Quote of the day: Since it's our Chimpy making the plans, maybe there's no point asking whether there might be achievable military objectives in Iraq

"One of Bush's defining characteristics is his unyielding adherence to the same policies even as the justifications for those policies shift or negate themselves."
--Harold Meyerson, in his Washington Post column today, "A Couple of Polarizers"

It concerns me when well-meaning people assume that there is no case to be made for escalating our military intervention in Iraq. I'm not saying that there's necessarily a compelling case, but in frank geopolitical terms there are objectives that might be worth pursuing--just as there might have been back when we first faced the question of attempting some kind of intervention in Iraq, and no such case was ever made.

At the same time, of course, it does matter who's making the case. One reason the Bush administration could never make a persuasive case for any intervention in Iraq, let alone the insane blunt-force unilateralist form the Loony Warriors clearly always intended to ram through, was undoubtedly that there were several factions of Rival Loons who had sometimes overlapping and sometimes contradictory motives for an Iraq adventure.

Another reason the administration could never make a believable case for its Iraq policy is that the people who make and expound its policy are not only morons and ideological thugs but psychopathic liars, people who probably couldn't, or at any rate wouldn't, tell the truth if their lives depended on it. (Alas, while their lives don't depend on it, lots of others do.)

Last week Howie passed on to me a piece he was trying to write about, regarding our current options in Iraq. As soon as I read it, I understood why he was having trouble. The piece was not only difficult but painful to read. It was written, not in terms of ideology or emotion, but strictly of geopolitical realities, enumerating the limited menu of practical options and setting out what each would be designed to accomplish and how likely it was that the desired result might actually be achieved.

On this last count, all of the options sucked, it turned out. But that doesn't mean that there wasn't some possibly desirable and possibly achievable goal for each.

My reaction when I finished reading was that I understood a lot more about the reality of the situation, but as a result felt even more hopeless about it. I understood in a new way the true significance of the common assertion that there are no good options. Unfortunately, having it all laid out that way, the result for me was, as Don Imus might put it, that it made my hair hurt.

I can't help thinking we need to come back to this, but I'm not up to it yet. And as a practical matter, as Chimpy the Prez prepares to assault the air waves, I can see where it really doesn't matter.
Because when the case for a military "surge" is being made by intellectual flyweights like Wee Billy Kristol and Feckless Freddy Kagan, or by (heaven help us) Chimpy the Prez, what reason is there to take it seriously? These are people, after all, who are (a) intellectually incapable of understanding any damn thing they talk about, (b) temperamentally inclined, presumably as a result of their deep-rooted (and no doubt well-founded) doubts about their manhood, to attack problems with explosions of testosterone, and (c) by their very nature so intellectually dishonest that they are either unable or unwilling to tell us anything remotely resembling the truth, even about what they actually believe.

Which brings us back to Harold Meyerson's column today, which provides a quick refresher course in what it means to have foreign policy--or any other kind of policy--made by people who are both thuggish cretins and compulsive liars.

If any Americans could truly understand Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, George Bush and Karl Rove should. All three firmly believe that the successful politician must above all cultivate his base--not that any of them can point to recent successes.

In refusing to do anything to curtail the anti-Sunni pogroms of Moqtada al-Sadr's legions, Maliki, after all, is just dancin' with the ones that brung him. He owes his office to Sadr. More broadly, he is the governmental leader of the Shiites at the very moment they and the Sunnis have embarked on a ghastly civil war. He is nominally also Iraq's prime minister, but if there was even a scintilla of doubt about the true object of his loyalties, it was dispelled by his execution of Saddam Hussein. Maliki is the prime minister of Shiite rage, a position that offers a good deal more security than that of dispassionate prime minister of a nation at war with itself.

Yet tonight, President Bush will announce that Maliki has changed. He will also announce that he is sending additional U.S. forces to Iraq, but he's done that before, in almost comparable numbers, to no good effect. What's different this time, we are to believe, is that the Iraqis will join us in trying to suppress the sectarian violence.

Maliki will order his forces to swarm Sadr City. He'll deploy Kurdish battalions throughout Baghdad, since Sunnis and Shiites aren't suited for the task (assuming, however improbably, that the Kurds want to hurl themselves into the middle of the Sunni-Shiite war).

Why Bush believes the Iraqi prime minister will actually do this is anybody's guess. For Maliki to cordon off Sadr City is a little like Bush blockading Southern Baptist churches, or surrounding the headquarters of the National Rifle Association and telling everyone to come out with hands up. Bush expects Maliki to turn against his own--a gambit nowhere to be found in Bush and Rove's own political playbook.

America's most polarizing president is telling Iraq's polarizing prime minister to stop polarizing. It's possible, I suppose, Bush told Maliki that the lesson of our November election is that polarizing doesn't always work to your advantage, but the fact that Bush has only stepped up his commitment to his ruinous policy in Iraq, against overwhelming bipartisan advice to the contrary, suggests that that idea hasn't even crossed his mind.

"Why," Meyerson asks, "does Bush expect Maliki to change his spots when Bush hasn't changed his?" And this is where our Quote of the Day comes in:

Indeed, one of Bush's defining characteristics is his unyielding adherence to the same policies even as the justifications for those policies shift or negate themselves. He first sought his tax cuts because our peacetime budget surplus was too large, then because we were at war and consumers needed to spend as though we weren't, then because our deficit could best be closed by the rich retaining more money to invest (albeit in China). He sought the war in Iraq to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction and to stop Hussein from sheltering al-Qaeda. As Ted Kennedy reminded us yesterday, the weapons didn't exist, Hussein is gone and Bush's war has only brought al-Qaeda more recruits. But our presence in Iraq continues unabated and, if Bush gets his way, will be escalated.

"Way too late," Meyerson writes, the president "is calling for a Marshall Plan for Iraq, with New Dealish public employment projects supplanting the flat-tax policies he had hoped to bring to the Middle East. But our basic policy remains basically the same, the expressed desire of the American electorate to reverse course notwithstanding." And, he notes, "the hard-core conservatives will stick with him."

So maybe there is truly no point in insisting on a real-world assessment of policy options when policy is being made and carried out by dimwitted bullies who aren't dealing with the real world to begin with, and who therefore stand no realistic chance of achieving the superhumanly difficult objectives of any of the available options.