With Abdul Aziz al-Hakim’s visit to Washington, one really might have thought that the cognitive dissonance from the White House would have gotten too intense for the Beltway press corps to keep covering administration “policymaking” with a straight face. Based on Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s article one’s hopes would be disappointed.

Really, truly do we need to take the idea that Hakim is the solution in Iraq even remotely seriously. The hope, it seems, is that more Hakim means less Muqtada, but what’s the point? Why would we want to trade an upstart Iranian-backed vicious Shiite Islamist would-be theocrat for a more establishment-oriented Iranian-backed vicious Shiite Islamist would-be theocrat? Maybe this sort of gambit can win you ten points in Calvinball but here on planet earth we’re rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. Or, perhaps, using the deck chairs to poke holes in the hull, hoping to avoid the iceberg by sinking the ship before the deadly collision occurs.

At any rate, now seems like a good time to revisit the political punditry of America’s Worst Journalist, Charles Krauthammer, and his eerily prescient column of May 2, 2003:

Before the war even began, the critics were predicting that Iraq was going to be the Bay of Pigs (plus “Desert One, Beirut and Somalia,” said the ever-hyperbolic Chris Matthews). A week into the war, we were told Iraq was Vietnam. Now, after the war, they’re telling us that Iraq is Iran — that Iraq’s Shiite majority will turn it into another intolerant Islamic republic.

The critics were wrong every time. They are wrong again. Of course there are telegenic elements among the Shiites who would like fundamentalist rule by the clerics. But even the majority of Iranians oppose the rule of the mullahs and consider the Islamic revolution a disaster. The Shiite demonstrators in Iraqi streets represent a highly organized minority, many of whom are affiliated with, infiltrated by and financed by Tehran, the headquarters for 20 years of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

These Iranian-oriented Shiite extremists are analogous to the Soviet-oriented communists in immediate post-World War II Italy and France. They too had a foreign patron. They too had foreign sources of money, agents and influence. They too had a coherent ideology. And they too were highly organized even before the end of the war. They too made a bid for power. And failed.

There is no reason to believe that Iranian-inspired Shiite fundamentalists will be any more successful in Iraq.

Seriously, are there no firing offenses for columnists? Silly critics. Damian Penny hailed Krauthammer’s genius

Glenn Reynolds:

MCCAIN ON IRAQ: “Well in war, my dear friends, there is no such thing as compromise; you either win or you lose.”

People love straight talk, but the trouble with this analysis is that it’s, um, wrong. Wars frequently have somewhat ambiguous outcomes. Think of, say, Korea which ended in a stalemate. Or Israel’s war in Lebanon just this past summer. Or, for that matter, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. This began as a fight between the United States’ government and Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime. The regime was toppled, but a Sunni Arab insurgency that was, in important ways, continuous with the Old Regime stayed in the field. At this point, though, it seems overwhelmingly likely that neither side of that conflict will achieve its main objectives.

Spencer Ackerman asks SCIRI’s Abdul Aziz al-Hakim to respond to accusations “of the abduction, torture and execution of perhaps thousands of Sunnis.” Follow the link to see his reply.

In the spirit of the post below, but closer to my own foreign policy bailiwick, it’s nice to read this rather than liberal hawkery from the DLC:

A third principle of counterinsurgency theory is to rigorously support political and economic reforms that undermine insurgencies. In the short term, we should begin a diplomatic campaign aimed at defusing the various Muslim insurgencies that al-Qaeda has successfully co-opted. Working toward political solutions to conflicts in Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, the Caucasus, and the Philippines would help divide the global jihadist movement that Osama bin Laden has unified.

Let me note by way of criticism that a conflict involving a certain country on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea seems to have gone missing from this list. Nevertheless, the principle is sound and this is therefore progress. Indeed, it seems to me that one thing crippling post-9/11 center-left national security has been an unwillingness to articulate this principle precisely out of fear of drawing the obvious conclusions for America’s Israel policy.

I recall that as of the panel discussion on “The Grievance Challenge” at the America’s Purpose conference in September 2005 merely raising the grievance issue was a bold and radical move even in circles self-consciously opposed to the “liberal hawk” line of thought. And, indeed, at the New American Strategies for Peace and Security conference organized by many of the same people two years before that this stuff wasn’t on the table at all. So to have the DLC moving in this direction is definitely a sign of progress, that the devastation in Iraq is leading people to develop some sounder views.

The alternative to confronting grievances is, of course, the underlying strategic error that brought us Iraq. Not operational military failures in that country, or even a mistake about Iraq as such. Rather, the fundamental error was simply to believe that attempting the wholesale externally-coerced transformation of Arab politics and society was the best way to combat the rise of al-Qaeda.