Envying their tactics

I doubt too many Keyboard Kommandos will take T-Bogg's advice and read it, but if you're going to read one essay about the delusions of the ideologues that have marked our Iraq adventure, from first conceived up to the present moment, than this is it.

Murtha’s argument that only a withdrawal of American forces can improve the situation was greeted by troops I know on the ground, and also by the White House, with genuine consternation. There is a plan, they say. In President George W. Bush’s phrase, “as Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down.” And the military keeps compiling metrics to show something like that is happening. But it’s not enough, and Murtha puts his finger on the essential problem: as long as the Americans are there to bear the burden of the fighting, the Iraqis who are supposed to stand up don’t really see any need. As Murtha put it in mil-speak: “I believe with a U.S. troop redeployment, the Iraq security forces will be incentivized to take control.”

In fact, standing down is not about pulling out. So topsy-turvy is the policy at this point that we’re not going to imagine leaving until the Iraqi government demands that we go—and you can be sure the Iraqis who are now taking power will do just that. When? As soon as they and their Iranian allies have consolidated their hold on the southern three fourths of the country and its oil.

And that's why we witnessed the strange visit Chalabi made to D.C. last week. Neither open to the public nor exactly furtive, the Cheney administration -- always admiring of Chalabi -- now must also come to the realization that they're going to have to deal with him anyway. His careful wooing of the mullahs in Tehran may result in him ending up as Prime Minister of Iraq after all. He'll be a puppet, perhaps, but not our puppet.

And Christopher Dickey makes another important point, one we're seeing more evidence of every day.

Such naiveté is bad enough. But the transparent envy that America’s right-wing ideologues conceive for the tactics of their enemies, the enormous temptation to fight them by using their methods, is much worse. They subscribe to some higher truth than ascertainable facts, divining the intentions of their evil adversaries and turning them into the stuff of paranoid fantasy.

UPDATED 'cause I forget to title the post. I like to tie up these loose ends.