The third reel

Ambassador Crocker states his case.

Two months before a pivotal assessment of progress in the war that he and the overall American military commander in Iraq are to make to the White House and Congress in September, Ryan C. Crocker, the ambassador, laid out a grim forecast of what could happen if the policy debate in Washington led to a significant pullback or even withdrawal of American forces, perhaps to bases outside the major cities.

“You can’t build a whole policy on a fear of a negative, but, boy, you’ve really got to account for it,” Mr. Crocker said Saturday in an interview at his office in Saddam Hussein’s old Republican Palace, now the seat of American power here. Setting out what he said was not a policy prescription but a review of issues that needed to be weighed, the ambassador compared Iraq’s current violence to the early scenes of a gruesome movie.

“In the States, it’s like we’re in the last half of the third reel of a three-reel movie, and all we have to do is decide we’re done here, and the credits come up, and the lights come on, and we leave the theater and go on to something else,” he said. “Whereas out here, you’re just getting into the first reel of five reels,” he added, “and as ugly as the first reel has been, the other four and a half are going to be way, way worse.”

That's quite a formulation. Between the utter fatuousness (gosh, don't I sound like a wingnut using all them 10 cent words?) of the metaphor, his prediction is based on what, exactly? But the timing here is significant. Two months before Petraeus is scheduled to give his report of the facts on the ground -- a report that the military is already soft peddling -- we are now warned that when we react to our failure to stabilize the security foces in Iraq by declaring the surge not working and ordering a phased withdrawal, things are going to then get much, much worse.

Worse than what? Not only should you not build a policy based on fear of the negative, you can't build a policy based on continuing something that isn't working, isn't helpful, and is, in fact, having negative consequences.

They can continue to send out proxies to exclaim, "gosh," and use stupid metaphors that only underscore the administration's contempt for our intelligence, but at some point...oh, never mind.