hand-picked idiot cronies. They fired everybody who had a clue and dared to speak up with the truth, and replaced them with yes-men.

The Times offers up some standard-issue speculation as to what an Iraq civil war might entail, as if weren't already under way. One section reminded me of something I've been remiss in reiterating:

Some experts have advocated a negotiated breakup of Iraq into three main sectors for the main ethnic and religious groupings. But a violent crackup could not easily be kept stable.

It might well incite sectarian conflicts in neighboring countries and, even worse, draw these countries into taking sides in Iraq itself. Iran would side with the Shiites. It is already allied with the biggest Shiite militias, some of whose members seemed to be involved in the retaliatory attacks on Sunnis after the Shiite shrine bombing last week.

And Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait would feel a need to defend Sunnis or perhaps to create buffer states for themselves along Iraq's borders. Turkey might also feel compelled to move in, to protect Iraq's Turkoman minority against a Kurdish state in the north.

If Iraq were to sink deeper into that kind of conflict, Baghdad and other cities could become caldrons of ethnic cleansing, bringing revenge violence from one region to another. Shiite populations in Lebanon, Kuwait and especially Saudi Arabia, where Shiites happen to live in the oil-rich eastern sector, could easily revolt. Such a regional conflict could take years to exhaust itself, and could force the redrawing of boundaries that themselves are less than 100 years old.

"A civil war in Iraq would be a kind of earthquake affecting the whole Middle East," said Terje Roed-Larsen, the special United Nations envoy for Lebanon and previously for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "It would deepen existing cleavages and create new cleavages in a part of the world that is already extremely fragile and extremely dangerous. I'm not predicting this will happen, but it is a plausible worst-case scenario."

Regional destabilization was one of the primary arguments against invasion from the outset, during that innocent summer of 2002 when we were all just debating the idea academically. And time and time again, I recall that one of the most frequent responses from the hardcore advocates of invasion, in the jargon of the technocrat, was that destabilization would not be a flaw, but a feature. Indeed, it was a cornerstone of the PNAC agenda. And it was easy to see where they were coming from, in abstract principle -- we were looking at a bunch of dictatorships run by inbred clans, keeping a lid on fundamentalist fanatics. Something had to give in the wake of 9/11. So far, so good.

But the holy mission to motivate fanatics to unfuck themselves hit a snag -- it assumed for some reason that they couldn't possibly be more fanatical, or become organized in their fanaticism, or recruit ever more fanatics -- or hell, just retaliate out of nationalist sentiment. The premise was apparently that they would just be so instantly wowed by our winsome combination of massively superior firepower and moral clarity that they'd instantly surrender.

How's that been workin' for ya? Conservatives are now in disarray, as they try to decide amongst themselves whether we just haven't tried hard enough up to now (Kristol) or if we just need to learn when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em (Buckley, O'Reilly, George Fwill). And their figurehead has proven, even as he makes the rounds with the same speech he had in '02, that he was never up to the rigors of the job at hand, with or without starting a war.

Would that this lesson not have come at such an impossible cost in blood and treasure, but the movementarians are now inexorably sliding toward a chaos of thought, a collapsing of the Borg, if you will (and you might). It's about to get even more interesting, and not in a particularly good way.