Iraq Study Group

It occurs to me that I haven't said anything about the Iraq Study Group. Ok. Here goes: It doesn't matter. Bush will screw things up. I know that sounds unfair to the president or pessimistic in the extreme, but it's not.

I've never believed we would be successful implementing a Weatern-style democracy through an occupation. You can't have democracy at the barrel of a gun. If King George had tried to impose a democracy on the US, we would have told him to go fuck himself and made Washington Emperor of the Americas. People don't like foreign soldiers walking around with guns. Double that sentiment when the soldiers regularly kill people (add more for torture, recreational rape/murder, and whatever this is called). There comes a time when you simply cannot tell people you are trying to help them, while concurrently shooting significant portions of their population. I'm surprised more people didn't consider that contradiction.

What I didn't anticipate, was the destabilization of Iraq into sectarian warfare. In a coldly objective sense this is kind of better for the US than a unified opposition, because at least our soldiers aren't the primary targets. The flip side is it spreads instability through the whole region, opening the possibility of a Saudi-Iranian-Turkish war. Now is the time to open bets on how many countries get burned. Why drop one country into chaos when you can bring war and anarchy to 3 or 4?

So even though my initial prognostication was very pessimistic: failure in Iraq, a long-enduring (Nam-style) guerilla war, and a global increase in Muslim hatred (eventually coupled to more terrorism)....even I wasn't pessimistic enough to predict we might trigger a regional war. Instead of hundreds of thousands killed, we could have millions. Every day that looks like a more credible possibility. People are beggining to realize that we've made some very foolish choices.

Of course there's always a chance cooler heads will prevail, which was supposed to be the point of the Baker Commission. They might not be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together, but they can at least help us discover where we are and chart a course out of this mess. That might even work if our problem were limited to a few foolish mistakes, but it's not. Our problem is actually fools. The bad decisions are institutional. They aren't caused by bad input, they're caused by people who take action without regard to input.

Our wonderful bipartisan Iraq study group assessed the state of things in Iraq, but never wrote up how we came to this pass. We got here through stupidity. The people who organized and built this war are idiots, and until that problem is corrected, none of the others will be. These are the people who sent Colin Powell to the UN with a vial of white powder as proof of Saddam's WMD program. Trust me, they don't give a shit what Baker thinks.

Thanks for trying ISG, but I predict this gets worse and worse for at least two more years. Stupid is as stupid does.