Duncan comments on an L.A. Times op-ed which states, “Looking back over a quarter of a century of chronicling current affairs, I cannot recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.

He adds:

This is the basic point, but it’s also something that has not penetrated the brains of the Very Serious People who rule our elite discourse. They fucked up. Lots of people died. Lots of people continue to die. Each of them, in their own little way, contributed to this “comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster,” and most of them are unwilling and unable to face up to that fact. This is truly the era of Bush, where accountability is for suckers, and I’ve come to conclude that’s pretty much the dominant cultural fact of elite Washington.

And still the very serious people imagine they know what to do. I’d say there’s about a 30% chance that come September the Maliki government will “fail,” and that “soft partition,” as discussed in the article, will be the new Pony Plan. Just give it a couple of Friedmans, why don’t we.

There it is, in a nutshell. These people have really, really fucked up and so of course the logical next step is… to let the people who fucked it up decide what to do next!

There aren’t any “good” or “better” options yet. All these proposals are built on a house of cards, and the fallout will continue for decades. Juan Cole:

Fred Kaplan at Slate points out that it does not take much reading between the lines to conclude that the new National Intelligence Estimate indicates that Bush`s Iraq War has generated a new and deadly threat against the US. In other words, the US had al-Qaeda on the run and would be safer now if it hadn’t invaded Iraq.

By the way, I had this argument two years ago with a US counter-terrorism official. He was skeptical of prognostications that the Iraq War would generate anti-US terrorism. I told him you can’t have a massive US military occupation of a major Arab Muslim country for years on end that does not come back to bite you on the ass.

“Al-Qaeda in Iraq” is of course just a bogeyman phrase to describe Salafi Jihadis there. But they obviously feel some kinship to the real al-Qaeda (you never want to see that) and they are threatening to get up an attack on the United States. There was no al-Qaeda in Saddam`s Iraq, so it is Bush who has created this current threat, which did not have to be there.

Of course, the US Right will conveniently use the small “al-Qaeda in Iraq” organization, which it more or less created by its militarism, to justify more militarism. But I don’t think the American public is that stupid.

I wish I was that optimistic…