Blinding hindsight

In his State of the Union, Bush said, "Hindsight alone is not wisdom."

But as Fareed Zakaria notes, repudiating hindsight because it's...er...hindsight, is ignorance writ large.

In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, the military-affairs scholar Stephen Biddle has written a powerful and persuasive critique of administration policy that centers on Iraqification. "Iraq's Sunnis," he writes, "perceive the 'national' army and police force as a Shiite-Kurdish militia on steroids... The more threatened the Sunnis feel, the more likely they are to fight back even harder. The bigger, stronger, better trained, and better equipped the Iraqi forces become, the worse the communal tensions that underlie the whole conflict will get." Biddle's argument is that the central plank of current administration policy -- ?"standing up" an Iraqi Army -- ?is not just unhelpful but actively producing the negative spiral we are watching.

I wouldn't expect too many flashes of hindsight out of this administration. It's just not in their DNA. It's not resoluteness or staying the course -- Bush has abandoned many strongly held principles when faced with political reality on the domestic front (see Dept. of Homeland Security, a behemoth the administration was right to oppose, but the invention of which they then claimed when it was politically necessary to do so).

On the Iraq front, though, it's all obstinance, all the time. An obstinance mixed with generous dollops of obtuseness.